The Discarded Heiress Returns novel · Chapter 8 of 32
Chapter 8: Room Nine
"Come inside before the frogs hear you," I said.
Dorrie stepped into the kitchen and stopped.
She looked at the yellow walls, the little TV over the stove, the card table with Nana's deck still on it.
She hadn't stood in this room in eight years.
My mother's rule. Dorrie could call her father. She could meet him for breakfast on the mainland. She could not go back to the motel.
"It's smaller," Dorrie said.
"You got taller."
"I got an inch. She bought me heels for the rest."
I put a plate of cold hush puppies in front of her.
She ate four standing up, the way Nana hated.
Then she opened her laptop on the card table and turned it around to face me.
"Ballantyne Hotels owes ninety million dollars," she said.
I sat down.
"Four hotels, and every one of them is mortgaged twice. The flagship is mortgaged three times."
"How?"
"She's been paying for the life with the buildings. The parties. The house. The plane she leases so she doesn't have to fly with people." Dorrie pushed her glasses up. "I'm the only one who sees the books. She thinks I can't read them."
"Can you?"
"I won the state science fair at sixteen. I can read a spreadsheet."
"I meant can you stand it."
She didn't answer that.
"The resort is her lifeline," she said instead. "Three hundred rooms on the beach with her name on top. The lenders will give her one more year if it breaks ground. If it doesn't, they call everything."
"And the Lantern's in the middle."
"And the Lantern's in the middle."
She clicked to a new file.
It was a letter on an engineering firm's letterhead.
"This is going to the county," Dorrie said. "It says your pilings are rotted through and the back deck could collapse. Unsafe for occupancy."
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