In truth, there wasn’t much Dylan could do for any of these patients.
“Why?” He looked up from the files.
“Because you’re going to be the man in charge around here sooner or later. Sooner if I have my way.”
“What?”
Dad leaned forward. “I’ve been working my tail off here and at the clinic for almost thirty years. While I plan to keep seeing patients, I also want to step back a little and enjoy life. After your mother died, I buried myself in work and the job of raising you. When you left for college, I doubled down on the work just to keep loneliness at bay.
“It’s time for me to kick back and do some traveling. Brenda and I want to go to Italy for our honeymoon. We’re thinking about taking a whole month off. Which is why I need you to start looking after some of these patients.”
“You’re taking a month off?”
“Yeah. We’re making the plans now. And that’s another thing. Our practice has gotten larger over the years, what with the new developments up the coast. I think we need to consider adding a nurse practitioner.”
Dylan was so surprised he could hardly wrap his brain around what Dad was saying. Was Dad abandoning him in every way?
“I know,” Dad said. “No one will believe it until we leave for the airport. But trust me, the reservations have been made, so it’s time for you to start planning for my vacation.”
“I always thought you wanted to go to Ireland.”
“I do, but Italy is on Brenda’s bucket list.”
Damn that woman. What was she doing to his father?
* * *
Ashley Scott, the owner of Howland House, Magnolia Harbor’s five-star bed-and-breakfast, laid her grandmother’s cake plates on the quartz countertop. She’d placed the squares of Mississippi mud cake she’d made this morning on the serving platter Grandmother had always used for sheet cakes. Then she laid out dessert forks and cloth napkins.
The Piece Makers, Grandmother’s quilting group, which Ashley had inherited along with Howland House after her grandmother’s death, would be arriving any minute. And the ladies had been served scratch-made cake for literally decades.
Grandmother had started the quilting group back in 1942, not long after Pearl Harbor. Many of the original quilters had passed on, but their daughters, all of whom were senior citizens now, had continued on. Ashley was a third-generation quilter—the only third-generation quilter, although Jenna St. Pierre joined them every once in a while.
And sometimes, like right this minute, she wished she hadn’t inherited the group. The ladies gossiped the way some people breathed. And to a woman, they all expected her to bake a cake every week. Just like her grandmother had.
Maybe she was being hard on them. When Ashley had first come to live with her grandmother, right after her husband, Adam, had been killed in action in Afghanistan, baking those cakes had been a distraction from her grief.
But things had changed. After Grandmother passed, she’d been forced to turn Howland House into a B&B just to make ends meet. Now that she’d become a successful businesswoman, with guests coming and going, the weekly Tuesday-evening meetings had become one more thing she had to manage.
And sadly, she was still missing Adam as if he had died just weeks and not years ago. That grief had settled into her and showed no sign of ever leaving. She hated to think about how many nights she still cried herself to sleep.
She turned away from the cake and dashed up the stairs to the third floor. “Homework done?” she asked her nine-year-old son, Jackie, who was propped up in his bed reading a graphic novel about Blackbeard, the pirate.
“Yup.” He looked up from the page and gave her a metal grin. It seemed ridiculous that he needed braces at the tender age of nine. They made him look older. Her boy was growing up.
Although, judging by his reading material, he’d not yet grown out of his fascination with pirates. At least he wasn’t reading about the infamous William Teal, who had lost his life during the 1713 hurricane as he was trying to return to Rose Howland, his lady love.
Rose, Ashley’s six-times-great-grandmother or some such thing, was widely regarded as the town’s founding mother. According to local legend, she’d mourned Captain Teal so profoundly that she’d planted daffodils all over the island in his memory. The wild daffodils still bloomed every year in late February, giving Jonquil Island—the sea island where Magnolia Harbor was located—its name.
“There’s Mississippi mud cake downstairs. You can come on down after the ladies arrive and help yourself to a piece,” she said to her son.
“Thanks,” Jackie said before turning his attention back to his picture book. He read more than graphic novels these days. In fact, he was turning into a bookworm. She supposed there were worse things, but she wondered what Adam might think about his bookish son. Jackie was not a chip off the old block, even though he reminded Ashley of Adam sometimes when he cocked his head just so.
Ashley left her son and returned downstairs just as the first quilters began to arrive. For the next twenty minutes, she served cake and coffee and listened to the local gossip.
Barbara Blackwood grumped about her granddaughter Jessica, who was insisting on a small October wedding instead of the June extravaganza Barbara wanted. But what else was new? Barbara lived to complain.
Barbara’s sister, Donna Cuthbert, didn’t complain as much as Barbara. She gossiped instead. She had juicy news about Bobby Don Ayers, who was apparently seeing Lessie Snow, Dr. Killough’s receptionist, on the down low.
“And what about you?” Donna asked, placing her cake plate on the kitchen counter and turning toward Nancy, whose eyes grew round behind her glasses.
“I’m not seeing anyone on the down low,” Nancy said in a voice that was slightly louder than
