Lena took a breath, letting the steady sound of the tide ground her. Her heartbeat quickened; her palms were sweating. “I grew up in a B&B on Cape Cod. My parents owned it. I was folding towels and checking in guests before I could reach the front desk without a step stool.”
A ghost of a smile touched her lips at the reminiscence—herself at seven, standing on her pink plastic stool, discussing room preferences with bemused guests. “Over the years, I did every job in the place at one point or another. I loved it—it was home, and purpose, and everything that felt safe.”
Kate said nothing, but her gaze held steady, anchoring Lena in the present.
“My dad died when I was fifteen. Heart attack.” The words came out flat, clinical, the only way she could say them withoutbreaking. “My mom… couldn’t cope. She sent me away to boarding school. Said she needed space—she couldn’t handle a grieving teenager.”
The rejection still stung, even all these years later. Lena understood intellectually that her mother had been drowning in her own pain.
The fifteen-year-old girl inside her still felt abandoned when she needed support the most.
“That’s where I met Emma.” A genuine smile tugged at her lips, bringing warmth to her chest. “My first found family member.”
“She told me,” Kate said.
Lena nodded, grateful Emma had paved this path. It made the telling easier somehow. “Six months later, my mom remarried. I guess she couldn’t handle life on her own. A man named Bob. He was controlling. Creepy.” Her skin prickled with remembered discomfort, the way his eyes tracked her whenever she came home for breaks. “Nine months after that, she ‘fell’ down the stairs and broke her neck.”
Kate gasped, her eyes widening with shock and sympathy.
Lena’s hands curled into fists on the table. “He produced a will that left everything to him, cutting me out. I was seventeen, broke, and legally powerless. I lost the house, the business, everything.” She took a deep breath, tasting salt air and bitterness, and voiced what she had never said to anyone but Emma.
“Emma and I both believe he pushed her down those stairs, that the will was fake—either forged or he somehow forced her to sign it. There is simply no way she would have cut me out. The B&B was my fathers’s.”
Her voice cracked on the last words. Her mother had loved her. Lena knew that, bone-deep. Whatever Bob did to produce that will—she knew her mother hadn’t been willing.
Kate gasped, one hand flying to her mouth, but remained silent, letting Lena tell the story at her own pace. She was grateful for the space.
Lena picked up her drink, stared into the melting ice, watching the cubes shift and clink against the glass. “Emma’s family took me in until graduation. College was obviously out of the question, so I went back to the Cape and got a job at the B&B. There were new owners by then—Bob sold and ran as fast as possible. Nice enough people, if useless.”
The memory brought a mixture of fondness and frustration. “They let me run the place while they played golf. I handled reservations, guest issues, hiring, all of it. They paid me peanuts, but I loved it, and I was good at it. It felt like mine again.”
For a few years, she’d been able to breathe. To rebuild something like the home she’d lost.
Kate’s brow furrowed. “Until Chester.”
“Yep.” Lena clenched her jaw. Even his name left a nasty taste in her mouth. “He showed up like some heir-apparent frat boy playing King of the Hill. Ordering everyone around and screwing things up. He started hitting on me.”
Her gut twisted at the memory—his too-close proximity, his hand on her lower back, his breath reeking of expensive scotch and entitlement.
“I turned him down—nicely at first. Then more firmly. Said I didn’t date people I worked with.” She rolled her eyes, shaking her head at her own naïveté. “I thought that would soften the blow, make it less personal. Didn’t work.”
Kate didn’t speak, but her knuckles whitened around her glass, tendons standing out.
“He didn’t like hearing ‘no’.” Lena’s voice hardened. “Told me if I didn’t sleep with him, he’d fire me. I laughed at him.” The reaction had been automatic, disbelieving—surely he couldn’t be serious. “Probably not the smartest thing to do, but you shouldhave seen the puffed up peacock. He had all the appeal of a street pigeon. Since I pricked his ego, he did fire me, but then offered me the chance to get my job back.”
Kate’s lips parted, her expression darkening with understanding, as if she knew where this story was going.
Lena grimaced, her skin crawling from the recollection. “I won’t repeat his suggestions for how to earn it back. Disgusting pig. I told him to fuck off.” The satisfaction of that moment still burned bright—the look on his face when she’d refused to be cowed. “So, he started the stories that I had been fired for theft, and then filed a false police report when someone asked him why I hadn’t been arrested.”
The humiliation of being escorted from her apartment in handcuffs, her neighbors watching, rushed back with nauseating clarity. Her hands trembled, and she pressed them flat against the table.
“I ended up spending all my savings on an attorney to clear me. Luckily, I found one with a forensic accountant wife, so they knew what to ask for to disprove his claims. They got it thrown out, but my name was ruined.” She’d walked out of that courthouse vindicated and broke, her reputation in tatters despite the dismissal. “No one on the Cape would hire me.”
Lena set down her glass and leaned back in her chair, the metal now almost hot against her shoulders. “Emma got me out. She offered me the desk clerk job here. A clean slate. I took it, even though I feared it would come back on her somehow.”
Kate reached across the table, offering her hand, her support, without a word. Lena looked at it for a moment—the simple gesture of connection, of solidarity—then laced their fingers together. Kate’s hand was warm and solid, grounding.
“You’re a survivor, Lena. You’re not broken,” Kate said, her voice fierce with conviction. “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”
