The-Rotten-Step
The For Sale sign was already leaning against the porch when Maeve arrived, as if the inn had given up before she could.
She left it where it was. Twelve years in the city had taught her to keep her face still while she decided things, and she stood a long minute in the gravel lot, breathing lake air that smelled exactly the way it had the morning she'd left — wet stone, pine, the faint diesel of the early boat. Her father had built the Heron's Rest with his own hands and a loan he never quite paid off, and now both the man and the mortgage were hers, and she had one season to make either of them mean anything.
The front step gave under her foot with a sound like a cough.
"Wouldn't put my weight there if I were you."
She knew the voice before she turned. That was the worst of small places — they kept your ghosts in working order. Cormac Daly stood at the corner of the porch with a clipboard and a pencil behind his ear, broader now, grey starting at the temples, the same unhurried way of looking at a thing as if it owed him an explanation. The boy she had loved at seventeen had become a man who fixed what other people let fall apart, and he was looking at her the way you'd look at weather coming in off the water.
"Cormac."
"Maeve." He said her name carefully, the way you carry something you're not sure is yours to hold. "Solicitor said the estate hired me to survey the