She was starting to get a bad feeling about this. “What? What’s the thing?”

“I sent you the first page of the will, but there’s a…clause.”

Oh, crap. She was getting a very bad feeling about this.

“I didn’t want to tell you this over the phone, or ambush you last night, but things are a little more complicated than you just inheriting the inn free and clear.”

“Complicated how?”

“The inn is yours…but you can’t sell it for a year.”

By the time Sawyer dragged himself into Lawson’s Lager House, he had been awake for twenty-eight hours. But at this point he was better off staying up and going to bed at a “normal” hour.

And he needed to be around his friends. Clara was always telling him that he and Ben Lawson and Jake Ramsey had a “bromance” going on, and honestly, Sawyer had no problem with that interpretation. They helped him look out for Clara. Hell, they looked out for him, even though he didn’t like to think of himself as the kind of person who needed looking out for.

Festival weekends aside, Sawyer didn’t work Fridays—one of the perks of being chief—so unless he had something going on with Clara or mermaids had taken over the town, he generally passed Friday evenings at the bar with his buddies. The three of them had been friendly in high school, but it had been in the years since graduation that they’d become close. You sat next to a man at a bar for however many hundred Fridays in a row, and that man became your family. So if that was a bromance, he was all for it.

He eyed the bar in question and sighed. Law was at one end arguing with Maya Mehta. Which meant it would be a while before he got served. He pulled out the stool next to Jake. “Hey.”

Jake nodded.

Maya’s voice carried from the other end of the bar. “All I am asking is for you to have the band start fifteen minutes later so my patrons don’t have to listen to your dubious brand of rock and roll spilling out onto the sidewalk as they’re arriving for a civilized night at the theater. Don’t bands always start late anyway? Because their sensitive artistic souls are so unpredictable?”

“Why can’t you start your play fifteen minutes early?” Law countered. “Then everyone will be inside by the time the band starts.”

“Because, Benjamin, the theater starts at eight o’clock. Not seven forty-five.”

Sawyer shook his head. There was a time when he would have tried to intervene in the ever-festering low-level feud between Law and Maya, who ran the theater two doors down. Much of small-town policing was about peacemaking—smoothing over grudges and helping people find common ground. But those two were beyond help.