Forever, Plus One

CHAPTER FIVE

Typically of Amy, Emily found herself being dragged into the most high-end, luxurious children’s store imaginable. It was all beech wood shelving and pastel-colored walls, hundred-dollar quilts and thousand-dollar christening gifts. It stocked everything from clothes and gadgets to baby furniture and ornaments.

“Amy, you can’t get me a gift from here,” Emily protested, glancing about her at all the beautiful items.

“Why not?” Amy retorted. “My best friend is having a baby. I can spoil you as much as I want. Now do you want something practical like a stroller or something lavish like this organic eco-friendly pacifier? Ooh look!” Amy cried, becoming instantly distracted and hurrying over to another shelf. “Biodegradable diapers.” She grabbed a packet and began reading off the back. “Hypo-allergenic materials. Rainforest alliance certified. Low toxins. No dyes.”

Emily felt a little overwhelmed by the choices available to her. She hadn’t even begun to think about toxins or allergens. She’d hardly even thought about diapers and pacifiers! She’d only just begun to wrap her head around the fact a baby the size of a raspberry was currently growing inside of her.

“How much stuff is this baby going to need?” Emily said, suddenly feeling anxious.

Amy looked at her friend, concerned. “Don’t start freaking out.”

“But I haven’t even begun to work it all out,” Emily replied, hearing her own voice rising with panic.

Amy sprung into action. She scooped an arm around Emily’s shoulder and led her to a plush Scandinavian-style nursing armchair – that cost $1,400 dollars, Emily read on the sign – and sat her down.

“Let’s make a list,” Amy said. She perched on the matching charcoal footstool opposite Emily and looked up. “There’s nothing like a list for clearing the mind.”

Emily shook her head. “I don’t need a list,” she said with a resigned giggle. “I’m just having a moment. It’s all so new and strange and… unexpected.”

“It wasn’t planned then?” Amy asked, curiously. “The baby, I mean?”

“Nope,” Emily confessed. “But if I did conceive on our honeymoon like we all seem to think, then it must have been the night before Daniel told me he wanted to start trying for a baby.” She chewed her lip, remembering how Daniel had booked the entire lighthouse restaurant in order to broach the subject in a beautiful and romantic way, and how terribly that moment had ended for them when she suddenly got cold feet. “Right before I told him I wasn’t ready.”

“Oh…” Amy said, wrinkling her nose. Her voice softened. “You didn’t want this to happen?”

“I did,” Emily said. “I changed my mind a couple of weeks later. I just needed some time to let it sink in. But I must have already been pregnant by then so I wonder if it was just the hormones changing my mind subliminally. And I think the damage was done by that point, for Daniel, I mean. He seemed glad when I told him I’d changed my mind again but I wonder whether he kept hold of a bit of resentment.”

“The pregnancy isn’t quite as happy a surprise for him as it is for you?” Amy asked.

Emily shrugged. She became aware of all the fears she’d been bottling up. “I was the more reticent but now that it’s here it feels so perfect and right. But Daniel just seems stressed. Like there’s something he’s not telling me. I was wondering if it was something to do with how much he missed out on Chantelle’s start in life. But he’s being typical Daniel about it. Not saying a word. Leaving me to speculate.”

Amy patted Emily’s hand. “I’m sorry, Em. That sounds hard. And you could do without that kind of stress right now.”

Emily smiled at her friend. “I actually feel a ton better now I’ve talked to you about it. It’s so nice having you here.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “So, Harry. Do you think this is the real deal?”

Amy blushed as the conversation turned, once again, toward her blossoming romance with Harry.

“It’s going really well,” she confessed. “We’re so different yet somehow so completely compatible.”

Emily grinned. “I always had a feeling you needed a younger man.”

“Oh, don’t remind me,” Amy said, rolling her eyes. “He’s only five years younger than me but it feels like a whole generation. I’ll mention some pop song that I liked in high school and he’ll tell me he remembers it from when he was ten! I mean he’s still closer to his twenties than his forties.”

“I don’t think thirty-six should be counted as being close to your forties,” Emily said, remembering her own classification as an older mother and the slight risk it posed her. She always felt a little sensitive when people brought up aging, even if accidentally.

“Fine,” Amy said. “But thirty-one sounds like a baby to me! I don’t like to think about it. Me hitting the big four-oh so much sooner than him.”

“You’re thinking that far ahead?” Emily asked, raising her eyebrows.

Amy shrugged. “I guess I am. I can’t help it. We just click. It’s like everything is easy, you know. Even the arguments don’t feel that bad because I just have this sense that we’ll work it out.”

