“Itwasfine?—”
“It was not fine. Nothing about the last three weeks has been fine. You just kept saying it was because admitting it isn’t working means admitting you were wrong, and you—” Meg stopped. Her mouth closed. She looked at the ceiling.
“Say it,” Anna said.
“I don’t need to say it.”
“You were going to say something. Say it.”
Meg looked at her sister. The kitchen was very quiet. Luke’s pen had stopped. Tyler had gone still on the stool. Michael’s hands were flat on his notebook, not writing.
“Mom used to say that,” Meg said. “Just more time. Just one more chance. If everyone would just believe in what she was building?—”
The silence that followed was the kind that has weight. Anna’s arms dropped to her sides. Tyler’s head came up. Luke set his pen down entirely.
“That’s not fair,” Tyler said.
“I know.” Meg’s voice cracked. “I know it’s not fair. I’m sorry.” She pressed her fingers against her eyes. “But I’m not wrong about the rest of it.”
Nobody moved. The grill ticked. The ocean came through the windows—steady, indifferent, the same sound it had made through every Walsh family crisis for fifty years.
Anna stood at the counter with her hands at her sides and the word “Mom” ringing in her ears. Sam. The mother who kept leaving. The mother who always said next time, more time, one more chance. The mother whose painting hung in Bea’s room because she wasn’t there to hang it herself.
Anna was not Sam. She knew that. Meg knew that. Everyone in this room knew that.
But the dinner service—the grinding, the refusing to quit, the insistence that it was working when it wasn’t — that WAS Sam. That was exactly what Sam did. Chase something beautiful anddrag everyone along and call it passion and never look back to see who was falling behind.
“Okay,” Anna said.
Tyler looked at her. “Anna?—”
“She’s right.” Anna’s voice was steady. “Not about Sam. About the rest of it.” She looked at the spreadsheet. At the dinner column. At the numbers that said what she’d been refusing to hear. “The dinner service isn’t working. Not like this.”
Michael’s pen came up. “If you asked me what the numbers support?—”
“Tell me.”
“Keep weekend breakfast, Saturday and Sunday. Keep dinner service Friday and Saturday only. Cut weekday breakfast. Lunch stays as it is, seven days, ten to three.”
Tyler opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Saturday and Sunday mornings.”
“Your eggs are the highest-margin item on the menu. Weekend mornings, they’re the reason people come.”
“But the weekday jogger?—”
“Tyler.” Anna looked at him. “Two mornings. That’s what we can do without breaking. You keep the eggs. You keep the photography. You keep Lindsey.”
Tyler’s ears went pink. He looked at the spreadsheet one more time. At the weekend breakfast column—the one that was green, the one that said his eggs mattered.
“Okay,” he said. “Saturday and Sunday.”
“What about the gap?” Meg asked. Her voice was rough. “The scholarship shortfall?”
Michael’s pen tapped the notebook. “This model covers approximately sixty percent of the shortfall. The remaining forty percent is still open.”
Luke wrote something on his legal pad and underlined it.
“So it’s better,” Tyler said. “But it’s not solved.”
