Page 61 of The Accidental Innkeeper

She stared at me. “That’s… an option?”

“It’s the option,” I said.

“Right.” She nodded and scribbled something in her notepad. “Order more towels.”

We reached the end of the hall where the emergency light was mounted above a door leading to the stairs. The casing was dusty, and one of the lenses had a crack.

I tested it. It stayed on, and I snapped a picture of the crack.

“Emergency light cracked,” said New York as she continued to scribble in her writing pad. ”Replace before festival.”

She didn’t say the festival name out loud. She didn’t need to.

Pearls & Pints Bachelor Weekend. A fucking nightmare.

I looked back down the hall—old building, old wiring, old patchwork, a thousand small things that had survived because someone kept them just barely on the right side of disaster.

New York stood there with her pen poised, waiting for the next instruction. Her hair was pulled back and messy, her face flushed from moving too fast all day and refusing to stop. She was trying to be invisible, trying to take up less space, trying to avoid being “the woman who didn’t know what the fuck she was doing.”

It didn’t fit her. Her stubbornness filled rooms, even when she tried to shrink it.

I pointed at the next fixture. “That one. Check the plate. Photograph it. Send it to me.”

Her brows lifted. “I’m… helping now?”

“You’re here,” I said. “Use it.”

She nodded and then stepped closer, careful and focused, her phone in one hand with the pen tucked behind her ear. She raised the camera, snapped a picture, and then looked up at the fixture like she wanted to memorize it.

“I’m going to become an expert in light fixtures against my will,” she breathed.

“Welcome to old buildings,” I said.

She huffed a laugh and wrote something down anyway.

We moved toward the stairs again, the inn creaking under our footsteps and the lights glowing above us, holding steady for now.

Pearls & Pints was one week away.

New York kept writing while she walked, the pen flying, already three steps ahead of the problems she hadn’t solved yet.

The list on my phone kept growing, picture by picture, like the job was already deciding what it wanted from me.

And the problem was… I was letting it.

13

SARAH

Have you ever heard of exhaustion insomnia? Me neither. But trust me, it’s a thing. A cruel, ironic thing that sneaks up on you after your body collapses but your brain decides it’s the perfect time to host a symposium on Every Bad Decision You’ve Ever Made.

Last night, I dragged myself to bed fully clothed, face-planted onto the mattress, and waited for unconsciousness like it was a bus that was supposed to arrive any second now.

It did not arrive.

Instead, my brain flipped on like a stadium light—bright, loud, and unhelpful.

Did I lock the back door? Was the boiler still humming? What if we lost power during the Pearls & Pints weekend? Did we have a backup generator? What if we were hit by a hurricane that blew the inn away? What if I failed spectacularly and ended up living in my car?