Isabel still looked wary, but a tiny spark of interest flickered in her eyes. Penny, ever the professional, simply raised an eyebrow as if she already suspected there was far more to this “vacation” than he was letting on.
“I would love to go back there,” Isabel told him.
“I suppose I could take the time,” Penny said, “Especially as my boss is inviting me.”
“Good, then I suggest you all get packed because we’re leaving in two hours,” Darius informed them and grinned at their shocked faces.
The next few minutes were ones of the three occupants in his study fleeing in sheer panic to get ready for their impromptu summer vacation.
Darius leaned back in his chair as his office fell silent. He was feeling the first real stir of anticipation he had felt in months. Sweet Blossom Bay held the final piece he needed to complete his vision. But for the first time in years, the thought of acquiring those last two properties didn’t feel quite as urgent as the idea of spending an entire summer watching his family heal under the gentle Gulf sun.
He glanced down at the open folder still spread across his desk. The Bay View Beach House paperwork sat on top, waiting for the last of his signatures. Penny had marked the pages with small colored tabs in her usual meticulous way.
Darius reached for his pen and signed each line, the strokes neat and final. Decades of waiting reduced to a few minutes of ink on paper. He should have felt triumph. He had felt triumph after every other deal of this size in his career. But the man whose family had once filled that beach house with summers and laughter had died less than a year ago, and his daughter had let it go because the grief had made it too painful to keep. Darius had won by waiting for the loss of someone he had never personally met. The paperwork was clean. The ethics, he was less sure of.
He closed the folder and set the pen down beside it.
The locals of Sweet Blossom Bay had a saying that the bay brought lost things home. Darius had never been the sort of man who put much stock in that kind of folklore. He had built an empire on numbers and contracts and the long game, not on bay breezes and small-town legends. But standing alone in his quiet office, with the deeds to a coastline he had spent his whole life chasing, finally signed and waiting in front of him, he found himself wondering whether he had been lost for a very long time without ever knowing it.
The Gulf was waiting. So was his family.
Darius picked up the folder, turned off the desk lamp, and went to pack.
TOM
Tom Reilly sat in the surgical waiting room of the small Sanibel hospital and tried, for the fourth time in twenty minutes, to take a sip of coffee that had gone cold sometime around the second hour. The paper cup was crumpled along one side from where his hand had tightened around it without him realizing. He set it down carefully on the side table beside him and let out a long, slow breath that did nothing to ease the ache that had settled between his shoulders.
The waiting room was quiet at this hour. A young couple sat in the corner near the window, the woman holding the man’s hand while he stared at the floor. An older gentleman a few seats down was working a crossword puzzle with the patient, methodical focus of someone who had been there a while. The fluorescent lights overhead hummed softly. It was the kind of sound a person stopped noticing after the first hour and started noticing again after the third.
Tom rested his forearms on his knees and watched the double doors that led back to the operating rooms. They had not openedin nearly forty minutes. He had been watching the clock as the moments ticked by.
Somewhere on the other side of those doors, George Heart was lying on a table while a surgeon and a team of nurses worked to put his hip back together. George was eighty-five years old and tougher than men half his age, Tom thought, and felt the familiar tightness at the back of his throat that had not really gone anywhere since his wife, Eleanor, had died.
He pictured her then, the way he sometimes still did when he needed steadying. Eleanor in the bakery’s front window in the early morning light, dusting flour from her apron, calling something over her shoulder to whichever of the staff had just walked in. Eleanor standing in his kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, telling him she had decided they were going to take George out to dinner whether he liked it or not, because that man spent too much time alone in that hotel and somebody had to do something about it.
George was Eleanor’s late first husband, James Heart’s older brother, and the uncle of Eleanor’s two children, Michael and Linda. When James had been killed in the line of duty, having been in the military, Michael had been eight and Linda seven. Tom had known the Hearts all his life, having grown up in Sweet Blossom Bay, where his family owned the Reilly Bakery. Eleanor, an incredible baker and businesswoman, began working at the bakery two years after James died. She and her kids had moved into Heart House, which stood beside their family hotel. She’d been a breath of fresh air to the family bakery and breathed new life into it and him.
Tom had never married after being jilted on his wedding day the year before he returned to Sanibel Island and the small community of Sweet Blossom Bay. He’d vowed never to letanyone do that to him again and had sworn off love until Eleanor and her children found their way into his heart.
Tom’s heart squeezed as he thought that Eleanor would have hated this. She would have hated it that George had fallen alone in his own home, that no one had been there for him right away. And he might have lain there for hours longer if not for one quiet, careful woman doing her job. Eleanor had loved her brother-in-law in the fierce, slightly bossy way of a younger sister. The thought of her standing here beside him in this waiting room, hands on her hips, telling him exactly what she thought of George’s stubbornness about that hotel, almost made him smile. Only his lips refused to curl upward as the worry for George bore down on him.
A nurse passed through the room with a clipboard tucked under her arm, and Tom lifted his head.
“Any word?” Tom asked her quietly, the way he had asked her twice already.
“Not yet, Mr. Reilly,” the nurse answered with a kind, practiced gentleness. “Dr. Patel is one of the best orthopedic surgeons we have. He’s been in there a while because he’s being thorough. That’s a good thing.”
“Thank you,” Tom told her.
“You’ll be the first person I find when there’s news,” she promised, and continued on through the room.
Tom watched her go, then looked back at the closed doors.
He had not eaten since breakfast. His back ached from the plastic chair. Tom glanced at his phone. There was another message from Linda with an update on where she and the kidswere. This was always a ritual with them whenever they traveled to and from Miami. They would send regular message updates on their trip progress.
Tom messaged back, telling her she was making good time and to keep safe. As soon as the distraction was over, his mind again drifted to the shock of the phone call that had come early that day.
Tom had been at Reilly’s Bakery, his sleeves rolled up, helping Lila, his newest baker, pull the second batch of key lime pies from the oven. He still loved that part of the day, the way the bakery filled with the sharp, bright scent of lime and the warm undertone of butter pastry. Lila had been telling him about a new pastry she wanted to try, something with mango and vanilla bean cream, and he had been listening with one ear and watching the way she moved through the kitchen as if she had been born to it. Eleanor had moved like that, too. He had been thinking about that, in the small, distracted way a person thought about a wife who was gone, when his phone had rung.
