Chapter One
Present Day
“F or goodness’ sake. Just come in,” Celeste grumbled after the second round of knocks sounded at the door of the third-floor turret room. She’d been lying on the bed in the lodge’s smallest but coziest guest room for the last two hours, but even the heavyweight merino-wool blanket she’d pulled over her head couldn’t keep out the intrusion.
Judging by the tentative raps against the door, coupled with the persistence of the knocker, Celeste knew…
A)that it was her youngest sister, Quinn, and
B)better than to ignore her.
As the youngest of the McCarthys, Quinn had spent her whole life showered with attention and wasn’t about to be disregarded.
Celeste moved the blanket away from her face and watched as the door to the room opened slowly and Quinn poked her head in, with her mop of short curly brown hair and vintage round glasses framing concerned and teary eyes. “I come bearing poppy-seed loaf,” she whispered, holding out a plate of Celeste’s favorite dessert and taking a small step inside. Quinn set the plate on the bedside table, then slid a bottle of amber liquid out of the pocket of her wide-leg jeans, showcasing it like a game show host. “And Fireball. Ta-da!”
Despite the pit in her stomach and puffiness of her eyes, Celeste couldn’t help but grin. “An odd combination,” she said. Odd but thoughtful, as always with Quinn, who was likely feeling just as crummy as she was. Celeste shifted over and patted the mattress next to her.
Quinn plopped down onto the bed beside her, then shimmied over and put her head on Celeste’s shoulder. “How long have you been up here for?”
From the queen-sized bed, they had a postcard-perfect view of the fondant-iced crest of the Rocky Mountains against the pale gray late-afternoon sky. The flickering gas fireplace was keeping the room cozy. Celeste really just wanted to be alone, but her little sister was like the human version of a stuffie—soft, innocent and oh-so-snuggleable.
She kissed Quinn on the head and glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “A while.”
Quinn propped herself up on her elbow, unscrewed the bottle of cinnamon-flavored whisky and took a swig, then passed it to Celeste. “So, they’ve told you, I heard. I was last up. And Elodie and Ava each found out last night, over FaceTime.”
Now the missed calls from her other sisters the night before made sense. She’d been exhausted after turning over a full house that weekend and had sent the calls to voicemail and passed out by nine o’clock.
“Yup,” Celeste said and took a small sip, the alcohol burning her throat as it went down. She coughed and winced. “Ugh. I can’t believe we used to drink this stuff.”
“Used to?” Quinn said. “Are you forgetting Marilyn and Tyler’s wedding?”
“I believe that was Elodie and Ava,” Celeste said. The two middle McCarthy sisters had taken full advantage of the open bar on the night of their cousin’s wedding this past summer at the lodge, and Celeste had been on Advil and Gatorade duty the next day. Given the phone call she’d received only hours before the wedding from Matt, telling he was breaking things off and wouldn’t be coming as her date to the wedding, it was surprising she hadn’t been the one nursing a hangover.
“So…” Quinn said. “What do you think?”
“I think they’re being ridiculous.” Ridiculous didn’t even sum it up. The idea of her parents selling the Butterfly Lake Lodge after forty-five years, when their health was fine—more than fine, actually; Everett and Jeannie were often cited as the gold standard, #SeniorGoals—was nothing short of shocking.
Hours earlier, right after checkout, they’d closed the door to the inn’s office, where Celeste had been looking over their reservations for the upcoming week, and given her the news. Time to retire. Putting the lodge on the market. They’d had enough anyway, Jeannie had said, waving her hand in the air like it was no big deal, like she was declining dessert after a five-course meal. Like it wasn’t going to completely shatter their eldest daughter’s life.
Celeste had tried to remind them what keeping the lodge in the family had meant to Jeannie’s grandparents, way back when they had gifted the lodge to Jeannie and Everett for their wedding, but her appeal to their heartstrings had been in vain. There was only one of me , Jeannie had reminded Celeste. There are four of you. That makes things a lot trickier.
Plus it was perfect timing, they’d said. The lodge wasn’t in disrepair necessarily, but in the next decade major work would need to be done on the roof and the foundation and new windows were likely needed on the entire south-facing side of the building. It would cost a small fortune to do all the work necessary to keep the place going.
