She spent much of the next eight years traveling—Paris, London, Vienna, Albania, Armenia—before returning to Rocky Ridge for what she thought would be a respite. Always big on resolutions and always obsessed with money, she’d set a goal of storing up at least $100,000 in savings. At the same time, the extravagant part of her couldn’t resist another plan: to add modern electricity and plumbing to the farmhouse and to build her parents a new stone cottage, English-style, accented with Mediterranean tiles and tall, diamond-paned windows—a generous overture but also, perhaps, an attempt to absolve herself of the devastating fire she had accidentally caused as a child, decades earlier in De Smet. Either way, the new construction would be a gain for Rose too. By moving her parents a half mile away to Rock House, as she named it, she could have the old farmhouse for herself and some quiet from her mother. Then she could finally concentrate on her writing and, in her spare time, be on hand to help her mother’s.
