He thought about the deed he’d signed in his Miami office a few hours before they’d left. The Bay View Beach House. The neat strokes of his pen across each line of the contract. The small flicker of unease he hadn’t been able to push all the way away.
The man who had owned that house had refused to sell it to him for forty years. Darius had approached the owner himself when he was in his thirties, had sent letters every two years through Penny, and had once flown personally to the small retirement village in Fort Lauderdale where the man had moved after hiswife passed. The man had received Darius politely, given him a glass of iced tea, and told him that the beach house wasn’t for sale, that it had been in the family since his grandfather had built it, and that he intended to keep it there. Darius had thanked him for his time and left.
The man had died less than a year ago. The daughter, an only child living elsewhere with her own grief, had reached out to Penny within six months. The grief had made the house too painful to keep. She’d let it go quietly. No realtor. No sign in the front yard. A clean, private sale to Wayne Group International. The papers were signed two weeks ago, and the keys were delivered to Darius’s office in a small leather pouch containing the new alarm codes.
Darius had won the property by waiting forty years for an old man to die.
The thought sat strangely in his chest as he drove. He had told himself, every time he had thought about it over the last few weeks, that he had not done anything wrong. He had made a fair offer. The daughter had accepted. The transaction had been clean. He had not done anything that any other man in his position would not have done.
But every time he thought of the daughter signing those papers from her quiet living room somewhere up the coast, he felt a small, unfamiliar tightness in his chest that he couldn’t quite get rid of.
“Uncle Darius,” Emma said from the back seat, snapping him out of it, “I can see the bay.”
The Sanibel causeway had begun to lift them up over the water. The gulf opened out on either side of the road in longshimmering panels of indigo and gold, and the late sun spread itself across the surface of the bay in the particular way that only ever seemed to happen here. Emma pressed her face to the window and let out a small, delighted gasp.
Beside him, Isabel reached over and squeezed Darius’s hand on the steering wheel.
He squeezed back.
“Thank you for this,” Isabel said softly. “It’s what we all need. I remember coming here after…” She sucked in a breath, thinking of their parents’ death.
“I know,” Darius said, giving her a warm smile.
He rolled down his window for the first time on the drive. The warm bay air poured in, full of salt and sun-baked sand and something else underneath, the faint sweetness of jasmine somewhere on the breeze. Emma rolled hers down too, and her dark hair flew in long streamers behind her.
Isabel looked over her shoulder at her granddaughter, and her eyes shone.
The causeway brought them down onto the island, and Darius drove slowly through the small streets toward Bay View Drive.
Hearts Hotel rose in the distance on its slight rise, white clapboard catching the last of the sun, the wide wraparound porches and the tin roof painted gold by the angle of the light. Darius let his eyes drift toward it as he passed and felt, again, that small, unfamiliar tightness in his chest.
The house came into view at last. Set back behind a row of low palms. Modern coastal lines. Floor-to-ceiling glass at the front catches the gold light and throwing it back in long warmrectangles across the gravel drive. The bay glittered behind it, and a few gulls wheeled lazily overhead.
Darius pulled up, parked, and for a long moment, none of them moved.
They all just sat and looked. The bay. The house. The warm wind was coming in through the open windows.
“It’s even better than I remembered,” Emma whispered.
Isabel laughed softly and pressed her hand to her mouth.
“Darius,” Penny said from the back, “this is beautiful.”
“I’m glad you like it,” Darius told them, and meant it more than he could have said out loud.
He got out and rounded the SUV to open Isabel’s door for her. The front door of the house opened a moment later, and a woman in a neat pale blue dress stepped out onto the porch, smiling as she came down the steps. The housekeeper that the agency had arranged. Darius hadn’t met her before, but Penny had vetted her thoroughly, the way Penny vetted everyone.
“Mr. Wayne,” the woman said warmly. “Welcome. I’m Marlene.”
“Marlene,” Darius said, shaking her hand. “Thank you for being here. This is my sister Isabel, my great-niece Emma, and our family friend Penny.”
“Welcome, all of you,” Marlene said. “I’m so glad you’ve arrived safely. The bedrooms are made up, and the linens are fresh, and I’ve put fruit and cold drinks in the kitchen. I do owe you an apology, though, sir.”
“An apology?” Darius asked.
“Supper,” Marlene said, with a small wince. “The previous family who came through left the kitchen in more of a state than I’d been told to expect. I’ve been at it most of the afternoon, but I won’t have a proper supper ready for tonight. I’ll have something good for you all by tomorrow evening, I promise. Tonight, I’m afraid you’ll need to fend for yourselves.”
“Don’t worry about it, Marlene,” Darius told her easily. “We’re just happy to be here. I’ll go and collect something for everyone now. What would you recommend?”
