Their mother’s insurance had covered the funeral and little else.
Hannah had never resented helping her brother, yet she sometimes feared that every bill arriving in the mail was proof she would never escape a life spent reacting to emergencies.
“I’ll pick up warehouse shifts,” Noah said.
“You can’t skip your final exams.”
“You can’t carry both of us forever.”
She sat across from him.
“I don’t intend to.”
For the first time, they made a budget without pretending the numbers would repair themselves.
They discovered they had enough for ten days of groceries if they stopped buying lunches and delayed the phone bill.
Hannah promised to apply for work the next morning.
Noah promised to finish his project.
Neither promised that everything would be fine.
That was the most honest conversation they had shared in months.
Chapter 6: Simon’s Reason
Simon Weller lived in a narrow brick house near Beacon Hill rather than the waterfront estate newspapers liked to imagine.
He kept the kitchen unchanged from the years when his wife was alive, right down to a chipped yellow teapot.
Miriam found him the next morning reading a folder marked with the names of twelve bidders.
“You could have left the restaurant quietly,” she told him.
“I could have.”
“Instead, you stopped a very large transaction.”
Simon closed the folder.
“I stopped a transaction that had not earned my trust.”
Miriam had represented the Weller Trust for fourteen years.
She knew Simon’s stubbornness could become dangerous when grief or principle made him forget the practical consequences of delay.
The trust’s harbor holdings needed repairs, and every month without a lease cost money that could have funded scholarships and shoreline maintenance.
“The board will want a precise explanation,” she said.
“Give them one.”
“A server’s dismissal is serious, but it isn’t automatically grounds to reject twelve qualified bidders.”
Simon turned a photograph toward her.
It showed the old Harbor Exchange building before the windows had been covered with advertisements.
“Do you remember my father’s first rule?” he asked.
“Access must remain public.”
“His second rule.”
Miriam frowned.
“A lease is a promise to people who will never sign it.”
Simon nodded.
“Every one of those bidders wants a piece of our shoreline.”
“I needed to see whether they could recognize a person without money as someone who belonged.”
Miriam did not entirely agree with his method.
She believed governance required evidence, not tests arranged in dining rooms.
But she also knew Charles Voss had recently requested a private amendment that would move a public walkway behind a hotel lobby.
