Home. The word settled in my chest, warm and right.
"Yeah," I said again. "Let's go home."
And for the first time in fifteen years, I knew exactly where that was.
EPILOGUE
HAZEL
By the time the scaffolding came down, the inn didn’t look cursed anymore.
It looked like mine.
Fresh white paint gleamed where peeling clapboard had once sulked. The roof no longer threatened to shed shingles every time the wind picked up off the marsh. The wraparound porch was solid under my bare feet, boards straight and true, railings sturdy enough that Ethan had finally stopped stress-testing them every time he visited.
“Just making sure,” he’d always muttered, palms pressing down like he could will structural integrity into existence.
Today, he didn’t check. Today, he just stood at the far end of the porch with a beer in his hand, laughing at something Lucas said while they argued about whose power tools had actually saved the day.
They were both wrong. The money had saved the day—and the money was Gideon’s.
Well. Gideon’s cut of the Dane machine, funneled into contractors and materials and the kind of specialist help most inns our size could only dream of. Electricians who actuallyreturned calls. Historical preservation experts for the crown molding. A landscape designer who’d somehow made the front beds look intentional.
But it hadn’t just been money. Dane pride didn’t allow for hands-off philanthropy.
Lucas and Ethan and Gideon had been here every chance they got, sleeves rolled up, boots on, taking personal offense at every crooked board and sagging beam.
Behind me, through the open doors, voices drifted from the newly bright dining room—women talking over each other, chairs scraping, the clink of dishes as Maude and Meghan and Isabel did battle over whose food went where.
I leaned my shoulder against one of the porch columns and let myself breathe it in.
My home.
I still thought those two words sometimes just to feel the way they settled in my chest. Not as a question or an apology. As a fact.
The one-year clause in my grandmother’s will still loomed—quiet, unhurried, waiting for its turn on the calendar. But the funny thing was, the closer that date crept, the less it felt like a deadline and the more it felt like a promise.
A reminder that I could walk away if I wanted.
I didn’t want to.
“I wouldn’t dream of selling you,” I murmured to the house. “You’re stuck with me.”
The thought made me smile. I’d quit my HR job in Chicago, given notice on the condo I’d always thought of as temporary. I’d packed my carefully neutral life into boxes and driven south with everything I owned crammed into the back of Gideon’s truck and a U-haul trailer pulled behind.
The inn didn’t make enough yet to support me fully—not in the way my old salary had. But between Maude’s ruthless budgetspreadsheets, some strategic “family loans” from the Danes that I pretended not to know the details of, and revenue starting to trickle in, we were … okay. Growing. Learning.
Finding a way.
And I had help.
“Hazel!” Isabel’s voice floated out from inside. “Your check-in forms are adorable, but your cancellation policy could be improved.”
Isabel appeared in the doorway, hands on narrow hips, dark hair in a knot that somehow still looked glamorous after an entire day of wrangling vendors. She wore one of the Palmetto Rose polo shirts—navy with a rose embroidered over the heart—but the clipboard in her hand had my logo on it.
“Have I told you lately that your ADR is going to make me cry if we don’t nudge it up?” she said, but her eyes were warm. “I say this with love.”
“You did warn me that ‘I just want people to feel welcome’ isn’t a pricing strategy,” I admitted.
