Ruthless Vows

The lobby ceiling is twenty-seven tiles across and fourteen deep. Harlow Foster counts the water-stained ones separately. Eleven, same as last week, same as the week before, when she promised herself she would call a roofer. She does not call the roofer. She sorts the mail instead, and finds a thick cream envelope. Certified, return receipt requested, from a P.O. box in Portland. Walsh Development Group. Inside is an offer of four hundred thousand dollars for the Silver Gull Inn and its property at 47 Harbor Point Road, Cove Point, Maine, from a man Harlow has not seen in five years. Then the credit union calls. The lien is ninety days past due. Unless it is paid within thirty days, foreclosure begins, and by the way, the bank would happily take a buyout instead. Finn Walsh left this town at seventeen rather than stay and be the Walsh kid whose old man drank himself ashore every Friday, hauling traps for someone else's profit until his back gave out. He left Harlow a letter and made her promise to read it after he was gone. She wedged it between a stack of flannel sheets and the wall and never opened it. Now he is the one making the offer, and there is something stapled to the second page he did not mean her to think about: a faded receipt paid out of the inn's renovation fund to a contractor Harlow has never heard of and never authorized. The signature is careful cursive, the kind taught in a Catholic school, the i's dotted with little circles. Her grandmother wrote like that. Her grandmother has been dead seven years. And Finn is not the only buyer circling. Delia Vancourt calls him late at night, polished and unhurried, with a better offer and a proposal: *Let's cut Harlow out.* In the middle of it is Jasper, Harlow's younger brother, who draws instead of arguing, and who has already asked Edie Quinn down at the diner whether his sister is going to sell. A small-town second-chance romance on the Maine coast, about a Victorian inn whose foundation is held together by spite and good intentions, a letter left unread for years, and what it costs to stop leaving. It ends with a repainted sign and a lobster bake on the patio; closed-door.