Chapter 1 #2
A scrape sounded near the front door.
Percy Hollis slipped inside, bringing the smell of hay and horse with him. At twelve, he was all narrow shoulders, large brown eyes, and limbs that seemed to have grown faster than the rest of him. A knitted cap hid most of his dark hair.
“Eliza said you needed me.”
“Can you run to Mr. Talbot’s workshop and ask if he can look at the laundry wringer?”
Percy’s nose wrinkled. “He doesn’t like coming here.”
“Mr. Talbot doesn’t like going anywhere.”
“He said last time the machine ought to be thrown in the river.”
“Tell him I’m considering it, but I’d like him to look at it first.”
Percy grinned.
Martha reached beneath the desk and drew out a cloth-wrapped bundle. She had hidden two currant pastries after breakfast before Mr. Dobbins could ask for a third.
She handed one to Percy.
His grin widened. “For me?”
“For someone who cleaned six stalls before sunrise and remembered to bring in the wood without being asked.”
“I forgot yesterday.”
“But you remembered today.”
He peeled back the cloth and stared at the pastry as though she had handed him a silver dollar.
Something in Martha’s chest tightened.
At his age, she had already learned not to eat anything too quickly. Food disappeared at the orphanage. So did blankets, shoes, ribbons, and promises. Children who expected kindness generally learned better.
Percy still expected it sometimes.
She hoped he never learned better.
“You’re important here,” she said. “Eliza and I couldn’t manage without you.”
His eyes lifted to hers, then dropped. “I should go before Mr. Talbot closes.”
“It’s not even noon.”
“He closes when he feels like it.”
“That’s true. Ask what he’ll charge before he touches anything.”
“What if he says he won’t know until he touches it?”
“I think you know me well enough to guess what I’d say in response to that.”
Percy laughed on his way out.
For a moment, the lobby felt less cold.
Then a floorboard creaked overhead, followed by the clatter of a bucket and Eliza saying something Martha was glad the Dobbins family could not hear.
Martha opened the desk drawer. At the bottom lay the carpenter’s letter, delivered that morning.
She had avoided opening it for nearly three hours.
There had been breakfast to serve. A chimney to check. A proposal to refuse.
Now there was nothing left between her and the envelope.
She carried it into the office and closed the door.
The room had once belonged to Amos. Martha had changed little about it after his death. A map of the territory hung behind the desk. Two ledgers sat beside a tin box of receipts. His chair squeaked when she sat, the same way it had when he leaned back to think.
Martha slid one finger beneath the seal.
The carpenter’s handwriting was clean and spare. He listed the damaged supports, the warped exterior wall, the leaking roof, and the section of foundation that had shifted beneath the rear rooms.
Martha read the final estimate twice.
Three hundred and eighteen dollars.
That did not include new wallpaper, furnishings, or replacement windows. It did not include whatever else he found once the walls were opened.
She set the letter on the desk.
Outside the office, the inn went on demanding things from her. A bell rang at the front desk. Someone crossed the lobby, calling out to Percy. The kitchen door slammed. Water rushed through pipes that knocked whenever they were used, though none carried hot water upstairs.
Martha looked at Amos’s map.
They had stood in this room the week they bought the inn, surrounded by dust and broken furniture. Amos had spread the map over the desk and told her travelers would come through Willow Crossing by the hundreds.
We’ll give them a place worth remembering, he had said.
For a while, she had believed him.
After he died, maintaining any sort of belief became work.
She had worked through grief, debt, fever, frozen pipes, spoiled food, and every whispered suggestion that a widow had no business running an inn alone. She had bargained with suppliers who treated her like she was a joke.
She had repaired hinges, balanced ledgers, scrubbed blood from sheets after a miner split his head open in the saloon and smiled at guests who complained that the snow was inconvenient.
She had done everything asked of her.
The building kept asking for more.
Martha pressed her hands flat against the desk.
Three hundred and eighteen dollars might as well have been three thousand. Three hundred thousand, even.
She could close the west wing. Lock the doors and pretend the damage stopped at the threshold. Keep patching what broke in the rooms they still used. Sell Amos’s watch, the silver serving pieces, the last of the good linens.
She could refuse another proposal next month and another after that.
Or she could admit what everyone in Willow Crossing already believed.
The inn was too much for her.
The thought arrived quietly.
Sell it.
Martha closed her eyes.
There would be no inn. No work waiting before dawn. No front desk between her and men who thought a woman alone was an invitation. No room for Percy. No place for Eliza. No promise left to Amos.
And no reason for Martha to remain in Willow Crossing at all.
She opened her eyes and looked again at the carpenter’s estimate.
For the first time since Amos’s death, giving up felt like her only real way forward.