Chapter 4
MICHAEL
Michael sat at Uncle George's desk with a stack of files open in front of him and a yellow legal pad already half-filled with his small, neat handwriting.
He'd been at it for two hours. The accounts. The mortgage papers. The supplier statements. The thick folder Martin had handed him with a quiet warning that it would not make for pleasant reading. Martin had been right. It hadn't.
But Michael had spent thirty years untangling worse messes than this one.
The difference was that those messes had belonged to strangers.
This one belonged to the man who had taught him to fish off the end of the marina dock, who had stood in for the father Michael had lost at eight years old, who had walked Linda down the aisle because there had been no one else to do it. This one was personal.
He picked up his phone and typed out a message to his sister.
Linda, where are you? We need to talk!
He set the phone down and looked at the row of locked cabinets along the office wall.
He needed the keys. Rosa had told him Linda had taken Uncle George's big ring of keys, the legendary one with a labeled tag on every single key, so she could get into everything while their uncle was in the hospital.
Michael needed the rest of the files locked in those cabinets before he could build the full picture.
He sat back in the chair and let his eyes travel around the office.
For years, his uncle had run the hotel from this room.
The same oak desk. The same worn leather chairs by the window.
The same wall of photographs Michael could have described with his eyes closed.
He'd grown up in this office. He'd done his homework at this desk on rainy summer afternoons.
He'd learned to play chess in the chair he was sitting in now.
The thought had been growing in him for days, and sitting in this chair, it finally settled into something solid.
Michael wanted to come home.
Not for the summer. For good.
He was sixty years old. His wife, Evelyn, had been gone for three years.
His firm in Miami practically ran itself now, and his partners had been gently circling the question of his retirement for the better part of two years.
His son and daughter-in-law had said more than once that they'd love to raise Lily somewhere slower than the city, and Sweet Blossom Bay had always come up in that conversation.
Nothing was holding him in Miami except habit, and habit had never been a good enough reason to do anything.
Michael let the dream unspool the way he hadn’t let himself do in years.
He could sell his shares in the firm. He could move back to Sweet Blossom Bay and take over the legal side of properly saving the hotel, not from four hours away.
He could finally do something with the old campground land across the road, the stretch he'd bought quietly years ago when it had come up for sale and no one else had wanted it.
It had sat closed and empty ever since, and Michael had never quite been able to explain to anyone, including himself, why he'd bought it.
He gave a soft laugh, thinking how he and Evelyn used to go camping there when they first got married.
She was never big on camping, but having the safety net of Heart House and the Hotel just across the road had eased her into it.
Then they’d taken their son Ryan there for a few days each summer when they came to visit his mother and Uncle George.
His face softened as he thought of his mother and how, after she’d passed away, those trips had become few and far between.
He rubbed a hand over his face, tiredly, and sighed.
While Michael had bought that land on impulse, without a valid reason, maybe it was, as his mother always said, that sometimes we do things on impulse because, deep down, we know it would affect our future.
Well, that ground might just have a purpose after all.
It would make a perfect site for a proper medical clinic.
Linda's son Ethan was a doctor, and so was his wife Olivia.
The two of them were off saving the world with Doctors Without Borders for the summer, but they wouldn't be doing that forever.
A clinic of their own, in a town that had to drive at least twenty minutes to get to a doctor, might be exactly the thing to bring them home.
And closer to the hotel, on the big open patch of land near the road within the wetland reserve, there was room for something special for his own son Ryan and daughter-in-law Brooke.
The two marine biologists had often spoken about wanting to settle down somewhere meaningful.
A small marine research and education center focused on the bay’s unique ecosystem and the Calusa heritage could be exactly the kind of work that would bring them home as well.
It would give them a real purpose, and Lily would grow up running barefoot on the same beach Michael had.
Michael wanted his whole family here. Linda too.
She had nothing left holding her in Miami now except memories and the occasional visit from her son and grandchildren.
Here she had a free home in Heart House, family all around her, and a hotel that desperately needed her.
