Chapter 4 #2
Poppy traced her thumbnail over a scratch in the dining table.
She’d spent the last decade trying to jam herself into a round hole when she was a square peg.
She’d extended one gap year into three, trying to put off college as long as possible.
When she eventually made it to Northeastern, she’d hated every moment.
Medicine? She lasted one semester. Finance?
An epic nightmare. Of course, studying art hadn’t been an option available to her, so she bounced around for years, gathering credits but unable to settle on a major.
The day she told her parents she was dropping out, the world nearly stopped turning.
Eventually, they recovered enough for her mother to shove her into a friend’s PR agency as little more than a gopher—running errands, filing, updating spreadsheets, waiting for inspiration to strike, and her life to change.
Then, shortly after Grandpa M’s death, Benji came back.
Urbane, funny, relentlessly charming, a grown-up version of the boy she’d flirted with the year she turned seventeen.
So very not Thom. Through Benji, she heard that Thom had left the family business, and Benji painted a story of Thom’s out-of-control ego.
Thom was stubborn, selfish, arrogant, a prick—according to Benji—and Poppy remembered her hurt.
Back then, it had been convenient for her to believe him.
The pain they had experienced at Thom’s hands bonded them…
But honestly, she’d always had her doubts about Benji’s story, things she didn’t want to look more closely at.
Benji, their love story, should’ve made her happy, but she’d lost herself, inch by inch, over months and days. She couldn’t remember when she’d last felt joy, a spark, and she’d lost all sense of herself. She was running on autopilot, disconnected.
She needed the grass under her bare feet.
To kayak on the lake and sit on the rocks as the sun slipped behind the trees.
She needed Solstice Deep—her loft bedroom, creaky wooden floors, coffee in her grandpa’s rocker on the porch.
Safe. Familiar. Well … safe-adjacent, considering Thom’s “licked-a-belt-sander” expression and his “would rather strip wallpaper than talk to you” attitude.
She could live with that if it meant staying here. Just like she could refuse to believe Thom’s assertions that he was the inn’s owner and maintain that the final pearl was still missing. They were, at worst, lies, at best, excuses—tenuous, maybe a little silly—but all she had to work with.
“Poppy, your coffee.”
She looked up, and up some more, and took in Thom’s face, the impatience in his eyes. He held out a mug to her and her eyes burned with tears as her fingers gripped the handle. Covered with pink roses, it was her grandma’s favorite cup.
“This isn’t your cup,” she whispered.
Thom closed his eyes, and for a heartbeat, something—maybe the tiniest hint of empathy, if one believed he had any at all—flashed across his face.
“I have the cup because I also bought the contents of the house, everything that wasn’t specified in the will, and stuff that your family didn’t want,” he explained, sitting down in the chair opposite her. “There was quite a bit.”
She could believe it. Sentiment wasn’t something the McMasters indulged in.
She hadn’t been invited to take anything from the house, hadn’t been offered any keepsakes, other than what was stipulated in the will.
But out of nowhere, she wanted this cup.
Not because it was pretty or valuable, but because her grandma’s hands had held it.
But it now belonged to Thom.
Pride had her lifting her chin, blinking back her tears.
She couldn’t leave, and backing down now wasn’t an option.
She sipped her coffee, immediately appreciating how good it was.
She tapped her finger on the handle and sighed.
She had a million things to do this morning—call her mother, call Benji, buy some clothes and toiletries and a damn toothbrush.
She had apologies to make and, she supposed, guilt to feel, tears to shed.
But strangely, she didn’t feel guilt-ridden and was only a little bit remorseful. In fact, her overriding feeling was relief—as if she’d dropped the sixty-pound gorilla sitting on her back.
“Is my brother sitting sobbing in a corner somewhere?” Thom asked her. Right, he hadn’t lost the ability to read her mind. He didn’t sound concerned or worried.
Whatever had happened between them, Benji and his mother had refused to explain.
It all happened before she and Benji got engaged a year ago—he proposed only three months after they reconnected—but rumors about Thom taking money for …
something, and the brothers’ estrangement, still intrigued Boston’s elite, and they often discussed it over overpriced cocktails and fancy canapés.
