Room at the Inn

“You couldn’t just give it to me.”

“I’m Leo Potter. I can do anything I please.”

Carson made a choked sound that was supposed to be a laugh and came out more like a sob. God, what was wrong with him? He felt like he was being crushed, pressed flat by an enormous weight. He’d stayed here too long, gotten himself in too deep, and now he was drowning, and no one had told him the water would be so heavy. No one had told him it would hurt this fucking much.

“I can’t fix it.”

“I’ve seen the projects you’ve worked on. Bring in the right architect, find the right contractors, and you’re perfectly capable of handling it.”

“I can’t be who you want me to be.”

He meant any of them. His parents. Julie. Leo.

“You already are,” Leo said mildly. “You just have to talk yourself into believing it.”

Carson got out of the car. He didn’t know where he was going. He just needed to move.

He walked toward the water, gazing up at the empty windows of the factory.

This town is dying.

So was your mother.

Julie had given her a kidney and another fifteen years.

Leo was trying to give him the factory.

A second chance.

You decided small accomplishments don’t count.

But of course they did count. Julie’s counted. There was nothing small about what she did—she healed people and fixed things. Julie Long had planted herself in Potter Falls sixteen years ago, and here she flourished. She’d opened an inn, and the world came to her.

Whereas Carson kept flinging himself out into the cold, alone, barking orders in an effort to make things happen. To make things better.

Only it didn’t ever get better. What had he accomplished that someone else couldn’t have done just as well?

Leo’s stupid theory—it was the truth. He’d needed to get out of Potter Falls because of his dad. Because a fierce ambition and a desire to prove himself to Martin Vance had pulled him out into the world.

It had been so long since he felt that pull. That wanderlust. Years since he woke up in the morning excited to build something. He’d never been to Dubai, and he didn’t give a damn.

But the factory—he wanted to see the goddamn factory fixed up.

He wanted to see Julie’s house in the spring, to put a new coat of paint on the shutters in the summer, and to risk his ass on her steep roof cleaning out the gutters in the fall.

He wanted to hold her in the morning in her deep, soft, warm bed and smell her coconut shampoo and feel that belonging, that rightness he’d only ever found with her.

He wanted it, but he didn’t know how to take it.

Leo’s shoes crunched over the frozen snow that covered the river rocks.

Carson was tired of getting in his own way. Tired of working hard all the time and changing nothing. Tired of always moving away from where he longed to be.

“Give the factory to Julie,” he said.

Leo told him, “Give it to her yourself.”

Chapter Thirteen