They dispersed slowly: Tom to the office to review the bills from the renovations, James to his laptop to research the facility's reviews again, Dani to strip Pop’s bed with tears she thought no one saw.
Kate stayed in the kitchen, holding the envelope. She put the envelope in the drawer with her mother's recipes, another piece of paper that held too much weight to open casually. Then she went to help Dani.
The inn would go on. They would go on. But first, they would stand in the empty room and let themselves feel the weight of this particular ending, this goodbye that felt as final as any funeral.
That night, after everyone had gone to bed, Kate stood in her mother's old room, looking at the photograph again. Her mother had forgiven Lillian, had let her come back at the end. But she'd never told her children, or their father. That secret had been kept for years, hidden between recipe cards.
Kate thought about secrets and forgiveness, about time running out and last chances. In five days, she'd listen to Lillian and learn why her grandmother had insisted on Mother's Day, why it had to be now, what couldn't wait even one more week.
The inn creaked around her, settling into night. In Wells Pop slept, lost in time. Her siblings slept, preparing for the busy days ahead. And somewhere across town, Lillian lay dying, holding on to secrets that had waited so many years to be told.
Five days.
Kate touched her mother's face in the photograph: thin, dying, but peaceful. Maybe even happy.
Whatever came on Sunday, whatever truth emerged, at least they'd face it together. The four of them, no longer estranged but still strangers in many ways, bound by blood and circumstance and the slow, hard work of becoming a family again.
Five days to obsess over something she couldn’t control.
She’d been down that road before, and it never helped her nerves. Instead, she decided on a long, hot and fragrant bath. Most likely, it wouldn’t be enough to calm her fears.
But it was all she had for tonight.
CHAPTER 25
Lillian Whitfield woke at four in the morning in her rented cottage, her body announcing itself with the particular pain that had become her unwelcome companion. The cancer had its own schedule now, indifferent to her lifetime of rigid routine. She lay still for a moment, cataloging the hurt: the sharp ache in her abdomen that never quite left, the bone-deep exhaustion that sleep couldn't touch, the nausea that would rise and fall like a tide throughout the day.
The cottage was too quiet. She'd lived alone for many years, but this was a different solitude, thick with the end approaching. Through the window, she could see the harbor beginning to lighten, that particular gray that preceded dawn in coastal Maine. Elizabeth had loved this time of day. She'd written about it in one of her letters, the ones Lillian kept in the lockbox beside her bed.
Staying in the cottage as her illness progressed seemed the better solution than staying at the inn. Although she desperately wanted to be surrounded by family, the kind of welcome she’d hoped for still hadn’t materialized. Her grandchildren had been cordial, and if she was honest, their behavior toward her wasone of tolerance, not acceptance. So far, the few days she’d spent sleeping at the inn, felt forced and unwelcome.
No, this is where I belong… alone.
Moving carefully, she rose and made her way to the kitchen. The doctor had prescribed stronger pain medication, but it clouded her mind, and she needed clarity for what was coming. This weekend, she'd tell them. This weekend she would unburden herself of the secrets she’d kept for so many years. The thought made her hands shake as she measured coffee.
The cottage had come furnished, generic coastal decor that could have been anywhere from Maine to North Carolina. She'd brought nothing of her own except clothes and the lockbox. At first, this had felt like appropriate penance, living without the comfort of familiar things. Now she understood it differently. She'd been practicing for erasure, for the world continuing without her imprint.
The coffee finished brewing, and Lillian carried it to the small sitting room that looked out over the harbor. She could see the inn on its rise, windows beginning to glow as the family woke. Four grandchildren she barely knew, living in the shadow of her failures.
Thomas with his brittle competence, hiding his divorce as if failure was contagious.
James, brilliant and adrift, reminded her painfully of Elizabeth at that age. The same restless intelligence, the same need to matter. She'd pushed Elizabeth toward medicine, law, anything prestigious. Instead, her daughter had chosen three loves, the ocean, a ramshackle inn, and Daniel Perkins, a fisherman who adored her. The right choice, Lillian understood now, far too late.
Dani was physically the most like Elizabeth herself. Beautiful, with the same desire to be useful, to contribute, to earn her place through competence.
But it was Katherine who was most like herself. Lillian had built three successful hotels after her divorce, proving she didn't need anyone. Kate was trying to prove the same thing, just with less capital and more heart.
The sun rose properly, turning the harbor from gray to silver to gold. Lillian pulled out the lockbox, entered the combination: Elizabeth's birthday. Inside were the letters, the photos from those last weeks, and something else. Something she'd never told anyone about.
A USB drive containing security footage from all those years ago.
She'd had cameras installed at her Back Bay home, state of the art for the time. The footage showed Elizabeth arriving that night, the night everything broke apart. But it also showed what happened before Daniel arrived. Elizabeth crying on the doorstep for twenty minutes before ringing the bell. Elizabeth saying she loved her mother, that she wanted both worlds, both families. Elizabeth begging for understanding.
And Lillian, cold and implacable, saying the words that severed them: “Choose him and you're dead to me.”
The USB drive also contained something else. Audio recordings from the phone calls she'd made years later, using her connections to destroy Daniel's business. She'd kept them out of some perverse need to document her own cruelty, the way people photograph accident scenes. At the time, she believed she’d made the recordings as a way to make sure everyone engaged in her plan, kept their end of the bargain. Looking back on it all now, she understood how foolish it all was.
She needed to give this to her grandchildren, all of it. They deserved the complete truth, not some sanitized version that made her look better. But first, she needed to see Daniel, understanding it most likely would be her last chance to talk to him.