Now not only did Celeste no longer get to keep up the illusion that her parents would be around forever, but the lodge, which she loved and where she’d pictured herself working for the rest of her life, had a very uncertain future without the two people who’d been so instrumental to its success.
Whoever the new owners are will want to keep you on, honey , Jeannie had said.
No one knows this place better than you , Everett had assured her. We can even make your employment a condition in the sale agreement.
But Celeste knew better. New ownership meant new ideas, new traditions, new blood. With her dual major in history and comparative literature from the University of Victoria, she had no formal training in helping to run a business. She’d just been lucky enough to be born into one.
For the past ten years, she’d managed all of the Butterfly Lake Lodge’s operations, from training and scheduling the cleaning staff, ordering supplies, taking bookings, checking in and touring guests, and problem solving the many different curveballs that came along with running their fourteen-room lodge.
Everett and Jeannie were the faces of the inn—Everett as the resident naturalist who created and maintained their award-winning pollinator gardens and grounds and offered astronomy classes, hikes through the woods, and cross-country skiing expeditions, and Jeannie as the chef, baker, and host extraordinaire who made sure stomachs were happy and faces were smiling. Celeste was behind the front desk and otherwise behind the scenes, making sure the lodge maintained its air of effortless calm while ensuring everything ran like clockwork.
“Why do you think they told us all separately? Are they not only selling but closeted masochists as well?” Quinn asked now.
Celeste sighed, then buried her face into her sister’s shoulder. “I don’t think they could take a tsunami of four daughters’ tears all at once. Pass me that bottle.”
Another knock sounded at the door. Celeste and Quinn looked at each other. If it was their mother, she’d have likely been listening outside of the door for the past five minutes. Jeannie was notorious for getting into her girls’ business, from grilling their friends who came to dinner or for a movie night when they’d been growing up to reading the diaries they’d kept stuffed under their mattresses and in their underwear drawers (an accusation which Jeannie still denied) to having an often infuriating but usually appreciated sixth sense for what was going on in the minds and lives of her daughters.
If it was Everett, he’d be there to get a game of euchre going or convince them to go for a late-winter hike in the forest behind the lodge. Everett didn’t like conflict, so smoothing things over with the girls as quickly as possible and pretending everything was okay would likely be top of mind.
The door creaked open slowly, then stopped. Celeste and Quinn burst out laughing as another much larger bottle of Fireball slowly levitated into the room, held up by a phantom hand. It could only be one of two people.
“Elodie!” Celeste cried, and she sat up as the second oldest of the McCarthy sisters appeared in the doorway. “I thought you were away for another week.”
Elodie entered, wearing khakis and a weatherproof down jacket, her long auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail, her big, gold-flecked brown eyes filled with concern. A biology professor at the University of Calgary, Elodie was on sabbatical, researching something about mycorrhizal networks, or what she called in layman’s terms “trees talking to each other.” She’d been using the lodge as her home base in between expeditions to an area in the boreal forest, where she and her team had a base camp.
Elodie spotted the small bottle of Fireball on the bed between Celeste and Quinn and joined in their laughter. “Great minds,” she said and looked around the room. “I was supposed to be gone for another week. But after last night’s call, I figured I might be needed elsewhere.”
“Do Mom and Dad know you’re back?” Quinn said.
“They’ll know soon enough. I slipped in through the mudroom. I figured at least one of you would be up here.”
The turret room had long been the McCarthy sisters’ favorite place to hang out, since it offered the most privacy. It was only ever occupied when the lodge was full. Otherwise if someone booked it, looking for the most affordable option, they would always be surprised with an upgrade to a larger suite, with no additional charge. It had also been a great place for a slumber party in their preteen years despite there only being one bed.
Since it was a Monday evening in late April, a time of year when the lodge was only at capacity on weekends, the turret room was conveniently available for the sisters to commiserate.
Now they were only missing Ava, which wasn’t uncommon. Ava was a single mother of an eight-year-old girl, Sam, and worked a demanding job in downtown Calgary as one of the city’s top investment bankers. In the last few years, Ava and Sam had only been able to make it to the lodge for Christmas, an important family celebration or wedding, or for the odd weekend when Ava’s bosses were themselves on vacation.
“Should we call Ava?” Quinn said and slid her phone out of her pocket. If there was a time they would have loved all being together at the same time, it was now.
