The Cottage on Nantucket Page 6

  The words sat there, in black and white. They hadn’t reordered themselves.

  “Mom left you The Hotel Benjamin? Like, The Hotel Benjamin in downtown New York City?”

  “It seems so,” Tessa said quietly. She could’ve shouted it and it would’ve been quiet in Janey’s head. So much clamored inside her mind now that she could hardly see the next item on the list.

  “The home listed at 4752 Shoreline Way, Long Island,” Janey read, her chest starting to throb with the effort it took to breathe. She gasped for breath. Her mother had left her younger sister a hotel in New York City and a home on Long Island.

  These were huge items. Huge.

  This wasn’t Mom’s string of black pearls she’d gotten on a trip to Cozumel, nor a picture frame that held sentimental value. This wasn’t even her car, which she and Tessa had agreed to sell and split the money. It had been sitting in a garage in the city, and the late-model sedan came from a top brand and had less than ten thousand miles on it.

  Mom had lived in the city for the last several years of her life, and Janey had no idea how she’d come to own a home on Long Island or a five-star hotel, complete with a James Beard award-winning restaurant on the main floor.

  The next item on the list was a bank account, complete with the account number, the name on the account—Mom’s and Tessa’s only—and the address of the bank. A note below that read, This is a completely separate bank from the others you’ve been to. Sorry. I know it means another trip to the city, but I suppose all of this will require that.

  “I guess so,” Janey said with a scoff. She hadn’t gone to the city with Tessa the first time. First, she honestly hadn’t been sure she’d have been able to handle it mentally and emotionally. The ache to talk to her mother hadn’t lessened with time and distance, and right now, it intensified in such a way that Janey’s head pounded.

  She closed her eyes, trying to block out the light and sound that plagued her perpetually. She’d brought all of her medications to the cottage on Nantucket, and she’d been religious in taking them. She got up and went to the drawer where she’d stored her pill box. With a shaking hand, she got a glass out of the cupboard, and Tessa edged over so Janey could fill her glass with water from the sink.

  She drank it all, the cold liquid helping her to focus. Her pills would do the same, and she refilled her glass and swallowed all of them in a single gulp. “This is insane,” she said, her voice made mostly of air.

  “What do you think it means?”

  “It means Mom was buying stuff in the past few years, and she didn’t tell us.”

  Tessa’s eyebrows drew down. “Why do we suddenly own someone else’s intellectual property?”

  “What?” Janey hadn’t made it that far, obviously.

  Tessa moved over to the table, and Janey followed. Her pulse settled, and she didn’t care if the pills were placeboes. They worked, and she set her glass on the table and retook her seat in front of the binder.

  The last item on the page listed the intellectual property. “This is three series of science fiction novels,” she said. “Cole used to read these, years ago.”

  “Do you know who DM Conway is?” Tessa asked.

  Janey picked up her phone and started tapping to get to the Internet browser. “He’s an author. He wrote those books.”

  “I gathered that,” Tessa said. “But how did Mom acquire the ability to control his publishing rights? I looked it up, and you can earn on someone’s books for seventy years after they die. Seventy.”

  Janey looked up from her search for DM Conway. “Seventy years?”

  “That’s—yes.” Tessa pressed her palms together, spreading her fingers. Janey had seen her do such a move several times in the past, usually when she was trying to get her brain to think of something it hadn’t yet. “We’re talking about passing this on to our children, Janey. I’m not going to live for seventy more years.”

  “Depending on when this DM died,” Janey said, and Tessa nodded her acquiescence. She went back to her phone and typed in the name. An author website came up, but there was no picture. She left that and went to the next link, though she never really believed anything on the user-curated websites.

  “Isn’t there something in the binder that will tell us?” Janey asked as the site loaded. The Internet out here on the Point could be flaky, and that was just another reason Janey didn’t like spending too much time here.

  She could work from anywhere, but the Internet was essential for that to be possible. She could download the docs and graphics she needed easily, but uploading took forever, and the crucial item she needed to send to Sunny back in the Jersey office still hadn’t finished.

  “I admit I stopped looking,” Tessa said. “I read the first two pages, and then I made the decision to tell you.” She met Janey’s eye, and Janey set her phone aside. She rarely let herself be fully present with her family. Even her children sometimes sniped at her to put her phone away so they could tell her something important to them.

  With her mom and sister, Janey could answer work emails and text her significant others, and they wouldn’t say a thing. She knew she missed out on important details and bonding conversations, and her stomach swooped as she thought about why her mother hadn’t left her an extra key that opened a mysterious drawer. Or a check singly for her in the amount of twenty-eight thousand dollars.

  Her throat tightened, and the world spun for a moment.

  Janey knew this feeling well. It descended upon her every time her phone rang and an unknown number sat there. It could be a creditor, asking her where her payment was. In fact, that was almost always what an unknown number meant for Janey.

  She usually kept her notifications on silent, so she didn’t have to explain why she wasn’t answering calls. She had a visual notification set, and her phone flashed when it rang, but she could shrug it off as a text if she had to.