“That’s amazing,” Emily said, smiling to herself. Amy’s description sounded just like her own relationship with Daniel. It wasn’t easy, there were still challenges, but there was a pervading sense that they would make it work no matter what. “But what do you argue about?”

“Time,” Amy said. “Distance. Obviously.”

“Yeah, what’s going to happen with that?” Emily asked. “Do you think you’ll move here? Or Harry to New York City?”

“I don’t know. I’m here for the summer now so I’m just going to think about that. I needed to get out of the city for a bit anyway. I guess I’ll see how I feel about it after having spent a couple of months here. The back and forth wasn’t fun but I wonder if once the initial passion stage dies down a bit the long distance might not be so much of an issue anymore.”

Emily laughed. “It’s so funny hearing you speak like this. There was a point when a weekend was too long for you here.”

Amy looked embarrassed. “Well, it was,” she said defensively. “Back then. Things are different now.”

“You’re in love,” Emily pointed out. “Now you know why I had to stay here.”

Amy nodded reluctantly. She hated being wrong.

Just then, the store woman came over. “I’m sorry, ladies,” she said, “but we’re closing now. Did you want to purchase anything before I shut down the till?”

“No thanks,” Emily said at exactly the same time as Amy said, “Yes.”

Emily looked at her friend, frowning with confusion.

“We’ll have this nursing seat,” Amy said.

“Ames, no way!” Emily cried. “It’s so expensive!”

Amy shook her head. “It’s fine. You deserve it. And it already has significance to us. We had a good heart-to-heart on this very chair. We can’t not take it now that it has such sentimental value.”

Emily held her hands up, relenting. There was no point arguing with Amy over this. Best to just let her friend go all out. Treating her friends was one of her great pleasures in life after all.

They paid for the chair and loaded it into the back of Amy’s car. Emily noticed as she got in the passenger’s seat that she had a missed call from the inn. She checked her voicemail. It was Lois.

“Sorry to disturb you, Emily, but the Erik & Sons men are here. They said they had a meeting booked with you. A tour of Trevor’s house. Daniel says you have the keys so he can’t let them in.”

“Oh no!” Emily cried. “Amy, floor it. I’m late for a meeting!”

CHAPTER SIX

The echo inside Trevor’s house made Emily shudder. It felt so empty and unlived in. So devoid of humanness.

Wayne Erik drew up to Emily’s side. “It’s a beautiful place,” he said. “Trevor kept it in great condition.”

“It was his summer home for many years before he moved in full time,” Emily explained. “That might account for the lack of wear and tear.”

That and the fact that Trevor hadn’t really had anyone in his life; no family or friends to visit him. He’d rattled around in that big house alone for years. Emily wondered whether her father lived a similar type of existence. Elderly and alone. Maybe he had neighbors who thought he’d been abandoned by his family, who worried about him getting lonely. The thought made her ache inside.

Daniel came up next to her and touched her elbow lightly. “Are you okay?” he asked softly.

Emily nodded. “I just get so sad when I come here,” she explained.

Daniel scooped his arm around her shoulder. “I know. It’s a good thing that we’re transforming it. Although I know it doesn’t always feel like we’re doing the right thing by stripping Trevor from this place. But you did it with the inn, remember, and that was ultimately the best decision.”

“You’re right,” Emily agreed.

They held hands as they walked through the house together with the architects, stopping periodically to study their plans and compare them with the real thing. The Erik brothers had drawn up several options for how to convert the house, depending on how many rooms Emily and Daniel decided on as guest bedrooms, how big they wanted the restaurant and open-plan kitchen area to be, and how much they were willing to spend. The cheapest option involved doing the least amount of work, keeping at many of the original internal walls in place as possible, but Emily was certain she wanted the entirety of the lower floor to be completely open plan, which was only a feature on the most expensive option. From a business plan point of view, they also had to factor in the increase of income from having more rooms to rent out, but Emily didn’t want to just cram in as many as possible. The third floor of the inn already had dozens of smaller, cheaper rooms. Emily wanted this part of the inn to be luxurious, high end, something that would really dazzle visitors.

They stopped in the kitchen and looked over the three plans.

“I want this to be the lower floor,” Emily explained, pointing at Wayne’s creation for the kitchen and restaurant. “But this for the rooms.” She pointed at Cain’s third-floor plan with just three apartment-style rooms that could accommodate families with space for a living room and separate bathroom in each apartment. “I like how you’ve laid them out so that each one has an ocean view.”

