“I have an older brother, John, and Abuela definitely made an effort to pair him off. For a while, anyway. But then John finally told the family he’s gay, so that ended her matchmaking.”

“Yeah, I guess that would do it. Was that hard for John? For your family?”

“Hard for him, I’m sure. I think my parents suspected for years before he actually said anything, so when he came out, it was like we all breathed a collective sigh of relief that we could finally talk about it.”

“What about your grandmother?” Simon asked. “I might be reaching here, but she seems pretty dedicated to the idea of a traditional family.”

“Really, she’s just dedicated to her family.”

“You know, I think it’s pretty special she’s so invested.”

“She wants me to be happy. I know that. Sure, it’s been annoying to have random guys show up ready to declare their intentions, but . . . I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve managed to get hitched on my own. And really, I’d love the same thing—to find someone, to settle down and have a family.”

Simon dropped his gaze to his hands and shifted just slightly away from me.

“I’m sorry. Was that too personal?”

“No.” He cleared his throat, looking back up to meet my eyes. “No. I think it’s nice.” He held me there, his pale eyes I couldn’t help but keep noticing locked on mine.

“So, um . . .” I swallowed. “The inn.”

“Right.” His voice cracked as he spoke. “The inn.” He pulled a binder out of his bag and handed it to me, then gave his head a little shake as if to clear his mind. I recognized the gesture because I was doing the same thing to clear my head.

What had just happened?

I focused on the binder as Simon started in on his findings. “There are a couple different problems that have contributed to the financial position the inn is now in. Part of the problem is that Thornton was a really nice guy. The rest of it was just as I had originally thought—mismanagement of growth and some generally bad accounting.”

“He was a nice guy? How is that a problem?”

Simon reached over and turned a page in the binder. It was full of charts and graphs and paragraph after paragraph of analysis. “If you flip over to the second page,” he said, pointing about halfway down, “that’s a graph showing the average number of employees at similar inns of this size. And that blue bar is how many employees Winding Way has had over the past five years.”

“It’s almost double.”