  She thought about her leaking roof and the home equity loan she needed to fix it. The subfloor in her bedroom and the living room needed to be torn out and replaced too, because her last dog had been old and used any patch of carpet for a bathroom.

  Janey’s house was far too big for her, despite the fact that her twenty-year-old daughter and her boyfriend lived with her, and she desperately wanted to move. In order to that, she had some major repairs to do on the house so she could sell it for at least what she owed on it. And in order to do that, she needed the loan.

  With her despicable credit, she couldn’t get the loan.

  She’d asked Tessa and Ron to be co-signers for her in the past, but she hadn’t wanted to do so again. She was almost forty-seven years old, and she hated the feelings of inadequacy at not being able to handle her own life that came when faced with her past decisions that determined her future opportunities.

  The world pressed down on her. Further and further and further, until she felt like she couldn’t move, let alone breathe.

  “Do you want to look?” Tessa asked, her voice echoing in Janey’s ears. “Or should I?”

  Janey burst to her feet. “You know what? I need a minute.” She swiped her phone off the table and dashed for the front door. She didn’t bother closing it behind her. In fact, it slammed against the wall as she hurried down the front steps and hit the sand across the street in a dead run.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Janey pulled in the salty air, wishing it didn’t hold the scent of her childhood. A burning rage existed inside her that she needed to scream out. Sometimes she needed to hit something really hard to get the fury out of her system.

  Nantucket had no Crossfit gym, and no punching bag, and while Janey had brought her workout clothes, she hadn’t sought out a gym or a yoga class. Heck, she could’ve taken a walk along the beach just to get some exercise in.

  Because she hadn’t done much more than sift through junk and fight her irritation for the past week, she couldn’t run for long.

  Her lungs burned and she finally fell into a fast walk, her
breath panting in and out.

  “A hotel,” she said, the words exploding from her. “How in the wide universe of possibilities did Mom buy a hotel?”

  There was no explanation for that. None. After Dad had died—“Twenty years ago,” Janey reminded herself—Mom hadn’t gotten a job. She lived off the life insurance, and she’d used the money from the sale of her house to buy apartment in New York. She hadn’t wanted to take care of a yard, and she’d loved her one-bedroom place on the sixteenth floor of a building that overlooked Central Park.

  Janey’s mind spun around that apartment. It had to cost millions, and now that she took a moment to think about it, Mom shouldn’t have been able to afford it at all.

  “She obviously could,” Janey muttered. “Maybe she’s owned The Benjamin for decades.”

  If that were true, why hadn’t she said anything to Janey or Tessa? They’d never stayed there. They’d never vacationed in the city.

  No, Mom had always brought their family to Nantucket Point, to the little cottage she’d loved with her whole soul.

  Tessa wanted to keep it, and while Janey had been looking at the situation from a purely financial point of view, with other assets in play, she could admit she didn’t want to sell the cottage.

  Before she knew it, she’d crossed the beach and arrived at The Lighthouse Inn. The old building had once been an operational lighthouse for the Point, and the Nantucket Historical Society had a plaque mounted next to the front door.

  Now, the lighthouse served as a five-room bed and breakfast, with full-time, live-in caretakers. Janey could still remember the day Phil and Margo Michaels had been named the operators of The Lighthouse Inn.

  The entire population of Nantucket had come to the inn, and Mom had brought her and Tessa. She’d been sixteen years old and surly about being on Nantucket at all.

  Over the years, though, Janey had come to the inn for an afternoon soda or to the beach that ran up to the overhang of rocks where the lighthouse sat.

  Margo hosted games for guests on that beach, and she’d never turned away Janey and Tessa.

  She wondered if she could catch Margo in her mid-morning chores. Perhaps they could talk, as Margo had known Mom well.

  Instead of heading toward the entrance, she wrapped her arms around herself and faced the wind that blew up off the rocks as if it were angry they dared get in its way.

  She breathed in deeply and tried to clear her mind. Breathing never worked. Alcohol did. Her anti-depressants did too. But deep breathing? Yoga? Meditation?

  Janey only did them to give her therapist the illusion that she was trying alternate treatments.

  She walked around the three-story lighthouse that bore a fresh coat of light gray paint. She’d gone all the way to the door before she saw the sign taped to it.

  Caretakers needed.

  Janey pulled in a breath. The Michaels’ didn’t work here anymore—or wouldn’t come November first.

  She read the requirements to be the caretaker of The Lighthouse Inn, as if she needed a new job. She didn’t. She loved her job, and she was very, very good at selling software to huge companies.

  The problem was, Janey spent more money than she earned. She always had, which meant she was operating with three decades of bad money decisions and constant financial pressure.

  Her eyes caught on the third or fourth requirement: Interested applicants should apply as a couple or partnership.

  “Well, that eliminates me,” Janey said bitterly. She couldn’t operate a boat either, but that could be learned. Finding a man her age who wasn’t a total loser was a lot harder than learning how to sail.

  She turned away from the inn, seeming to find disappointment wherever she looked. She needed to text or call Milford, her single boyfriend, and she already had a scheduled video chat with Curtis, her married one.

  Just the fact that she had two boyfriends made most women’s eyes widen. Tessa had sat on the other end of the phone line, utterly silent.

