Page 71 of The Accidental Innkeeper

I shifted the tool belt on my hip. “I’m done for today.”

She looked at me and then past me, already recalculating her day. “Tomorrow?” she asked.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

She didn’t thank me or question it, just accepted it like it was already slotted into her plan.

That should’ve bothered me.

It didn’t.

I headed for the door, stopped once, and then turned back. “Get Helen’s nephew to clear the gutters today if you can,” I said. “It’ll help everything else.”

“Yes. That’s good,” she replied, rubbing the right side of her cheek and then the other.

I turned and headed out the side door, carried the ladder to the truck, and slid it into place. The tailgate shut with a dull thud.

I climbed into my truck and sat for a moment longer than necessary, my phone in my hand, scrolling through photos I’d taken without meaning to take so many.

I started the engine and pulled away, the inn shrinking in the rearview mirror, pink against the blue.

This was supposed to be an inspection—a quick in-and-out job, a favor for Dottie, a safety check on a building that needed it.

Somewhere between the roof, the hallway, and a woman who refused to quit, the job changed shape.

I felt it then. That pull. The kind you ignored. The kind you handled.

I tightened my grip on the wheel.

Tomorrow, I’d come back.

I told myself it was for the building. The inn mattered. Maplewood Falls mattered.

Yeah. I was full of shit.

15

SARAH

Istood at the front desk, watching as my newest guests, Vicky and Joyce, forty-something best friends from New Jersey, walked out of the inn like they owned the place.

Bikinis. Flip-flops. Sheer beach tunics drifting over bare legs. Oversized cloth beach bags knocking against their hips as they walked, sunscreen-sticky and effortless.

“Back by lunch!” called Joyce on her way out.

“Save us bacon!” Vicky waved.

I waved back, smiling, still mildly stunned. They were headed for the inn’s private beach, a sentence I still couldn’t quite believe applied to me.

I hadn’t known there was a beach down there when I arrived. Edna never mentioned a beach in her letter, just rubbing in the “loser” part. I’d assumed the cliff dropped straight into jagged rocks and certain death, the kind of coastline that came with warning signs and memorial plaques. So when Joyce casually mentioned “the beach below the inn” during our check-in call yesterday, I’d laughed politely and then gone to investigate like a woman expecting to find a crime scene.

Turns out, she wasn’t hallucinating.

Stone steps had been carved into the cliffside, smooth and worn, leading down gradually to a small, protected cove with white sand and gentle water. That kind of beach looked like it belonged in a travel brochure and not directly under a building I technically owned.

Boomer had been down there too, a stick clenched proudly in his mouth, tearing up and down the shoreline like it was his personal kingdom. His owner lounged under a pine tree for shade, book in hand, completely unbothered by the fact that she was living someone else’s vacation fantasy.

That was the moment something in my brain shifted.