“I can’t stay here with you like this. I'm going to the Harbor Hotel,” Dani said finally. “When you're ready to talk, really talk, call me.”
Kate almost laughed watching her sister navigate her ridiculous suitcase back to the rental car, then went inside to check on her father. He was agitated, muttering about the woman in the blue coat, about Elizabeth, about promises broken and kept.
Kate gave him his afternoon medications early, hoping they'd calm him. Then she sat at the desk in the office, looking at the bills, the estimates, the reservation logbook with its sparse bookings.
Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number with a photo attached. She opened it to find a picture of the inn taken from across the harbor. A professional shot, the kind real estate agents used. The message below read:
It's still a beautiful property. It deserves to be saved. Let me help.—L.W.
Furious Dani had given Lillian her cell phone number, Kate deleted the message, but the image stayed burned in her mind. The inn did look beautiful from that angle, like something worth saving. Like the home her mother had loved, where she'd raised her children, where she'd died too young.
Outside, the snow fell harder, and Kate could see, from a distance, the ice fishermen out on the pond pulling their lines, heading home before the storm hit. She wished she was still out there, where the only problems were simple ones, fish or no fish, thick ice or thin, stay or go.
But she was here, in this inn that was falling apart, with a father who was fading, a sister who'd betrayed them, and a grandmother who wanted to buy her way back into their lives.
Tomorrow, Lillian Whitfield would come to dinner.
Kate poured herself a whiskey from the bottle she kept in the bottom drawer, Pop's old brand, cheap but effective, and started making a list of everything that needed to be done before then. Clean the dining room. Plan a menu with Marcy. Figure out what to tell Pop.
Figure out how to face the woman who'd broken her mother's heart. Her anger brewing at the thought that perhaps their grandmother had paid for Dani’s hotel room.
The snow kept falling, and somewhere in Kennebunkport, in some expensive hotel, Lillian Whitfield waited. After so many years, she was finally making her move, claiming their lives, the inn, and their family as her own.
We’re not her family, and Whaler’s Landing isn’t her home.
But as she looked around the office, at the water stains and the peeling wallpaper and the photo of her mother on the desk, Kate wondered if she had any fight left in her to keep it.
CHAPTER 3
Kate woke at 4:47 a.m. to footsteps above her room. Not the familiar settling of old wood that marked the inn's nights like a lullaby, but the deliberate shuffle of slippered feet on worn floorboards. Pop was wandering again.
The third-floor hallway stretched in darkness, lit only by the EXIT sign's red glow and pale moonlight through the window at the far end. Snow continued to fall, fat flakes that clung to the glass and obscured the harbor beyond.
Kate found her father trying doorknobs with the patient determination of someone performing an important task. He'd dressed himself in his good khakis and the navy sweater Elizabeth had given him their last Christmas together, twenty years old now, carefully preserved, pulled out for occasions that existed only in his fractured memory.
“Pop?”
He turned, and for a moment his eyes were blank, seeing through her to some other time, some other place. The confusion cleared slowly, like fog lifting off the harbor. “Katie. I'm looking for the Roosevelt Room. Guest wants extra towels.”
There was no Roosevelt Room. Hadn't been since the previous owners named the rooms after ships back in the day. She guided him gently back toward his room, noting how light he'd become, how his shoulder bones felt sharp through the wool sweater. In his bedroom, she helped him out of his good clothes and back into his pajamas, his hands shaking with the buttons.
“Katie,” he said as she pulled the covers up. “Don't let them take her.”
“Take who, Pop?”
“Elizabeth. They want to take her back to Boston. But she belongs here. With us.”
The words lodged in her throat. “No one's taking anyone. I promise.”
By the time she made it back downstairs, sleep was impossible. The kitchen was dark except for the green glow of the microwave clock: 5:18. Kate started the coffee maker and stood at the window while it gurgled to life. Her reflection stared back from the black glass, a ghost version of herself, translucent and wavering. She looked exhausted, even in the forgiving darkness.
She flicked on the overhead light and caught herself properly in the glass cabinet doors. Where Dani had inherited their mother's delicate features and auburn hair, Kate was all Perkins. Her father's broad shoulders and sturdy build, designed for hauling lobster traps and weathering nor'easters. Dark hair that she kept short for practicality, currently sticking up at odd angles from sleep. Her face was wider than fashionable, with her father's strong jaw and dark eyes that looked almost black in the harsh kitchen light. At thirty-five, she already had lines around her eyes from squinting against sun and snow. Her hands, when she looked at them, were rough from work, nothing likeDani's manicured fingers or their mother's elegant hands in the photos.
She looked exactly like what she was: a Maine woman who worked too hard and slept too little, who chose function over form every time. “Built for winter,” Pop used to say, and he'd meant it as a compliment. But sometimes, catching herself like this in unguarded moments, Kate wondered what it would be like to be built for something softer.
The coffee finished brewing as Marcy arrived, stomping snow off her boots in the mudroom. Six inches had accumulated overnight, transforming the inn's shabby exterior into something from a postcard. Through the window, Kate could see how the snow had softened every hard edge, covered every flaw. The failing roof looked picturesque under its white blanket. Even the scraggly rosebushes she hadn't had time to prune looked artistic, like something from a gardening magazine.
“The roads are a mess,” Marcy announced, unwinding her scarf. “But I made it. You want the good news or bad news?”
