THE GROUND RULES
Alice would have enjoyed the look of torture on Knox’s face a lot more if she hadn’t suspected she was wearing the same one.
Lauren reached into the box for the next item. A pale pink cardigan with pearl buttons. “Huh,” she said. “Cute.”
Alice felt a laugh burst out of her chest. “That’s because you have one just like it. You and Eleanor have the same love for all things pink.”
Lauren blinked, as if just realizing that was actually true, and not looking thrilled to find she had something else in common with her great-aunt. Visibly shaking that off, she leaned forward and pulled out a delicate gold necklace with a small diamond-encrusted heart charm.
It made Alice’s heart constrict. “I never saw her without this necklace. Never. Walter gave it to her, but she liked to say it was too pretty to blame the necklace for his behavior, so she kept it.”
Alice was looking at Lauren, so she saw her jerk with surprise at the name Walter.
“Who’s Walter?” Knox asked.
“My grandpa,” Lauren said softly. “He and Eleanor were together when he fell in love with her sister, Ruth—my grandma.”
“Walter was the love of Eleanor’s life,” Alice told him. “She never really recovered from losing him. But when Walter and Ruth were killed in a car accident, Eleanor took in their two-year-old son as her own. Evan.”
“My dad,” Lauren said. “Who was raised by a woman who resented his presence from day one.”
Alice frowned. “Not as Eleanor told it. She loved Evan, but when he turned eighteen, he walked away from her and broke her heart all over again.” She shook her head, unable to imagine the pain. Or, given her own life and what she’d been through, maybe she could imagine. “I always admired how no matter what knocked her down—betrayal, TV show cancellations, the inn closing—she always picked herself up and kept going.”
Lauren was staring at the necklace with a whole boatload of emotion spilling from her gaze, so Alice handed it over.
“Can you really pick yourself up?” Lauren finally asked in a very quiet, very serious voice.
“Are you kidding?” Alice let out a rough laugh. “I’ve picked myself up so many times I’ve lost count. And you know who taught me how to do that.”
“But . . .” Lauren looked so conflicted that Alice actually ached for her. “My dad always told me she was so hard on him, so unbending. She ruined his childhood.”
“She left you a third of this place,” Alice said. She tried really hard not to judge a person’s choices, especially having made some questionable ones of her own. Plus, she’d been privy to a very different Eleanor from the one the rest of the world knew. Yes, the woman had been deeply flawed. And okay, also obstinate and mercurial, but for those few she chose to love, she’d go to the ends of the earth without hesitation. But as far as Alice was concerned, the misconception of Eleanor’s character wasn’t on Lauren. It was on Lauren’s dad and Eleanor herself. Alice peered into the box for the next item. “There’s an iPad. Anything on it?”
“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “I raced out of the library with the vibrating box and came straight here.”
Knox flipped open the iPad cover and swiped on the home screen. “It’s dead.”
Lauren pulled a portable battery charger—in a pink case—from her purse and handed it over.
Knox plugged it in and swiped again. “No passcode. How unlike her.”
“Maybe she wanted Lauren to be able to get into it,” Alice said.
Lauren snorted. “Right.”
“Maybe you could give her the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise,” Alice suggested.
Lauren didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t argue further. Still, when Knox tried to hand her the iPad, she shook her head.
So Knox began to swipe through it himself. “There’re a few apps. The usual, nothing added though.” Then he paused. “Huh.”
“Huh what?” Alice asked worriedly.
“First of all, there’s a doc with information on the inn.”
“More words,” Alice said, losing patience. Hell, who was she kidding? She had no patience to start with, never had.
“It looks like Eleanor planned on hiring a hotel management firm to run this place,” Knox said. “She hadn’t signed on the dotted line yet, but the info is all here. They’d staff and run the inn for us, so we wouldn’t have to sell. We could keep it as a business venture.”
They all stared at each other.
“Why in the world wouldn’t the attorney have mentioned that to us?” Lauren asked. “Knowing this would’ve given us all peace of mind.”
“Oh my God.” Alice could picture Eleanor up on a cloud high above laughing her ass off. Or who knows, maybe from the top of a fire and brimstone mountain. Shaking her head, she plopped back against the couch cushions. “Damn, she was sneaky. And manipulative, even to the very end.”
“I don’t get it,” Lauren said.
“The obligation of the inn being on our shoulders got us all here.” Alice looked at her two partners. “Be honest, if we’d known about the hotel management firm from the start, one or more of us might’ve chosen not to come at all, and instead let them handle everything.”
Lauren slowly raised her hand. “I’d still have come. For curiosity’s sake, if nothing else.”
