She couldn’t sell the inn. She’d slept on the foldout couch in her parents’ house this year, tiptoed throughtheirspace, carried hot casseroles on her lap through expensive cab rides, and none of it, not a bit of it, had felt like it should.
“I have to get back to it,” her father muttered sheepishly. “Ken said he was going to talk to you. You should talk to Ken about the inn. It just makes more sense to sell and be done with it.”
He all but hung up on her.
Rose jerked back in her chair, quickly looking for support from her aunt’s financial adviser—the person who had walked her through all the insurance paperwork two months ago. His face bore sympathy…but not support. Nor surprise.
After he’d eaten her pastries?
“My dad talked to you about this,” she accused him.
He cleared his throat. “Your father asked me to check what the inn would sell for without repairs, yes.”
“It’s got to be less than what it could produce if we fix it up. What did you say?”
“That it would simplify your aunt’s estate significantly—”
“Her estate?” After shedied? “She’s sitting right here!”
Rose glared at him, eyes flicking to her aunt in distress. What a terrible ghoul this asshole was to be making plans based on the assumption Max would die soon. Max was doing fine!
Fortunately, Max had gotten bored with the proceedings and fallen asleep in her chair, face tilted down to her considerable chest, so she didn’t hear that anyone was planning her demise.
Rose lowered her voice to a whisper and pointed a finger at the financial adviser. “It’s up to me, right? I have power of attorney. I’m not selling it.”
The financial adviser shoved a tissue box across the table, a practiced gesture he must have employed with many unreasonable women. Rose was prepared to be as unreasonable as necessary. She evaded his skeptical expression and looked down at her phone, pulling up group texts and calendar entries.Someone else had to see how important the inn was to Max and Rose. Fifteen different relatives she’d emailed, every single one of whom had gladly eaten Rose’s steamed pudding every Christmas since she was old enough to look over the stove. She’d bought the pastries and sent the reminders. They would come. They were just late.
•••
Three hours later, Rose staggered out into a Boston blizzard, blinking at the thin sunlight filtering through the snow. Nobody else had come. Nobody else had even called herback.
She’d never been this angry. Or, rather, she hadn’t been this angry in a decade.
Thirty years of endless summer days on the back lawn, winter evenings in front of the fireplace, birthday parties and anniversaries and even Rose’s long-ago honeymoon, and nobody else wanted to hold on to the inn? Nobody else cared? Where was the big family she’d thought she had?
Wondering if she’d somehow missed a message, overlooked an email, Rose stood in the knee-deep snow and searched through the electronic nooks and crannies of her phone. She checked her junk mail folder. Her spam texts folder. Her work email. Nothing. And then she called her old voicemail inbox, the one she’d quit using three years ago when she left her job in private wealth management for her current role at a nonprofit—she had too many old clients who thought she still solved their problems.
There was only one message, dated almost three months previous, and it made her whole body lock up in shock whenshe heard it. She nearly dropped her phone, one hand automatically scrabbling in her purse for her rescue inhaler, even if it wasn’t her asthma that was closing up her throat.
Hey, Rosie? It’s me.
She hadn’t heard Tom’s voice in ten years, but identifying it was the only effortless part of hearing his message.
I’m, um. Well. I might be about to die.
The message was rough and full of static. The roar in the background must be the rain. He’d left her a message just before that infamous picture of Boyd Kellagher’s rescue was taken.
I’ve always loved you.
Rose’s mind skipped right past that, as she’d long since decided that Tom meant something very different by those words than she’d originally thought. It was the next statement that caught her attention:
I’m sorry for everything. I wish I had the chance to make it up to you.
Tears threatened to spill out over her cheeks. There wasn’t a way to make it up to her. He was supposed to love her for the rest of her life; tickets to his Broadway premiere weren’t going to cut it as a substitute, and it was beyond her what else he might think he had that she wanted. Why bother being sorry now? Once again, he was too late.
However.
Didn’t she need someone who knew how to swing a hammer? That was ironic. That was great timing.
