"Dad," Hope said, leaning forward, "that lady looks worried." Ethan slowed the pickup. "Looks that way." "Are we going to help?" she asked. He glanced at the grocery bags, the clock, and the sky that was darkening too quickly. Then he looked at Hope, whose face held the simple expectation of someone who had never once heard him say that helping people was only for days when it was convenient.
"Yeah, honey," he said. "We're going to help."
Evelyn Hartwell had spent the last twelve hours being thanked for things she was no longer certain she believed in. At breakfast, the hotel manager had complimented her on the centerpieces for the Winter Lights Gala, although a florist had selected every arrangement. At lunch, three members of the Hartwell Community Trust board had congratulated her on the projected fundraising total, even though the pledges had not yet come in. By midafternoon, a photographer had asked her to stand beneath the portrait of her late mother, Margaret, while two donors discussed whether the hotel's new suite rates were high enough.
Evelyn was forty-one, a little too accustomed to holding her expression steady while other people spoke around her, and tired of being told that her family's success made ordinary rules irrelevant. She served as chief executive of Hartwell Hospitality Group, which operated six historic hotels across New England, including the Grand Alder. Her position had never been a ceremonial inheritance; she had worked fourteen years in hotel operations, studied finance at night, and led the renovation that had kept the Grand Alder from closing during a disastrous winter. But people who did not know that history preferred to call her lucky.
Five years earlier, her mother had died after a sudden stroke. Margaret Hartwell had been the warm center of the family's charitable work, a woman who could remember the names of housekeepers' children and preferred listening to a soup kitchen volunteer over speaking at a donor luncheon. The Lantern House had been her favorite project. Margaret used to arrive there without warning carrying grocery bags, sit at a classroom table, and read with the children until someone reminded her she was supposed to be chairing a meeting across town.
Evelyn had admired that ease without knowing how to imitate it. Her childhood had been spent in expensive places, but Margaret had refused to let her believe that expensive meant better. She took Evelyn to the Lantern House when she was ten and asked her to help set out chairs. When the little girl complained that none of the tables matched, Margaret told her that people were not coming to eat furniture, a sentence Evelyn had never forgotten but had not always lived by.
After Margaret's death, the trust board had grown more formal. Dinner meetings moved from the community center to the hotel's private dining room, and the reports became thicker while the visits to the Lantern House grew less frequent. Nolan Pierce joined the finance committee after promising a major gift, then offered to advise the trust on property values and investment strategy. He was handsome in a polished, deliberate way, spoke softly while disagreeing with people, and understood that an argument about efficiency could hide almost any ambition.