“I gotta go.” Sawyer pushed back from the bar. If everyone was going to keep talking about Evie, he needed to get out of here.

“Everyone liked Eve back in the day,” Law said, and when Sawyer laid down some cash for his unfinished pint, he added, “Some of us more than others.”

Eve saw Jason Sims out, legal jargon making her head spin. She wasn’t sure she’d caught all of what he’d said after he’d dropped the bomb on her, but she had heard one thing loud and clear. A year.

A freaking year.

She had also heard the figure he had cited for property taxes and basic bills to keep the inn going over the course of that year.

She was stuck. If she couldn’t sell the inn for a year, she would have to reopen it just to afford its upkeep.

But there was no way she could run it. She had a job in Toronto. She had a mountain of student debt she was chipping away at with an ice pick. Soon she would be applying for another job, a bigger one she had a good shot at that would pay enough to turn her ice pick into a shovel.

She would have to hire someone to run the inn.

And add that person’s salary to the mountain.

Little crackles of panic raced up and down her spine.

“Oh, Eve,” Jason said as they stood in the open doorway. “One more thing. Lucille said to tell you she left your room the way it was.”

She nodded mutely and closed the door behind him.

That was the second time he’d referenced her room.

Well, crap. Given that she had no earthly idea what to do about the disaster her life had become in the last five minutes, maybe it was time to go upstairs and face the stupid thing.

She wondered why Lucille hadn’t renovated it into something reasonable. That would have been the logical thing to do, once it became clear that Eve’s absence from town was permanent.

Could she just go up there, open the door a crack, and throw a lit match inside?

No. No matter how she decided to handle the inn, she was going to have to deal with the room. Since she was already on the verge of a meltdown, why not get it over with? She could have a multitasking meltdown.

She climbed the stairs like she was marching to her death. There were two large guest rooms in front and three smaller rooms in back on the third floor. Lucille used to occupy one of the back ones, but judging by Eve’s detective work that morning, she had moved to the first floor at some point. But back in the day, they’d slept in neighboring rooms—all the better for marathon fairy-tale reading sessions.