The Summer We Buried

The last time you were in Whitlock & Sons' office, you were nine years old, and your grandmother bribed you with saltwater taffy to sit still while she signed papers.

There's still a jar of taffy on the desk. Everything else has changed — including the man behind it, who was not, the last time you checked, supposed to be Noah Calloway.

He doesn't look up right away when you're shown in. He finishes the line he's writing — Noah always finished things, that was the whole problem, you were the only thing he never got to finish — and then he sets down the pen, and ten years land in the room at once.

"Wren." Your name in his mouth is careful, like a word in a language he stopped practicing. "You look—" He decides against the sentence. "I'm sorry about Eleanor. The whole town came. I don't know if you saw."

You saw. You saw him too, third pew, staring straight ahead in a dark suit while you sat behind your grandmother's casket and felt the entire congregation of Havenport not-looking at you with tremendous effort.

"You're the executor," you say, because facts are safer than the last ten years.

"I'm the executor." He opens a folder, and something in his face tells you to sit down before you hear what's in it. "The inn is yours. All of it — the point, the dock, everything." A pause, one heartbeat too long, and there it is, the fine print of your grandmother's last act of matchmaking: "On the condition that you live in it, and run it, until Labor Day. With a co-signatory approving every major decision." He closes the folder. He almost manages neutrality. "Her choice of co-signatory was… specific."