Chapter 1
ONE
JADA, PRESENT DAY
“How was your stay this time?” I ask the Jenkinses, a married couple who have been coming to my family’s hotel, The Jepsen, for the past thirty-four years they’ve been married. It’s crazy to think they’ve been coming here literally a year longer than I’ve been alive.
But this place sticks with people. They’re far from our only frequent guests.
“Fabulous, as always.” Mrs. Jenkins squeezes her husband’s hand, and her radiant smile fades. “But a little different. I’m so sorry again for y’all’s losses.”
We lost my grandparents just before Thanksgiving last year, both within the span of a month. They built this hotel up together, and every part of the space has their touch. I wonder how weird it is for the Jenkinses—this fixture in their lives, gone, even if they only saw them once a year.
“Thank you,” I say as a reflex. It’s hard enough to be confronted with Mimi’s handwriting in the old guest book or Pop Pop’s endless filing boxes in the office every single day.
But condolences, as appreciated as they are, make my chest ache deepen even more than the constant reminders of their absence.
“And we’ll surely have the construction on the new bar done by the time you come back next year.
Apologies again for the noise during the day. ”
Hopefully done, that is. This new addition to the hotel has been a fucking nightmare that’s dragged on and on for over two years at this point.
I need it to be done, but it’s been hitting every single roadblock possible besides an infestation.
I don’t even want to consider that because I might think it into existence.
And the new addition might not even be worth it if I don’t actually inherit the place. Which is also my fault.
I’ve worked in the hotel for as long as I’ve been old enough to contribute, but my practiced customer service face isn’t strong enough to withstand this anxiety spiral.
I pretend the computer is slow to excuse my expression and finish checking them out. Mr. Jenkins, like my grandfather, loves having every receipt printed even though we’ve emailed them for over a decade at this point. I hand it over to him and he thanks me.
“Thank you for choosing to spend your time away with us,” I say, truly meaning it. “Have a safe drive back to Nashville.”
“Thank you, dear. See you next year for our thirty-fifth!” Mr. Jenkins nods, then opens the door for his wife.
I manage to maintain my smile until they’re in the car, then I let it fall with a sigh.
I hope we’ll even be here for their thirty-fifth anniversary.
“You good?” Grace, my assistant manager and friend, asks when she comes out from the office.
“Just the usual.” I check around the lobby for guests and find that they’re mostly mingling near the front doors out of earshot.
It’s a Saturday, so a lot of our guests have already started their day with a short walk to downtown Jepsen, or on the walking tour of the historically Black side of Jepsen.
The hotel is the first stop on the tour, where guests get a walkthrough of the small exhibit I put together about the hotel’s historical significance.
“Mm.” She nods. Out of all of my friends, she gets the business side of my stress the most. We met in our hospitality master’s degree program and both dropped out of our ill-fated hospitality PhD program at the same time. “Need a break?”
I check my phone and see a text from my twin brother, Jeremiah. “Please. I’m meeting Jeremiah in a little bit in town.”
“No problem. Just bring me back a little treat.” Grace slips past me to stand behind the front desk.
I grab my purse and head into town to Sarah Jane’s Bakery. My best friend Waylon’s cousin, Sarah Jane, opened it after running a popular stand at the farmer’s market. It’s a short walk, and not nearly long enough for me to come down from my anxiety spiral.
Jeremiah can tell the moment he sees me, and his eyebrow lifts. He looks exactly like our dad, but with locs that he has in a casual knot on top of his head. Especially when he gives me looks like that.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“What isn’t?” I want to lie down right on the sidewalk.
“Here, let’s get something to eat.” Jeremiah puts his hands on my shoulders, spins me around, and guides me into Sarah Jane’s.
We order some of Sarah Jane’s incredible cookies, plus coffee and a treat for Grace. It’s busy this morning, but we find a little table. Jeremiah’s a big guy so we have to squeeze in tight.
He splits the cookies so we can both try each flavor, then he picks one for each of us to try first. I appreciate it because sometimes even deciding on a flavor of cookie makes my brain want to melt out of my ears.
I open my mouth to speak, but the look on his face tells me to eat something before I unload on him. The cookie does help ease a bit of the anxiety, as does the coffee. Whatever caffeine placebo the coffee gives me helps me sort out where to start with the shit-storm that is my life.
“Still no luck on the husband front, so that means no luck on the inheritance front. And then throw in the whole mess with the contractors for the hotel and I just…” I swallow. “I don’t know what to do. This has to be karma for lying to Mimi and Pop Pop.”
Jeremiah sits back in his little seat, at least as much as he can. He knows me better than anyone else, so the discomfort on his face makes me uneasy.
I really am screwed, though.
My grandparents were incredible people, but their insistence on giving all their grandkids a fair shot at the hotel kind of fucked me over.