“Sure,” Celeste said. “I doubt she’ll answer, though.”
Quinn tapped the phone to connect to their sister on FaceTime, while Elodie tossed her jacket onto one of the camel leather lounge chairs by the fireplace, then plopped down onto the foot of the bed and lay on her back. “Ahh…” she sighed. “A real mattress. Lovely.”
After three rings, Ava’s face came on the screen, features barely visible in a dark room. “Let me guess—you’re all sobbing like babies in the turret room,” she said before any of them could get a word in edgewise.
“Wish you were here,” Elodie said. “If anyone could talk some sense into Mom and Dad, it would be you.”
Ava’s no-nonsense approach to life and willingness to speak her mind sometimes got her into trouble but for the most part served her well, not only in her career but in life. She was also sarcastic and had been a holy terror of a teenager when she’d been at her hormonal peak, so when Sam had been born, the whole family had gleefully proclaimed that Ava was going to get what was coming to her, but so far, her daughter was as angelic as they came, without even a hint of her mother’s fiery temper or dry sarcasm. The whole family doted on Sam, as their only granddaughter and niece.
“Same,” Ava said. “But you know how I feel about the turret room. It’s haunted. Remember that knocking we heard last time we stayed there?”
Celeste rolled her eyes at Elodie and Quinn, but they all remembered that ill-advised Halloween Ouija-board sleepover over twenty years ago.
A sharp rapping sounded at the door, and they all screamed. The door flew open, and there was Ava, dressed in a perfectly tailored plaid Smythe suit, her light brown hair in a top-knot bun, and an overnight bag in her hand. “I’ll take that,” she said, dropping her bag onto the floor and reaching for the Fireball, dodging the pillow Elodie threw at her.
“You scared us, witch,” Elodie said, laughing. “Where’s Sam?”
“In the kitchen with Mom. That should tie Jeannie up for a while. Let’s get into it.”
Despite the reason that had brought them there, the four sisters were thrilled to be back together. For the next hour, they dissected their parents’ news with a fine-tooth comb, interspersed by jokes, tears, and catching up on the minutiae of their lives.
When a knock came at the door and Jeannie entered with a tray of raspberry white-chocolate scones fresh out of the oven, pretending she hadn’t been loitering outside of the door waiting for a break in conversation, they quickly changed the topic to the upcoming wedding the lodge was hosting that weekend, their mom’s Pilates classes, the neighborhood gossip—anything but the elephant in the room. Celeste noted that Jeannie looked tired, as though announcing her retirement had given her body permission to age overnight.
“Mom, are you okay?” Quinn said.
“I’m better now,” Jeannie said, taking in the sight of her four girls sprawled out across the guest room, eyes shining with the delight of a mother whose nest was full again. “What do you want for dinner? Sam’s in the kitchen having some minestrone soup and toast. I’ve got some nice tuna steaks in the fridge I can marinade for poke bowls. Or if anyone wants gnocchi—”
“Let’s just order takeout,” Celeste said. If Jeannie cooked, it would be an hours-long affair, and all she really wanted to do was eat dinner, then go to bed.
Everett was down at the rec center for his Monday-night house-league curling and wouldn’t be home until late, so after Celeste checked in with the evening desk attendant, they returned to Jeannie and Everett’s house behind the lodge. Elodie and Quinn read Sam some stories, then tucked her in while Jeannie ordered Indian takeout.
For their mom’s sake—or maybe theirs?—they opened a bottle of Cab Sauv, turned on some reruns of The Office and spent the rest of the evening pretending everything was normal.
*
In the morning, Celeste sat at the computer in the lodge’s office, grinding her teeth and trying not to smash her laptop against the desk. The lodge’s new accounting management software, which they’d been forced to migrate to after the former company had gone defunct, was as intuitive as wandering backward through a maze. Part of her short fuse likely had to do with a sleepless night, head spinning with her parents’ news, panic mode about the future of her job fully activated. She wasn’t trying to make this about her. But it was kind of about her, wasn’t it?
And now she had to figure this new software out—and fast. Taxes were due at the end of April, and their bookkeeper in town would be expecting everything to be up to date and error free. With the last system, Celeste had known exactly where to plug in numbers in order to keep track of money coming in and going out, even though she’d had no idea how it all ended up getting reconciled. That was what the bookkeeper was for. The new system, however, asked all kinds of questions about percentages going to OTAs and PIE settings and other acronyms, and she couldn’t figure out what to do with the damn thing.
