Chapter Thirty
Miles doesn’t pass by Dad’s grave on his way to the inn. He doesn’t want to unload all this negativity at his grave. Just—no. Also, it’s the dead of the night and going to the cemetery at this hour is really damn spooky.
His house is quiet when he gets home. Even when he tries his best to be silent, the main door creaks when he opens and closes it. The wall clock says it’s half past midnight, so Mom’s likely already asleep. Miles puts away his keys in the fishbowl near the door, glancing around. Everything looks so much emptier without people around. Is this what Mom sees, every single day, since he moved to the city?
“Hey, dad,” Miles says to a framed photo of him resting on the mantle. “Sorry I didn’t pass by. I’ll bring you flowers tomorrow.”
A door opens, and then there are footsteps from the top of the floor.
“Miles?” calls Mom, her voice sleepy. Miles walks up to the bottom of the staircase where she can see him, and he grins at hersheepishly. Mom yawns and rubs her eyes, a thick blanket wrapped around her shoulders. “Why are you here?”
“No reason,” he says. “Wanted to come home, I guess. Did I wake you?”
“The door did. What time is it?”
When she finds out how late it is, she sighs and tells him to head upstairs. She can barely keep her eyes open as she nudges him to his room, telling him to get some rest immediately, and that she’ll have breakfast for him in the morning.
Miles’s childhood room looks exactly as it did when he left it barely a day ago. Mom has cleaned it and changed the bedsheets, but didn’t touch his paint-stained desk—it still has the same mess of sketchbooks and pencils.
“Get some rest.” Mom stands on her toes and kisses his cheek.
***
He heads to the inn once the sun’s risen. Gabby’s surprised to see him back, and he beams at the spiffy new nametag she’s wearing. It says General Manager, with her name right above it. Miles saw it on her before he left town two days ago, but it still makes him unreasonably giddy to see it again.
While she still has a month to go before she finishes her short course, Mom wanted to promote her already so that she could start feeling out the position. “Feeling out the position” was a misnomer, and both he and Mom knew it, because she’s been doing most of the responsibilities for years now. The course wasn’t a prerequisitefor the position, anyway. For Miles, it was simply a line in her resume to prove that she’s officially studied for this, and Miles knows Mom would have given her the position even without it.
Still, he understands why Gabby felt the need to take the course. In the past few weeks, there were times he’d found her buried in a book about Hotel Management, expression all lit up and focused, and he knew it had been the right choice for her. He can tell she already has a mental checklist of all the things she wanted to improve for the inn.
It doesn’t take long for Miles to find out that he doesn’t have much to do. Everything’s already taken care of, with all the new staff hard at work. It’s a wonder how everything can turn around so quickly, and he sends a quiet plea to the universe that the inn’s able to keep it up.
“So, why are you here?” Gabby asks, looking up from the computer she’s working on. Miles is beside her by the front desk, swiveling a chair around absently.
“No reason.”
“Have you listened to Cloverlily’s new song? It came out an hour ago.”
Right. The band had their live release at eleven a.m., and he had received the reminder about it. He didn’t watch. “Of course.”
Gabby scoffs, “You didn’t.”
“I most certainly did,” he lies.
“Yeah? And what do you think?”
“It’s a masterpiece, as always. Have you listened to it?”
“No, and neither have you. You’re such a horrible liar.” She rollsher eyes, prints out a sheet of paper, and shoves it at him. “Check out these financials, will you? I’m still not sure I’m doing these right.”
He’s not any good at them either, but he doesn’t tell her that. If she figures out how little he’s needed around here, she might make him drive all the way back to the city and do his actual job. Maybe they should hire an accountant. If he keeps up his dry spell, Andy might actually give up on his art manager career out of sheer exasperation, and he can offer him a job.
Calvin calls him throughout the day—texts him, too, and Miles expertly dodges him. He asks what Miles thinks of the new song, asks him how the inn is doing, if he’s made new paintings, and Miles stares at his phone way too long typing and then deleting entire messages.
***
He can’t paint.
It’s so frustrating, setting up all these papers and pencils and inks and watercolors—and he doesn’t come up with anything. He stares at them all day, brings them to the roof garden, to the lake, even back to his childhood room. He comes up with absolutely nothing, just emptiness and a whole lot of frustration.
