wasn’t until Wyatt had said it that way that she realized that was the way she would prefer to deal with Uncle Dan’s passing, too. Antiseptically. The other word, the D-word, was far too raw and final for her to utter right now.
Pushing ahead, Alex focused on what Wyatt had begun to say. “What was he working on?”
Wyatt’s smile made her feel a little uneasy, although she couldn’t have explained why.
“My father was writing a history of the inn.”
That wasn’t the kind of story Dan usually worked on, she couldn’t help thinking. He wrote things that wound up on the front page, or of late, in a blog and sometimes in front of a camera. This sounded as if he was working on a book.
“What inn?” she asked, confused.
Was she serious? Wyatt wondered. So, she hadn’t known, either. That seemed rather strange. But then, his father had only told him last week—just before he’d extracted that promise from him.
“This inn.”
Alex stared at him. “This isn’t some practical joke, is it? Uncle Dan was just here a few weeks ago. He never mentioned this to me.... You’re serious?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because I didn’t know anything about it,” she snapped.
Ah, he thought. So that’s it. She’s upset because she knew everything that was going on at the inn at any given time.
And she hadn’t known about this.
Of course that would bother her almost as much as his surprising her with a funeral here without any advance warning. No matter what he did and for what reason, he upset her. Always had, and he didn’t see a way around it.
“He got all sorts of notes from your father when he got started,” Wyatt said, proving just how committed his father had been to the project. “Letters, files, photographs, copies of old ledgers...”
Her jaw dropped.
He hesitated before adding, “If you didn’t know about it, maybe it was supposed to be a surprise.” All he knew was that his father had asked him to finish it for him, and he’d said the publisher had given him a deadline, which he was to try to keep to.
“A surprise? For whom?” she asked incredulously.
Wyatt said the first thing that occurred to him. “For the rest of you. You and your sisters. I think he envisioned it as a sort of commemorative book on the bed-and-breakfast’s 120th anniversary next year.”
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