He would find a gentle way to speak to her about staying permanently.
Sweet Blossom Bay was where she belonged. He was sure of it.
The idea was so big and so warm that Michael had to sit with it for a moment before he trusted himself to write it down.
He pulled the legal pad toward him and started a new page. At the top, he wrote one word.
Home.
He sat staring at the page for a while before sighing as he stretched and decided he needed coffee and a few minutes away from the numbers.
Michael stood, rolled the stiffness out of his shoulders, headed out of the office, and down the back corridor toward the hotel kitchen. His mind was still half on the legal pad, half on the dream of the whole family coming home, and not at all on where he was putting his feet.
He came around the corner by the linen room at exactly the wrong moment.
Maggie came around it from the other direction with a full laundry basket balanced against her hip, and her head dipped as she scrolled through her phone.
They collided.
The basket went flying as she yelped and grabbed her phone.
Folded sheets and pillowcases burst into the air in an eruption of laundry.
Then Maggie gasped, losing her balance and pitching backward.
Her arms windmilled wildly through the air, her eyes wide with shock.
Michael's body moved before his mind caught up.
Both of his hands shot out, catching her around the waist, to pull her in against him before she could hit the floor.
Then they both froze.
Maggie was pressed against Michael's chest, one hand flat against his shirtfront, her face tilted up toward his. He could feel her heart thudding frantically from the adrenaline. He could also feel his own heart pounding just as hard. He could smell the intoxicating, familiar scent of lilies and vanilla that he’d know anywhere.
He looked down at her, and his eyes locked with Maggie's bright, wide-eyed stare, triggering a memory that dragged him back to when he was a teenager. The memory of a warm summer night on Sweet Blossom Bay beach flashed before him. It was another night he’d held her in his arms, and she’d stared up at him wide-eyed.
They stood dead still, neither of them moved.
"Good grief, Mr. Michael," Rosa exclaimed from the doorway of the linen room. "What have you done to Miss Maggie’s clean laundry?"
Michael and Maggie sprang apart as if they’d been burned.
Rosa was already gathering the scattered laundry, tutting under her breath, shooting Michael the same look she'd been giving him since he was a boy who walked into doorframes and serving carts because his head was somewhere else.
"You never did watch where you were going when you were thinking," Rosa scolded, scooping sheets into the basket. "It doesn’t matter how old you get. Some things never change."
"I'm sorry, Maggie.” Michael apologized, crouching to help, and he glanced at Rosa. "Sorry, Rosa. Let me get these."
"No, don’t worry," Rosa told him firmly, swatting his hands away from the linen. "Leave it. I have got this.” She looked at Maggie. “I’ll go refold these in the laundry room.”
Rosa stood, hefted the basket onto her hip, and bustled off down the corridor with it, still tutting, leaving Michael and Maggie standing in the sudden quiet.
They looked at each other.
Maggie's cheeks were flushed. A strand of hair had come loose at her temple.
"Well," Maggie said, with a small, unsteady laugh. "That's one way to say hello."
"I'm sorry," Michael told her again, and found he was laughing too. "I was a hundred miles away."
“I must take responsibility for my part in our collision.” Maggie held up her phone. “I was busy walking and texting.”
“Ah,” Michael said with a nod. “They should fine people for that.”
“Then they should fine them for being lost in thought and walking too,” Maggie pointed out cheekily. “I think if we went into competition with that, you’d end up with the most fines.”
They both laughed, and then there was a moment where the laughing softened into something else.
Michael stepped in and hugged her. It was a hug like any other hug he’d given her a thousand times at a thousand family gatherings.
Except this hug went on a beat too long, and he’d pulled her a little too close and breathed her in as her arms came around him, and she lay her head on his chest.
When they stepped apart, neither of them quite met the other's eyes. There were a few seconds of awkward silence before Michael cleared his throat.
"Would you like some coffee?" Michael offered, a little too quickly. "I was heading to the kitchen to get a cup.”