“What’s wrong?” she heard from over her shoulder. Celeste turned to see Ava in the doorway, wearing her high school track hoodie and a pair of faded jeans. Of course it would be Ava, whose commerce degree had set her up to do this task in her sleep, but through her annoyance, Celeste was glad to see her sister looking casual and relaxed for once.
“Nothing,” Celeste said. “When are you heading back to the city?”
“I’ll work remotely for the rest of the week,” she said. “Sam’s basically ahead of everything at school, so I don’t mind her being out of class. I think it’ll be good for Mom and Dad too. They seem a little…on edge.”
“What does Tyler think of that?” Ava’s new boyfriend had traveled with her the last few times she and Sam had visited the lodge, although Sam only knew Tyler as Ava’s “friend” and nothing more. Tyler was nice enough, but Celeste could tell Ava wasn’t all in. Ava was guarded and private; no one even knew who Sam’s father was, and anyone who was bold enough to ask promptly had their head bit off.
“He’s fine. He’s out of town anyway,” Ava said, and Celeste detected something in her eyes. “Your cheeks are splotchy,” she said, coming to look over Celeste’s shoulder. “Something’s wrong. Whatcha doing?”
Celeste took a deep breath in. “I’m just inputting some petty-cash purchases. Or at least I’m trying to. This new software is really confusing.”
“This is easy. You just…” Ava reached over to point at something on the screen, and Celeste swatted her hand away.
“Maybe easy for you,” she said and slumped back in her chair. “We’re not all financial-whiz kids.”
“It’s just simple accounting,” her sister insisted. “I can show you.”
“You might be able to show me this one thing, but everything else in this program is different. And I have no idea how to use it. Which makes me pretty much useless in my job, and no one is going to want to hire me once this place is gone.” Her voice wavered, and she willed herself not to cry.
Ava’s expression softened. “It’s not gone yet,” she said. “And whoever buys this place would be crazy not to keep you on. You know everything about the lodge. And you’re so good at your job.”
“There are no guarantees,” Celeste said. “And there are plenty of people with training who could easily slide into this role.”
“You’ve always been good at math. You can learn this quickly—with some online tutorials or something. Or there’s no reason you can’t take an online accounting class. All of this will make sense, no problem.”
Celeste didn’t want to take an online accounting class. She didn’t want to learn this dumb new software. She wanted to go back to using Hospitality Hub version 4.3, to when her parents hadn’t been selling the lodge, to when she’d still had a job with a future to talk about at her monthly cocktails with friends. Was that too much to ask?
She looked over to see Ava typing on her phone. “Here,” Ava said, flashing her screen. “Oakview College offers a course. It starts next week. Every Monday night from six to eight.”
Ava read the course description out loud, which had a lot of the language Celeste recognized from the parts of the new program causing her trouble. Oakview College was only a twenty-minute drive south from the lodge, just east of Canmore, and offered courses in everything from woodworking to introductory Spanish to digital marketing. Monday nights were slow at the lodge, so she wouldn’t be missed.
“How much?” Celeste said. She didn’t love the idea, but Ava might be onto something. Getting a paper credential would be important when she was forced to search for a new job, and in the meantime, there was this stupid petty-cash report that needed reconciling.
“My treat,” Ava said, tapping furiously into her phone. A minute later she looked up and grinned. “Confirmation’s in your email. Consider it an early birthday present.”
“Happy birthday to me,” Celeste grumbled.
“I’ve got to make a couple of calls for work. See you at dinner,” Ava said and left Celeste alone in the office.
Her sisters all had their thing: Elodie, her passion for teaching and biology. Ava, her success in the business world. Quinn, her burgeoning social media empire. What did Celeste have? Had she too easily fallen onto the safe-and-accessible path and piggybacked off her parents’ success?
She sat in her chair, staring at her laptop. Sitting around and sulking about it wasn’t going to help. She’d do the course, update her resume, and keep her eye out for good opportunities.
Some clattering sounded from the kitchen as the intoxicating aroma of apples, butter, and cinnamon floated into the office. Celeste stood up and made her way to the source of the delicious scent.
She might soon be jobless, but in the meantime, there was pie.