Or, in cases like this, when he clearly had an opinion but was censoring himself, Eve felt duty bound to drag it out of him.

“Dad,” she said softly, “tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Well, the will says a year, right? You can’t sell it for a year.”

“Right.”

“And you’ve already established that in order to sell it at all, you’ll need to get some work done.”

“I’m just doing the roof. And maybe some repointing of the brick.” That was it. The Realtor had come by yesterday and given her a list of improvements she thought would pay for themselves, but that was a slippery slope she wasn’t going near.

“Look,” her dad said. “I’m not telling you what to do, but what if you were to fix the place up?” He looked around the shabby kitchen. “Spend a year restoring it. It could be great again.”

He…might not be wrong. She could feel herself approaching the aforementioned slope. “You mean, like hire someone to renovate? Like a contractor who can be my eyes and ears in town? I guess I could come back one or two weekends a month.”

“You could,” he said blandly, in a way that suggested that was not what he’d had in mind. “Or you could take it on as a project. A tribute to Lucille. Maybe you don’t want to become an innkeeper, but if you fix it up, then when you do sell at the end of the year, the place will be worthy of her.”

Eve looked at her mom for her thoughts. She grimaced apologetically. “She did take care of you for so many years.” She tried to straighten the grimace into a smile but didn’t quite succeed. “And maybe it would be a fun change of scenery?”

Her parents’ logic was sound, but it didn’t hold up against the fact that doing all this—spending a year doing what Lucille wanted, honoring her wishes, blah, blah—would have to happen in Moonflower Bay. Moonflower Bay was not “a fun change of scenery.”

“And more pragmatically,” her mother added, “won’t it make that much more money if it’s ready to go as a high-end inn?”

Eve tried to consider what they were suggesting separately from her emotions about what they were suggesting. A year wasn’t that long, when she thought about it objectively. She could take an unpaid leave from work. It might actually work out pretty well on that end of things. Eve worked as a branch librarian, but she had her eye on a new job in the central administration, but it wasn’t going to be posted for several months.

But…the money. No salary plus all the expenses Jason had laid out plus the cost of a renovation?

Not to mention being in the same town as Sawyer for a year.