“If you’re that worried about who she is or her character,” Penny said, “look her up. I found out that she is the daughter of Tom Reilly, the bakery owner.”
“Tom Reilly,” Darius repeated thoughtfully.
“Yes.” Penny nodded. “Go on then. Let’s look her up.”
Darius pulled his laptop across the desk and opened it.
“I guess this beats running an actual background check on her,” Darius said with a snort.
“Tell me you weren’t thinking of doing that?” Penny looked at him in disgust.
“No!” Darius denied. “Isabel had already warned me against it.”
“But you were going to anyway,” Penny guessed.
“No.” Darius shook his head in denial.
Penny said nothing. The look on her face was the one she had been giving him for forty years when she did not approve of a decision but would let him make it anyway. It would be his headache when the trouble came. And it always did.
Darius ignored her eyes boring into him, and he typed:Reilly’s Bakery, Sweet Blossom Bay.
The bakery’s small website came up first. It had a neat pale-blue layout. There was a photograph of a flour-dusted man with a kind, square face standing behind the counter.Tom Reilly, the bio read.Owner. Sweet Blossom Bay native. Took over the family bakery from his father. Married to Eleanor Drew-Heart Reilly. Widowed five years ago.
Darius’s eye stopped on the wife’s name.
Eleanor Drew-Heart Reilly? A frown creased his brow. That couldn’t be a coincidence could it? He remembered Linda telling them they were staying at Hearts Hotel for the summer.
He typed it into the search bar.
Eleanor Drew-Heart Reilly.
The page filled with results.
Darius scanned them quickly. There was a small local obituary and a community write-up of the bakery’s history. An article from a Sweet Blossom Bay summer feature on the women who had shaped the town’s businesses over the decades. He clicked the community write-up.
His eyes traveled the screen.
His heart stopped in his chest.
His breath caught somewhere just behind his ribs.
The page laid out the story of Eleanor Drew-Heart Reilly in calm, neat paragraphs. Her first marriage. Her two children. Her second marriage to Tom Reilly. Her work at the bakery. Her sudden death from a heart attack.
But what struck Darius the most was her family. His eyes widened. Maybe Isabel was right, and that fate had brought him here this summer for a reason. Why else would the only person he’d run into and met not once but twice in the space of twenty-four hours be Linda?
Darius’s eyes narrowed as he reread the part about Eleanor’s brother-in-law from her first marriage, George Heart, the current owner of Hearts Hotel. Her two children. The names sat on the screen in plain black letters.
The room around Darius receded.
His pulse quickened in response to the jolt of his heart. The screen narrowed down to the small black letters of a name that had been stuck in his head since the previous night.
“Darius.” Penny’s voice came from somewhere far away. He looked up from the screen to find Penny watching him from the armchair. Whatever she had seen on his face had made her sit forward. “What is it? What did you find?” Penny asked.
Darius did not answer for a moment.
He drew a slow breath, leaned back in his chair, and started to laugh. Oh yes, fate loved to play cruel games. He turned the laptop around so that the screen faced her.
“Penny,” Darius said quietly. “Meet Linda.” He raised an eyebrow. “Linda Heart. And yes, she’s related to the owner of Hearts Hotel.”
