“A week. Just long enough to get this roof fixed and the place listed for sale. I have to get back to Toronto.” She studied his face. She was pretty sure he was relieved. Asshole. She wanted to revise her answer, tell him she was moving right in, staying for good. Just to irritate him.

“I’m sorry about Lucille,” he said. “I remember—”

“You know what, Sawyer?”

He raised his eyebrows. Maybe he was surprised she’d interrupted him. The old Eve—Evie—would never have done that. She would have hung on his every word, anxious to hear every thought in his head.

“Shut the hell up.”

“Ow!”

Eve, who had been trying to heft her suitcase into the closet of the room she’d decided to move into, yelped when a mermaid figurine fell on her head.

Ironically, she had decided to settle in this room because it was the only one that didn’t contain a creepy life-size mermaid. Last night, after discovering it was raining on the third floor, she’d crashed in the room closest to the front desk. But when she’d awakened in the middle of the night and shuffled out of bed to hit the bathroom, she’d run into a five-foot-tall mermaid perched near her door. Her sleep-addled mind had catalogued it as an intruder, and she’d screamed bloody murder.

It was possible she might have broken the bedside lamp.

By using it to attack a fiberglass mermaid.

Which was now a pile of fiberglass mermaid shards.

Seeing the inn in the bright light of day had been…something.

The Mermaid Inn had always contained mermaids, of course. The whole town was a little mermaid crazy—hence the Mermaid Parade every Labor Day weekend. As a kid, she’d adored the little mermaid touches here and there: the mermaid mugs the guests used for their morning coffee, the curio cabinet in the parlor that contained Lucille’s collection of mermaid figurines, the green-painted metal coat hooks shaped to look like mermaid tails.

But it seemed that in the decade Eve had been away, Lucille had gone full-on mermaid crazy. That, or a giant tidal wave had engulfed the place and barfed mermaids all over it.

You couldn’t go a step without running into a mermaid, sometimes literally. They were on pictures on the walls in every room. They were on pillows on the furniture in the parlor. There were mermaid coffee table books and mermaid calendars. There were signs in the dining room that said, “Please do not feed the mermaids” and signs in the bathrooms that said, “If your thighs touch, you’re one step closer to being a mermaid.”

And there were little mermaid figurines everywhere—and they were glued down.