A blush of heat crept up my neck at his words. He loved her. Of course he loved her. Jamie said they’d been together a long time. I don’t know why it embarrassed me to hear him say it. “It must be nice to have that in common,” I said. “I don’t think Jamie cares for poetry much.”

“I don’t know,” Simon said. “He might surprise you.”

I raised my eyebrows. Jamie liking poetry would definitely be a surprise. “I don’t know. It’s fine though. He’s got a lot of other redeeming qualities.” I moved toward my desk. “So . . . the inn? Do I need to start searching for money under the mattresses?”

“I don’t think things are quite that bad, but it’s hard to say at this point. I’ll need to spend some time with the numbers to know for sure.”

“Any idea what the problem is? The inn is busy. Almost too busy. It seems like we shouldn’t be struggling to pay vendors, and yet, since Thornton died, it’s like we’re always a couple weeks behind. Waiting for payments on the next event so we can pay bills related to the last one.”

He scratched his jaw. “I’m going to have to break things down a lot further to have a clear picture, but my gut is telling me this is a classic case of mismanaged growth.”

I dropped into my chair and motioned for him to sit. He settled into the leather chair across from me, his briefcase sitting at his feet. “What does that mean?” I asked.

“Sometimes when businesses start and their operations are smaller and easier to manage, financial systems are put in place that easily accommodate a smaller business model but don’t necessarily accommodate potential growth. If the business does grow and the financial management doesn’t grow with it, it’s easier for funds to be mismanaged because, though well-intentioned, owners make decisions without a clear picture of how their business is really doing.”

“When Thornton and Ida opened the inn, it was a much smaller operation,” I said. “Just a handful of rooms. Ida did all the cleaning herself.”

“Right. So Thornton handling all the finances made complete sense. But then the business started to grow.”

“And his financial strategies didn’t.”

“Exactly. Think about it this way,” Simon said. “At a large hotel or any other multifaceted operation, there are individual profit-and-loss statements for each component of the business—the hotel restaurant, event services, room revenue. At any given moment, you can see what parts of the hotel are profitable and what parts aren’t. If you’re losing money on breakfast. If weekday bookings are down, creating a drain on the accounts. Maybe the restaurant loses money during the week but makes up for it during Sunday brunch when everybody brings their grandma in to get a mimosa.”