  Then she’d said, “I can’t even handle one man. How are you dealing with two?”

  They’d laughed together, because it was a valid question. Janey hadn’t answered it. The only thing she’d told Tessa after that was that yes, the two men knew about each other.

  Milford knew more than Curtis, because Curtis didn’t ask questions and didn’t want to know.

  Janey didn’t see anything wrong with her behavior. She was honest about it. She wasn’t cheating.

  Curtis lived in an apartment in Jersey City, legally separated from his wife. The divorce just hadn’t gone through yet. Janey wasn’t wrecking any homes, and everyone involved was an adult.

  Her walk back to the cottage took much longer than her march away from it, and Janey soaked in the sunshine, finally starting to calm down a little bit.

  “It’s not Tessa’s fault,” she told herself as the blue cottage came into view. “It’s not Tessa’s fault.”

  It wasn’t.

  Janey had a near photographic memory, and the letter had sounded like Mom was worried about someone else coming in and taking the valuable assets she’d hidden in this addendum.

  Janey would be thrilled to never see another red binder again. At the same time, she couldn’t help hoping she had one with a letter in her mother’s handwriting just for her.

  I will tell her the same thing.

  It sure seemed like she probably did.

  “But where?” she whispered, the words floating away on the breeze.

  “Morning, Janey,” a man called, and Janey turned toward the sound of the voice.

  Riggs Friedman stood there, his smile far too large for someone holding a fishing pole and no fish.

  “Morning, Riggs,” she said, not wanting to be rude. She got along with Riggs and his wife, Bobbie, but she didn’t enjoy spending time with them. The couple was obviously lonely and starved for attention from their children, as they droned on and on about their daughter who was a judge in some city in Georgia Janey had never heard of.

  If they weren’t talking about Karla, Bobbie had a story about their son in Barcelona, who did some great big important thing for a sports team there.

  As if both of those weren’t bad enough, Riggs couldn’t make it through a conversation without mentioning Janey’s summer fling with Billy, their youngest. Yes, Janey had enjoyed kissing him, because he was a year older than her and incredibly hot. He still was, as she’d looked him up last week after Bobbie had stopped by the cottage on the first night Janey and Tessa had been on Nantucket.

  She may have messaged him, just like she’d texted Sean Masterson.

  Tessa would lose her mind if she knew Janey was currently talking to four men. Even she couldn’t believe it.

  “So.” Riggs fell into step beside her, and Janey couldn’t believe she’d let her guard down. “What do you think about breakfast?”

  She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He’d obviously been talking while she’d been inside her own head, and she was at a severe disadvantage by not knowing what he’d said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “Tessa and I have so much to do today. Besides, she already had blueberry muffins in the oven when I left for my morning walk.”

  There was so much wrong with that sentence that Janey nearly scoffed at her own statement. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had cooked in the oven in the cottage. Birds probably nested in it.

  But Janey would say anything to get away from Riggs, who’d bring along an over-eager Bobbie.

  “Janey,” Tessa called, and relief rushed through her.

  “The muffins are probably done.” She gave Riggs her brightest, biggest smile, and lifted her hand to Tessa. “I’ll be right in for those blueberry muffins.”

  Thankfully, Tessa knew how to deal with Riggs too, and she added, “Okay, but we don’t have much time. We have to get all those boxes over to Good Will.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  There were no blueberry muffins and no boxes inside the cot
tage. Janey almost wished there was, so she’d have something to distract her from the carefully lined up items still on the kitchen table.

  “Are you okay?” Tessa asked once the door had been closed and locked.

  “Yes,” Janey said, keeping her back to her sister. She went to the fridge and got out a bottle of water. After uncapping it and taking a long drink, she asked, “Did you know the Michaels’ are leaving The Lighthouse Inn?”

  Tessa frowned and shook her head. “I didn’t know that.”

  As neither of them were island locals, Janey wasn’t surprised Tessa didn’t know.

  “What did Riggs want?” she asked.

  “Something about breakfast,” Janey said. “Thus why I said that about the blueberry muffins.”

  “We’re going to have to eat dinner with them one night,” Tessa said. “Might as well get it over with.”

  “Fine,” Janey said, because her sister was right. “But they have to host it. If we do it here, they’ll never leave.”

  “Agreed.” Tessa sat down at the table and reached for the twenty-eight-thousand-dollar check. “Half of this is yours.”

  “Thank you.” Janey sat down across from her sister but not in front of the red binder. “I need a new roof, and I can’t qualify for the loan to get it. That will pay for it.”

  Tessa looked up and met Janey’s eye. Nerves vibrated through her, along with plenty of embarrassment. Janey did her best to hold Tessa’s gaze though.

  Her phone rang, and Janey’s eyes flew to it. She couldn’t get it before Tessa saw Sean’s name on the screen, and Janey swiped the call to voicemail.

  “Are you going out with him?” she asked.

  “He invited me to dinner,” Janey said coolly. “I was considering it, yes.” The man was a few years older than her and a lawyer, for crying out loud. Tessa might not have to think about such things, but Janey did. All the time. He was handsome and employed, and Janey knew that combination didn’t come along every day.