from having to deliver her dreaded news. Just because she’d decided to stay in Moonflower Bay didn’t mean she wasn’t full of mixed feelings. She’d decided to take a path that would close off another path. It was a sad thing. It was going to upset Erin.
“Dad found Grandma’s will.”
“Oh, good.” There had been some confusion over the will. While Grandma was in the hospital and starting to fade, she had started insisting that she’d recently updated her will and that they needed to be sure they were using the new one. But then no one had been able to find it.
“It was in her breadbox with that pastry knife thing your friend there gave her.”
“Pearl?” Nora chuckled. “And what does it say? Any surprises?”
“She left me her condo. Just me.”
“Oh. Okay.” Nora didn’t know what Grandma had been planning to do with her condo to begin with. If she’d thought about it, she would have guessed it would have gone to her dad.
“There was a note about you and Alex not needing it.” Their older brother Alex was a successful—and wealthy—anesthesiologist with a lawyer wife and no kids. “Which is strange, because she knew about our plan to buy a place together. So anyway, it’s weird, but we’ll just sell it and put the money into our shared pot. I talked to Alex, and he doesn’t care.” She snorted. “Alex, okay, but I can’t imagine what Grandma was thinking saying you didn’t need any money.”
Nora laughed. She could. She could also imagine her grandma fitting right in with the meddling matchmakers of Moonflower Bay. Hell, for all she knew, she’d consulted Pearl. Maybe that was why the will had been in the breadbox.
“I had an agent out for an appraisal, and she thinks we can get six hundred grand for it. So that’s it. Our fairy godmother has delivered. I know part of your whole ‘Nora moves to small-town Canada’ plan was emotional, or a time-out or whatever, but just be done with that part, okay? We’ve got our down payment, so just come home.”
Oh boy. Nora sucked in a breath.
“What?” Erin said.
“I, ah, have a couple things to tell you.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Nora was feeling better—but she also wasn’t feeling better. The first-trimester morning sickness was gone, and she felt good physically. But getting through the rest of the week after she’d told Jake had been hard.
But she had done it. She’d seen all her patients. Jacques was really getting the hang of things. They’d had calls from some schools in the region asking about flu clinics for next season.
She had also met with a real estate agent and was about to make an offer on a cute little place near Art and Jamila’s house. Eve had assured her she could stay at the Mermaid indefinitely, but Nora wanted to get her own place established before the baby was born in October.
Things were okay with Erin, too. She had been shocked by Nora’s news, but she’d recovered quickly, and was currently at work trying to convince Nora that they should still buy a place together—but that it should be a cottage on the lake so the cousins could still grow up together on weekends and in the summer. Nora had told her she needed to get her main housing sorted out before she could worry about a second place, but Erin had resumed her habit of sending real estate listings. They were all sweet little lake cottages in and around Moonflower Bay. None of them were as sweet as Jake’s place, though.
Erin was like a dog with a bone over the Jake question, but she’d finally let it go when Nora had sketched out the details of their last conversation. Now she probably had a Jake voodoo doll to go with her Rufus voodoo doll. Her mom was planning to take a short leave from work to come and stay for a few weeks after the baby was born.
And the baby. Her baby. She was having a baby!
She had a midwife in Grand View, and everything was looking good. She had an appointment for her twenty-week ultrasound and was trying to decide if she wanted to find out the gender at that point or if she wanted to be surprised.
It was all good. Mostly.
It was also…a lot. Thankfully, she had Eve and Maya by her side every step of the way. One of them was in the waiting room of the clinic at the end of every day—sometimes both of