In the kitchen, she found Dani already up, making French toast.
“You cooked?” Kate asked, surprised.
“I'm trying to be useful. Turns out I remember Mom's recipe.” Dani flipped a piece of bread expertly. “Sleep okay?”
“Better than I have in months, actually.”
“Good. You needed that cry.”
Kate poured coffee, noting that Dani had already set the table for the family, not just grabbed a quick bite for herself. “You're different lately.”
“We all are. Coming home does that.” Dani plated the French toast, drizzled it with local maple syrup. “Tom's extending his stay another week. James is working remotely indefinitely.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
Before Kate could respond, Pop wandered in, fully dressed but with his shirt buttoned wrong. He looked at them with confusion that cleared slowly.
“Girls,” he said, though it sounded more like a question than a statement.
“Morning, Pop,” Kate said gently. “Hungry?”
“I need to check the boats.”
“After breakfast,” Dani said smoothly, guiding him to his chair. “The boats can wait.”
Pop accepted this, settling into his seat. But his hands shook more than usual as he tried to cut his French toast, and Kate had to stop herself from taking over. Amy had been clear: let him do what he could for himself for as long as he could.
Tom and James appeared together, already in the middle of an argument about cryptocurrency that sounded like a foreign language to Kate. They stopped when they saw Pop struggling with his fork.
“Morning, Pop,” Tom said, his voice carefully normal.
Pop looked at him blankly for a long moment, then smiled. “Tom. Good boy. Always the smart one.”
It was the right name, the right son, a small victory. They all relaxed slightly.
After breakfast, while Amy took Pop for his morning routine, the siblings gathered in the office. Tom had spread papersacross the desk: insurance documents, contractor estimates, utility bills.
“We need to talk about summer,” Tom said in his lawyer voice. “Bookings are down forty percent from last year.”
“The storm damage probably scared people off,” Dani suggested.
“It's more than that.” Tom pulled up something on his laptop. “Online reviews have been brutal. Guests complaining about the renovations, the noise, the 'loss of authentic charm.' Winter is one thing, but if we aren’t up and running one hundred percent by spring, I don’t see us having a busy summer season.”
Kate read the reviews, her stomach sinking. Multiple mentions of construction noise, of the inn losing its character, of feeling like they were staying in a “construction zone.”
“They're not wrong,” Kate admitted. “Between the emergency repairs and Lillian's improvements, it's been chaos.”
“Lillian's improvements aren't the problem,” James said. “It's the lack of coordination. We're doing everything piecemeal.”
“Because that's all we can manage.”
“No,” Tom corrected. “Because that's all you can manage alone. But you're not alone anymore.”
Before Kate could argue, Rosa knocked on the door. “Miss Kate? Mrs. Whitfield is here. She says it's urgent.”
They found Lillian in the lobby, sitting in one of the restored chairs, looking grayer than usual. Her walking stick was propped beside her, and her hands trembled slightly as she held an envelope.