Daniel seemed to agree, though Emily noticed his focus was much more on the cost of things. It hadn’t escaped his notice that she’d chosen the most expensive downstairs option and the least lucrative upstairs option.

“And what about the second floor?” Wayne Erik asked.

“I can’t decide,” Emily explained. More bedrooms as per Shane’s design? Or more restaurant space as per Wayne’s? “What if we were to replicate the third floor on the second?” she said. “A carbon copy?”

Daniel frowned. “But then there would only be six apartments in the whole house,” he interjected.

“I know,” Emily explained. “But think of it in terms of the revenue from the higher price of the apartments. Right now there’s only one place for families to stay, which is the carriage house. But Bryony said there was so much demand coming in from families who want to spend the summer in Sunset Harbor. If we convert this into the family-friendly part of the inn it would be a great selling point. Plus, if we do it this way then every room can be advertised as having an ocean view! That would be an amazing selling point too.”

“I can see what you’re saying,” Daniel said, not sounding even the slightest bit convinced. “But I can’t help feeling like that’s not the best use of the space.”

“We’d only need to have six families each summer to get fully booked,” Emily contested.

“We don’t want to get fully booked from six families,” Daniel countered. “If there’s so much demand, why not double the amount of apartments? Income from twelve families is going to be better than just from six!”

Emily rubbed her forehead. She didn’t just want to pack the inn to the brim. And more people traipsing in and out would mean hiring more staff to care for them. They would cause more damage and wear and tear that she’d need to account for. The costs would be eradicated through the amount of cleaning, reupholstering and towel washing alone!

“We can always go back to the drawing board,” Wayne said. “Find a compromise that’s somewhere between your two ideas.”

“Like what?” Emily asked, not sure that there could be a compromise to satisfy both her desire to keep the inn feeling personal while making it as luxurious as possible with Daniel’s wish for a more stable income.

“We could make six smaller apartments on the second floor,” he said. “Then you can get a range of prices as well.”

“But what about the ocean views?” Emily asked. She desperately wanted every room to look out over the gorgeous sea.

“We could try to design them so that as many as possible had a view. But it would be impossible for all of them to. Probably three. Four at the most.”

Emily knew that it would make things a little more complicated when it came to the booking forms on the website, but Bryony would probably relish the challenge so that shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

Wayne spoke again. “Why don’t we create the new designs over the next few days and you can see what you think?”

Emily looked at Daniel for an opinion. He just gave a little shrug. She turned back to Wayne.

“We may as well try some new designs,” she said.

“Sure,” Wayne replied. “The rest of the work we can get started on right away, though.”

“When do you think we’ll be able to get all the work done by?” Daniel asked.

Wayne Erik looked down at the plans spread on the table and pondered. “Considering we’re going to redraw this floor,” he said, pointing at the second floor, “we’re probably looking at Labor Day for the whole thing to be complete.”

“That soon?” Emily asked, surprised. She’d been expecting years of work.

“Yes, for this place,” Wayne explained. “For the spa over at the inn it may take a little longer as you’ll need different constructors in there. Pool specialists and the like.”

Emily had quite forgotten about Chantelle’s spa plan to transform the empty old swimming pool. She realized then that they hadn’t yet looked at the brothers’ options for converting that place

“Can we look over those designs now?” Emily asked.

“Of course,” Wayne said.

“We should fetch Chantelle,” Emily said to Daniel. “It was her idea, she should be involved.”

They left Trevor’s house and collected Chantelle from the inn. Then they all went into the dark, unused outhouse that stood on the inn’s grounds. It was cold inside, despite the warm weather, dark and filled with shadows. Emily was glad for the sensation of Chantelle’s warm hand in hers, and drew comfort from it.

The brothers produced their plans for Emily, Chantelle, and Daniel to consider. The most impressive (and, once again, the most expensive) was to convert the space into a part indoor and part outdoor spa, overlooking the ocean. The barn area in that specific design would have two floors, a spiral staircase connecting the two, and the top floor containing an infinity pool with views of the oceans.

“I can’t resist the staircase,” Emily said. She’d wanted one ever since she’d set eyes on the yacht club’s.

Daniel grew animated then. “We could design it. The team at Jack Cooper’s, I mean. We’ve done spiral staircases before and it would help keep costs down. In fact”—he looked again at the plans and Wayne’s lightly scribbled notes—“we could do this paneling work here as well. The changing area doors. The reception desk.”

He looked excited by the prospect and Emily was glad to see that glint in his eye once more. He’d seemed so stressed recently it was good to just see him enthusiastic again.