In a few short minutes, Annie was home—the Inn, as she now liked to think of it. She parked next to Kevin’s pickup and wandered down the sloping lawn to the cottage that Earl and Kevin had custom designed for her and where Kevin was sitting on the porch in an Adirondack chair. He was gazing at the harbor, smiling.

“I love it here,” he said, without glancing at her.

“Yeah, me too.” She sat down beside him and followed his gaze. The water was calm, as if waiting for the boats to start their summer procession. “The Inn is going be spectacular.”

“And you can’t beat the view.”

The cottage was down the hill toward the water and, as Earl said, “within shoutin’ distance” of the Inn—the old Littlefield house that was being restored, updated, and transformed for the twenty-first century. Adhering to the same top-quality workmanship that they were putting into the main house, the brand-new cottage had wide-plank floors in the small, but sunny living/kitchen combination; a porcelain-tiled, pristine bath; a cozy bedroom shaded by a multi-armed, thick-trunked scrub oak that stood outside the window; and, best of all, a writing room with space for Annie’s laptop and her books and her imagination. The writing room also had two big windows that faced the harbor and the lighthouse and were designed to catch the eastward summer breezes. Originally, she’d wanted to have an apartment attached to the Inn. But she’d traded that idea for solitude. The cottage felt more like a real home, especially since she’d decorated it with a few childhood treasures: her grandmother Sutton’s braided rug; the special quilt her mother had made; her mother’s rocking chair. Her mother Ellen’s things, not Donna’s.

Annie wondered if she could hide there during Donna’s visit. Then she cleared her throat and, as her dad would have said, she “came back down to earth.” She tapped Kevin’s arm. “Donna’s going to be wicked impressed with everything you and Earl have done.”

Kevin ran a hand through his dark hair. A shade lighter than Annie’s, unlike hers, it only showed a few strands of silver; he’d joked that as the younger sibling, he had plenty of time to catch up. “But it’s the worst possible time,” he said. “We don’t even have a decent bedroom for her.”

Annie felt a pressing sensation on her chest, followed by a flash of hope that he’d tell their mother not to come. Then she felt guilty about wanting that. “How long will she stay?”