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“Rory Jordan’s not going to say no in front of the cameras, is he?”
We went to bed. Lee looked in on Grace.
“She’s asleep,” she said. She climbed under our comforter. The lights were out. I closed my eyes. Outside I heard a barn owl screech.
“The couple in the blue suite asked for a gluten-free breakfast,” I said into the darkness. The words hung there between us for a moment, ridiculous. Leanne shuddered.
“I want them out,” she said.
“The blue suite couple?” he asked.
“All of them.” I turned over in the bed. I pulled her closer until her head was resting on my shoulder and my arm was around her.
“You want to close the inn?”
“It sounds so final when you put it like that. But yes. We have to. I can’t do it right now.”
“I can’t either. I mean, I know it’s your business. You do all the work. But I don’t want anyone in the house until Nina’s back home.”
“I’ll tell them in the morning.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Leanne
I got up early on Tuesday morning and went to the kitchen to wait for Grace to wake. She appeared at seven thirty, looking for food, in her pajamas and one of Andy’s sweaters, with her phone in one hand and her headphones around her neck.
“My room is freezing, Mom. I mean, like, icicle levels of cold. It’s actually child abuse.”
It was a teenage exaggeration and not a new complaint. In the inn, the heating came on automatically in all the bedrooms when the temperature dropped below seventy degrees, but in our part of the house it had to be turned on manually. Mostly I didn’t. When the girls said they were cold I just told them to put on a sweater or come to the kitchen, where the stove always kept things warm. Why? Because I didn’t want my girls to be weak. My childhood had been hard. We’d never had enough money. I was hungry, often, and cold, always. I’d had my brief, glorious escape to college, before everything fell apart again, but for most of my life I’d scrapped and fought and built a life for myself. There’s a confidence that comes from making it on your own. I didn’t want the girls to experience the loneliness or the despair I’d felt as a girl sometimes, but I did want them to have that confidence. I wanted them to be survivors.
When I made the inn into a success, I worried that if I removed every small obstacle from their lives, they would never develop the strength they needed to take on the world outside our door. But as I watched Grace warm her hands by the stove, I realized how stupid I’d been. I couldn’t possibly give them the childhood I’d had. So what was the point of picking out small discomforts and imposing them artificially? My whole philosophy assumed that they had no challenges of their own. That their world outside our house was smooth and simple, and because of that I had made our home a place where they could expect to be pushed and challenged and questioned, instead of loved and cared for and reassured. Nina hadn’t trusted me. That was the truth. She didn’t come to me with her problems. She didn’t ask me for help. And that was my fault.
“I’ll fix it,” I said. “I’ll put your room and Nina’s on the same thermostat as the inn, okay? It won’t be cold anymore.”
She looked confused. “Okay. I mean, it’s not that bad.”
“I’ll fix it as soon as you go to school. Now, what do you want for breakfast? Waffles and fruit? Pancakes? You name it, I’ll make it.”
My tone was too upbeat. I was talking to her like she was seven years old. She looked around the kitchen. Usually, by this time, I’d be elbow deep in breakfast preparations for the inn, and Grace would be pouring herself a bowl of cereal. Today the kitchen was clean and quiet.
“Uh, I was thinking toast. And maybe eggs?”
“Coming up.”
Her eyes narrowed as she looked at me. I couldn’t put it off any longer.
“Grace, I have something to tell you,” I began, just as Andy arrived in the kitchen. He was already dressed, not in his work clothes, but in his new jeans and a pale-blue button-down that suited him. His hair was damp from the shower. He cast me a swift look when he came into the room, then leaned down to kiss Grace on the head before moving to the other side of the kitchen and pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“What?” Grace said. “What’s going on?”
I sat beside her at the table. “You know that Nina was supposed to come home last weekend, after her vacation with Simon?”
“Yeah.” Her eyes went from me to Andy and back again.
“Well, Nina hasn’t come home, obviously. And she’s not with Simon, because he came home on Friday night.”
“Nina’s missing?”
