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One week.
That’s how long it took to change her whole life.
One week.
Amelia had left Birch Harbor the previous Thursday. Now there she was, a whole seven days later, rolling back into town with her trusty sidekick, Dobi.
She patted the Dachshund’s smooth potbelly as he panted on the musty upholstery beside her. Cigarette smoke clung to the interior of her loaner sedan, but the wind whipping through the cracked windows quelled the stench enough that she enjoyed the long drive. With the open road for a backdrop and daydreams for company, nothing stood between Amelia and her future.
Of course, the forty-something brunette had lots to do. Her first order of business, after Kate picked her up from the car rental agency that evening, was to get settled in her new room.
Or rather, her old room.
Amelia Hannigan was moving back into the house on the harbor. Although, it wasn’t the house on the harbor anymore. The four sisters had settled on a new name for the future bed-and-breakfast, something befitting its emotional value and location on the quaint southern cove of the town in which they grew up.
They would call it The Heirloom Inn.
***
“Have you scheduled anything with Michael yet?” Kate asked once Amelia had finished returning her rental. The two women transferred the last of Amelia’s boxes and garment bags to Kate’s SUV.
Amelia had left New York with as little as she had arrived with. Spending the past decade or more traveling across America on her way to a starring role on Broadway had prevented her from accumulating much. Mostly just clothes and makeup, bedding and blankets (a Hannigan could never own too many throw blankets), and Dobi’s various accessories.
As it turned out, Amelia was more vagabond than thespian, always searching for the next big role—or, as the case may have been—any role.
Still, despite all the rejection, she would never give up on her dream to be an entertainer.
It all started one summer in Arizona. The Hannigan girls spent a couple of months with an aunt who shuttled them around various desert tourist attractions. Old Tucson Studios proved to be the highlight for Amelia, who was at that time fourteen years old. There, they toured wild west movie sets and mined for fool’s gold.
During a dusty gun show, the performers asked for a volunteer from the audience. Amelia’s hand had shot up, and soon enough she slid from her hot bleacher seat and joined a Doc Holliday impersonator who instructed her to play along to a bank robbery. For the next fifteen minutes, Amelia darted in and out of wooden flats painted like Tombstone’s infamous Allen Street. Her heart pounded in her chest; her face flushed.
After, she and her younger sister, Megan, sat and lapped up melting ice cream, giggling over the cute cowboy actors. Another visor-wearing tourist, her fanny pack slung low across high-waisted jean shorts, had stopped at the girls’ table long enough to compliment Amelia’s performance.
Since that day, the acting bug buzzed around inside of her like a fever.
But long years of traveling in pursuit of sporadic bit parts had steadily worn down her spirits. When she did get roles, nothing ever brought her to life quite like the historic reenactment.
When her mother, Nora, passed, Amelia realized how much she was looking forward to some stability. How much she was looking forward to being home.
Throwing her body against the back door of Kate’s SUV, Amelia willed the uneven boxes to keep from spilling out long enough to make it just a few miles into town.
She let out a dramatic sigh at Kate’s question about meeting Michael.
Michael Matuszewski was the Hannigan family lawyer, effectively. Amelia liked having a family lawyer. It felt prestigious. Aristocratic.
If only they were aristocratic, maybe then Amelia wouldn’t even have to go on auditions. Maybe then she’d be offered leading parts merely because of her reputation as someone important. Connected.
In reality, Amelia had just received her most recent and crushing rejection: a coveted role as Lady Macbeth. And she’d ended things with her younger, more attractive boyfriend. And then her mom died.
Oh, yeah... and she’d sublet her New York studio in order to return home to Birch Harbor to help her older sister pull things together on the four—no, make that five—properties their mother’s wobbly will had left in its wake.
Hers was not an aristocratic life, but that of a pauper. A commoner left to scrap together a living out of the shambles of a once hope-filled life.
Then again, perhaps having a claim to so many deeds did position the four Hannigan women in the upper echelon of small-town society, even if those properties were hodgepodge at best and ramshackle at worst. First, though, they’d need to shine the places up. It was one thing to own four places. It was another to own four projects. Oh, right. Five.
Amelia tucked Dobi onto her lap and stretched the seatbelt over her body. “Nothing formal, but Michael and I did text a little.” She stared ahead but felt Kate’s eyes on her. “What?” Amelia asked, flushing above her tunic before smiling at her older sister.
“Nothing. Nothing!” Kate replied and changed the subject. “So, Megan won’t be in until this weekend at the earliest. Clara offered to come tomorrow after school. I have a couple ideas to get us started, but I didn’t know whether we should meet with the lawyer first, or...?”
Kate was referring to the two big jobs that lay ahead of the Hannigan sisters. The renovation of the house on the harbor would first allow Kate and Amelia to take up residence there. Amelia suspected Kate intended on living in the oversized house for the long run, becoming a small-town innkeeper and hosting scores of tourists.
Amelia, however, saw a different future for herself. Though what, she didn’t know.
Equally important to the reno project was to make sense of the recent revelation of the lighthouse.
In one of their mother’s diary entries—the journal itself had yet to be unearthed—Nora Hannigan had vaguely referenced that the Birch Harbor Lighthouse would go to the girls, Amelia and her sisters.
As though the Hannigan estate wasn’t complicated enough, the matter of the historic and abandoned property added a new layer of mystery.
The lighthouse had belonged to their father’s parents, the Actons (yes—the Actons; Nora Hannigan never took her husband’s name and instead forced a matrilineal tradition upon her daughters).
One would assume that upon the death of the Actons, ownership of the Birch Harbor monument would fall to their only son, Wendell Acton, the Hannigan girls’ father.
But that was the problem. Wendell Acton had disappeared in 1992.