My grandparents’ will stated that one of their four grandchildren—me, Jeremiah, our older sister Kendra, or our cousin Danika—would inherit the hotel if we had our bachelor’s degree.
Jeremiah has his bachelor’s and master’s, but he’s locked into being a high-school math teacher.
He’d find a way to give it to me anyway, knowing him.
Kendra is an OB-GYN over in Nashville, so she’s got degrees to spare, but she’s not tossing her career and passion away for the hotel.
Danika…well, she’s been trying to get her degree for ages but can’t just pick a lane and stay in it.
So that would have left me. If my grandmother hadn’t changed the will after my grandfather’s death to say that we’d need to have our bachelor’s degree and be married to our true love to inherit the hotel, or it would be donated to a historical society a year after her passing.
Why? Because my ex-boyfriend, Troy, told her he wanted to marry me for some fucking reason. As if we weren’t more off than on. Putting a deadline on his proposal was probably her way of nudging him toward marriage.
And my stupid ass lied to my grandparents about us being broken up for over a year because I didn’t want to break their hearts even more.
They adored Troy. When he worked at the hotel while we were both getting our master’s degrees, they thought he could literally do no wrong.
Pop even said he’d be honored for him to run the hotel alongside me, just like he and Mimi did.
Except we’ve been broken up for ages, not that our love was particularly strong before that. And my dating life is dead. Not that I’d want to marry a relative stranger, but I need to marry someone.
I know the historical society would maintain the building, and it would still be a Jepsen landmark, but it wouldn’t be an active hotel. Guests like the Jenkinses would lose a piece of their lives, even if it was relatively small. Most of our staff would lose their jobs.
All because of me. And my stupid ex, but mostly me.
“You could always call Troy,” Jeremiah finally says.
“Oh my god, don’t even say that.” I fake gag. “Not that he’d help me after I cussed him out last time we spoke.”
I gobble down more cookies and chase the bites with coffee. The initial high of the sweets has worn off and I’m stuck in my anxiety spiral yet again.
“I still don’t get why Mimi did this,” Jeremiah says. “I mean, besides wanting Troy to propose. At least you don’t have competition. Danika doesn’t fit either condition to inherit the hotel.”
A shiver runs down my spine. Danika’s a hot mess, and I can say that because I’m also my own flavor of human disaster.
If she got her hands on the hotel, she’d probably run it into the ground, sell it, or both, somehow.
The property value has skyrocketed in the past few years.
She could get more than enough to pay off her debts from buying literally everything that’s vaguely trendy and go take a billion more vacations.
But I’m safe on that front—the only silver lining in this whole mess. She has a bunch of credits but no degree, and her boring-yet-offensive boyfriend of ten years flat-out refuses to propose to her despite her clearly stating that she wants marriage.
The track is clear and I just need to somehow run to the finish line.
Unless…
“I hope you didn’t jinx me,” I say.
“How would I jinx you?” Jeremiah steals the last bite of a butterscotch cookie that isn’t my favorite. “It’ll be fine. Even if Danika’s boyfriend manages to propose, she’s not going to finish her degree. She already has a job.”
Both of our phones light up on the table and my other problems come into focus. It’s Waylon in our group chat with my other best friend, his fiancée Bianca.
“He wants to know if we’re down for dinner this week,” Jeremiah says as he reads the message. “Just him, Bianca, and us.”
I swallow the knot in my throat that pops up whenever he or Bianca or any of our other friends reach out to us these days.
Right after my grandmother passed, they gave us plenty of space to grieve, which we both needed.
Especially me. I don’t think I really left my apartment much, besides to halfheartedly “celebrate” Christmas and Thanksgiving with Dad, Jeremiah, Kendra, and her husband and kids.
Each holiday felt like extensions of their funerals.
But now it’s been six months and I’ve still stayed distant.
I don’t know why. They’ve been perfectly normal in the few times we’ve hung out.
Being holed up in my apartment gives the illusion of safety from reminders of my grandparents.
If everything is exactly how I ordered it, without outside influences, I can’t be surprised by things like songs Mimi hated or something Pop would have found hilarious.
I can almost pretend they’re still here.
“You want to go?” Jeremiah asks.
The thought of seeing them should make me excited—I miss them. But any mention of seeing them feels like one of those heavy lead shields they put on you at the dentist. I could move to go, but it’s easier to stay put.
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “It’s still hard to be out there. Work drains all my mental reserves and I don’t want to be a shitty friend by being cranky.”
“It’ll just take some practice getting back into normal life outside the hotel. I think I’ve gotten out of my shell again. You should come. It’ll be good for you.”
Any other person telling me something would be “good for me” would piss me off, but coming from Jeremiah, it just vaguely annoys me. Because he’s right.
I can’t stay huddled up in my hole of grief forever. But stepping out of it sounds like too much right now, especially now that my future looks as bleak as I’ve been feeling. I have to figure out something, some way to get the hotel. Maybe then I can face the world again and get some closure.