As she’d understood it, Thom was vilified in the press, his reputation as a political strategist and ethics consultant shredded, and Benji and his mom distanced themselves from him entirely.
At the endless, boring parties she’d attended with Benji over the past fifteen months, Poppy fielded the same questions from everyone—society acquaintances, strangers, even her own family. Some had been subtle. Most had not.
Why were the brothers estranged? What had Thom done? What really happened?
Nobody believed her when she said she didn’t know.
Poppy tuned back into Thom’s question about her ex-fiancé.
“I doubt it,” she told him. Benji wasn’t the type to cry over spilled milk.
He was probably more pissed by the fact that she’d embarrassed him than he was by her leaving.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t want to discuss my relationship with your brother. ”
“Excellent, because that’s not something that interests me on any level,” Thom retorted. “What does interest me is when you are leaving.” He looked around his kitchen and nodded at the mess on his desk. “As you can see, I have shit to do.”
“Yeah, dismantling generations of McMaster history.”
“I paid a lot of money for this place to do exactly that.”
Bastard. “Do you not have any sense of sentimentality?” she demanded.
She slapped her hand on the table, rage bubbling.
“My grandmother made you sandwiches in this kitchen. You spent a decade worth of summers running in and out of this house. You spent hours with my grandpa in his workshop. You ate at his table. You read my grandma’s books. ”
He held her hot stare. “I’m only going to explain this once, and only because you are …
well, you. I don’t owe you, or anyone, any explanations about what I do with my property.
” Where was he going with this? “This place is a money pit, Poppy, and to save it from falling apart, it needs to be modernized, and modernized properly. And if that means gutting the kitchen and taking out a dry wall, I will do it. If it meant taking out the damn staircase, I would do it. Are we clear?”
“But—”
“Are we clear?” he repeated, through gritted teeth.
She recognized the muscle jumping in his jaw, the bubbling anger in his eyes. She knew Thom could only be pushed so far, and she was on the line. And while Thom didn’t scare her, she was too tired, emotionally and physically whipped, for a throw-everything-at-the-wall argument.
“We’ve gone off the subject,” he said, his eyes hot but his voice cool. “When are you leaving?”
She sipped her coffee. “I told you I’m not leaving until, one, I know that you are the owner, and two, I find my pearl.” Both lies, but she was in so deep, her only option was to keep swimming.
“You do know that I could just call the police and have you arrested for trespassing?”
“My grandpa would come back and haunt you, and my grandma would twist your earlobe,” Poppy told him. Threatening him with her grandparents, whom he’d adored and respected, was a low blow, but she needed to use any weapon at hand.
She wasn’t a cute six-year-old anymore, couldn’t bat her eyelashes and expect Thom to cave as he’d done in the past. He’d been so easy to manipulate back then, something she did with alarming regularity—Thom, I’m tired, carry me.
Thom, can I eat your cookie? Thom, Isobel is being mean to me.
She didn’t think she’d get away with any of her childish crap today.
“I’d love to be haunted by your grandparents,” Thom quietly told her, abruptly removing all the wind from her sails.
The truth was, they’d loved him as much he’d loved them.
That much was indisputable. He shoved his hand into his damp hair and placed his ankle on his knee.
Locking his hands behind his head, he scowled at her.
“What’s the plan of action for the rest of today, Poppy? ”
She sighed, knowing he was running out of patience. “I need to charge my phone, contact my mother and Benji, and find some clothes.”
“What are the chances of them descending on the inn to haul your pretty ass back to Boston?”
He thought she had a pretty ass. Wha-at? She took a sip of coffee, hoping for a brain boost. “Everyone in my family—and yours, to be fair—hates H-Town with a passion. It’s one of the reasons I ran here, because they’d think twice before running after me.”
H-Town was too much—too gaudy, unsophisticated, and over-the-top—for both of their families, who thought celebrating Halloween year-round was childish, called Luna a lunatic, and sniffed at the old-fashioned buildings, their noses too refined for such nonsense.
The store owners lacked ambition, the town lacked hustle, and—the biggest sin—cultural richness.
Poppy suspected that not one of them had actually set foot in the place in over a decade. If they had, they’d know it had a couple of genuinely fantastic art galleries, an award-winning restaurant, and a spa that was booked solid for a year.