Miles was sitting in my office when I came back from the morning walkthrough.

He'd taken the chair across from my desk, legs crossed, jacket folded neatly over the armrest. On a white bakery box in front of him sat a slice of lemon cake with a silver dessert fork laid beside it. It came from Marlowe's on Front Street, with candied peel on top and the glaze cracked at the edges.

It used to be my favorite.

"I didn't know if you'd eaten," he said. "You never do when you're stressed."

The week after Mom's funeral, he'd sat on the edge of my bed with a plate of exactly this and fed it to me one forkful at a time because I couldn't lift my arms. He'd wiped crumbs off my chin with his thumb. I'd thought nobody would ever love me that carefully again.

I stayed standing. "What do you want, Miles?"

He slid a thin document across the desk. The cover read *Temporary Authorization* in clean black type.

"Short-term financing support. Ninety days. You sign this, and I step back completely. No more emails to vendors, no more showing up at meetings. You run the hotel however you want." He met my eyes, and his voice softened. "I'm not asking you to marry me anymore, Brooke. I'm asking you to trust me one last time."

In my last life, eight months after the divorce, I'd called him because Mason had a fever and I couldn't reach anyone. He'd answered just long enough to tell me I didn't get to ask him for anything ever again.

I didn't touch the cake.

"I want to see the full terms," I said. "Every page. Not the summary."

He hesitated for half a second. Then he smiled and opened his briefcase.

The full agreement ran thirty-one pages. I sat down and read it while he sipped the coffee Tessa had brought him before she realized who it was for.

He wasn't wrong. There was no transfer of ownership. No equity changed hands.

But on page nine, Seabrook House agreed to let a "designated financing entity" pledge hotel assets as collateral. On page eleven, that permission couldn't be withdrawn by the company "absent the written consent of all secured parties."

I pressed my thumb into the corner of the page hard enough to leave a dent.

"This says Harbor Line can borrow against my hotel," I said. "And once I sign, I don't get to take it back."

"It's standard."

"Irrevocable is standard?"

"For a deal this size, yes." His fingers tightened around the coffee cup. "Investors need security. That's how financing works."

"Then answer one thing for me." I set the page down. "If your empire is worth millions, why does it keep needing my mother's hotel?"

His jaw shifted.

"Show me the other investors," I said. "Where their money comes from. What they've put up as collateral. If Seabrook House is backing this, I have a right to know who's standing next to it."

"You don't need to know that."

"I'm the one being asked to guarantee it."

"Brooke." He set the cup down too hard. "You're overthinking this."

That was the line he always reached for. Every time I'd asked about Harbor Line before, he'd had something ready. *Can we not talk about money during the honeymoon planning?* Or, *Why does it feel like you don't trust me?* Once he'd turned it into a conversation about whether I even wanted to marry him, and I'd spent the rest of the night apologizing.

I closed the folder.

"I'm not signing," I said. "And I'd like you to leave."

He let out a slow breath, like I was a child who'd thrown a tantrum and he'd decided to be the bigger person.

"I came here prepared to forgive you," he said. "For the rehearsal dinner. For humiliating me in front of Thornquist and half the investors on the East Coast. I was willing to let it go."

"That's generous."

His face changed.

He grabbed the agreement and slammed it onto the desk. The coffee cup tipped and rolled, and a brown stain spread across the blotter and soaked into the bottom edge of the pages. He didn't even glance at it.

"You have no idea what you're doing," he said. "Without me, this place rots. Slowly. One canceled booking at a time. And you'll stand in that lobby staring at your mother's empty wall wondering where it went wrong." He leaned over the desk. "Sloane at least understands ambition. She knows what it takes to build something. You just want to sit in the past and call it loyalty."

I didn't argue. I opened my drawer, took out the envelope Eleanor had prepared the night before, and pushed it across the wet desk to him.

"Formal notice," I said. "You are not authorized to represent that you have any right to use, pledge, or approve transactions involving Seabrook House assets. Not to lenders, not to investors, not to anyone."

He picked it up. I watched his eyes move down the first paragraph, then the second.

Then he laughed.

It wasn't the angry laugh from the ballroom. It was easy, almost amused, and it raised the hair on my arms.

"Brooke." He folded the letter in half and tucked it into his jacket like a receipt. "If you think refusing to sign stops this financing, you're more naive than I thought."

"What does that mean?"

He picked up his jacket and slung it over his shoulder.

"You really think your signature is the only one that matters?"

"Miles. Explain that."

He walked out. He left the cake behind.

---

Eleanor's office was the only lit window on the third floor of her building. She'd made tea neither of us drank.

The lender's copies had come in at five. She had them laid out on her conference table in two stacks, with red signature flags poking out of the pages like little tongues.

"Before we start," she said, "I need you to confirm something."

She slid a single sheet toward me. Mom's death certificate. I'd seen it once, three years ago, and then put it in a drawer and never looked again.

*Date of death: March 4.*

"That's right," I said. My voice came out thin.

Eleanor nodded and turned to the second stack. She opened it to a page marked with a red flag and laid it beside the certificate.

*Asset Pledge and Security Agreement.* Seabrook House parcels, equipment, and insurance proceeds, pledged as collateral to a Harbor Line financing vehicle.

At the bottom was my mother's signature.

The looping C. The way the k in Seabrook trailed off into a little tail because she always signed too fast. I'd watched her sign birthday cards like that. Permission slips. My first lease.

My chest locked tight.

Then I saw the date beside it.

*March 13.*

I put the death certificate and the agreement side by side and kept looking from one to the other, like the numbers might change if I waited long enough.

Those first weeks after she died, Miles had practically lived at my apartment. He made the calls I couldn't make. He sat with me at the funeral home. One night, he'd pulled a stack of envelopes out of my hands and said, "Let me deal with the estate paperwork, babe. You shouldn't have to think about any of this right now."

I'd been so grateful I cried.

"Brooke, your mother died nine days before this document was signed," Eleanor said quietly.

I pulled the agreement closer and flipped to the final page.

"Who witnessed it?"

Eleanor reached over and turned the document toward me.

"Look at the names."

Two lines, two signatures, two names printed underneath in neat block letters.

The first line read:

*Miles Grant Calloway.*

The second:

*Sloane Parker.*

I lifted my head.

"They used my dead mother's name?"

Eleanor set a records request letter on top of the file, already signed, the lender's address printed across the top.

"Brooke, someone forged your mother's signature."