“I’d still be here,” Knox said.
They both looked at Alice.
“Look, the only question that really matters now is, what do we do? We could ignore, finish the renovations, and just sell, as we planned.”
“Or,” Lauren said, “we pay the hotel management firm to take over for us after the renovations are done. Let them handle the reopening and the day-to-day operations, and we keep the inn as an income.”
Alice felt her stomach sink to her toes. In a vote right now she’d be outnumbered, though they were kind enough to not say it as they all just looked at each other.
“We have time for that decision,” Knox finally said quietly, going back to the iPad. “There’s nothing in her email inbox, sent, or trash folders. Either they’ve been wiped, or she never used the app— Hold on. There’s a draft folder with emails that were never sent.”
“To . . . ?” Alice asked.
“Her sister, Ruth. And every email has one of our names in the subject line, except the first one.”
“What?” Alice and Lauren asked in disbelieved unison.
Knox tried to hand Lauren the iPad. “This iPad came to you first. You should be the one to read them.”
“No.”
Alice turned to her, knowing that while her own default mood was stubborn, Lauren’s was fear. Of everything. But Alice couldn’t help but feel that in this case, Lauren needed to be pushed through the fear to face the past. The real past. “Lauren—”
“I can’t,” she whispered, looking stricken.
Alice looked at Knox. “Read the first letter.”
Knox nodded and began to read out loud:
Dear Sister to Whom I’m Not Speaking Even Though You’re Dead,
And it’s a damn shame you’re dead too, because I could really use your advice right about now. I’m not going to live forever and I’m thinking about what I’ll do with Granddad’s inn. I know you got his money and I got the property, and I’ve always been grateful for that. I also know you probably don’t give two flying hoots, but I really do wish I had your ear, just so I could do the opposite of what you suggest. After you ruined my life with your selfishness, I cut myself off from others. But somehow, in spite of that, I’ve let three people become family to me—even though at least one of them has no idea. So I’m leaving the inn to them. Huh. Look at that. I didn’t need your opinion after all.
Signed, The Way Better Graham Sister
When Knox finished reading, there was a beat of stunned silence. Alice didn’t know about the others, but she was way too choked up to speak. She’d known Eleanor considered her family, but it was sure good to hear it. Given the look on Knox’s face, he felt the same. She could only hope that Lauren realized that Eleanor’s love language had been actions. Leaving Lauren a third of this place had definitely been a show of love.
“What a crock of bull-pucky,” Lauren finally said. “She never even spoke to me, much less treated me like family.”
Alice drew a steadying breath, trying hard to sound even, but suddenly she was both missing Eleanor and yet also furious with her for not telling Lauren about her own past. “She was trying to honor you and your dad’s wishes to stay away from you.”
Lauren looked surprised. “What?”
“Apparently after your dad made some poor investments and Eleanor wouldn’t bail him out again, he told her to stay away from the both of you. That you didn’t want to see or talk to her either.”
Lauren blinked. “Again? What do you mean bail him out again?”
“I’m actually not sure,” Alice said slowly. “But I got the impression that years and years ago, he had a habit of making bad investments and she’d bailed him out a bunch of times before. He said that you and he didn’t want her sticking her nose in your lives at all. Ever. She didn’t like to talk about it, but I think she resigned herself to only watching you from afar, and you said she tried to contact you after your dad’s passing.”
“But . . . why didn’t he ever tell me any of this?” She looked at Alice. “Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this? We were best friends. Unless we weren’t.”
Alice closed her eyes for a beat at the wealth of pain in Lauren’s voice. “It wasn’t my place to tell you, but I did try a few times. You never wanted to talk about her—”
Standing up, Lauren turned her back on them, hugging herself. “Well, guess what? I still don’t.”
“There are more email drafts,” Knox said. “We should read them.”
“Maybe,” Lauren said, hugging herself. “But not now.”
“Yeah.” Knox snapped the case closed. “We could probably use some breathing room between them. Maybe we do one every night that we’re all here together, after work.”
Alice nodded.
They both looked at Lauren. She grimaced. “Yeah. Okay.”
Knox stood up. “I’m going to take out Pickle.” He turned to go, then pivoted back. “But I really hope you two figure your shit out in a way that Eleanor and Ruth never managed to do.” And with that, he walked out of the living room, Pickle on his heels.
A minute later, they heard the back door open and then shut.
Lauren went to the wall, where she wrote Ground Rule 8:
Read Eleanor’s emails together.
Then, without another word, she also walked out.
“Great,” Alice said to nobody. “I’ll just be here fixing this inn up all by my lonesome in order to regain my freedom.”