Tess had been coming to Wharton to visit her grandmother ever since she could remember, but her ancestors had built the home generations ago, when Wharton itself was new. Tess’s father and uncle had grown up there, as had their father and grandfather.
After her grandmother’s passing more than a decade prior, Tess and her parents had used the house as a vacation home. But Tess’s parents had moved to Florida permanently a few years ago, after having been snowbirds there for years before retirement, so Tess and her son, Eli, who would turn twenty-two this year, were the only ones who used the house these days.
Built a century earlier, the house was a regal Queen Anne, with dusty-green siding, a wraparound front porch, a turret, and a deeply pitched roof. Tess had spent her childhood exploring its endless nooks and crannies.
The main part of the home had five bedrooms, seven fireplaces, and six baths. The house, known as La Belle Vie, or “beautiful life” in French, and a play on their last name, sat on the hill in Wharton, overlooking the harbor below.
Turning the place into a bed-and-breakfast seemed like a perfect fit. Tess had always loved her time in Wharton. She had also loved her career in hospitality, first as a server and then as a chef. And she loved hosting people for dinner or a weekend. Being an innkeeper in this home in Wharton would allow her to combine all those loves. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of it earlier.
With her parents’ enthusiastic blessing, Tess had packed up and moved to La Belle Vie as summer faded into fall. A new chapter. A new life.
The first order of business had been getting herself unpacked and deciding how to configure the house for guests. A large room had been shuttered generations ago—the door permanently bolted. The windows to the outside were shuttered in black. From the backyard, Tess could tell it was either one massive room or a cluster of rooms, but she had never seen the inside.
Tess wasn’t sure why it had been closed off. It was just the way things were. Her grandmother had said something about the whole place being too expensive to heat in the winter, so that was why she shut up the back of the house. But that had never really made sense to Tess.
When Tess’s parents inherited it after her grandparents had both passed away, heating the house in the winter wasn’t an issue because they didn’t live there year round. In any case, that wing had remained shuttered. Her plan was to open it up and handle whatever needed handling—rot, mold, rodents （oh, please, no）， remodeling, whatever—and use that part of the house for herself when guests were in residence. An owner’s suite.
Back on the bench in front of the bay window, she watched the snow and thought about a conversation she’d had months before with Simon Granger, her longtime friend who owned the most magnificent inn in Wharton, Harrison’s House, just a few blocks away. Simon and Tess had grown up together, spending summers in their families’ homes. He had turned Harrison House into an inn after his grandmother passed away more than a decade prior.
“It’s about time,” he had said when she told him about her plans for La Belle Vie. “You’ll have the house to yourself in the winter, if you don’t escape to Hawaii or Palm Springs like any other sane person. In the summer and fall, your guests will fund your life. You get to live in a place you love and make a living, too. Just like I do. It’s perfect!”
She had agreed. It was perfect. As soon as she was ready for those guests who would be “funding her life,” Simon would funnel them to her until she built up a following of her own. His inn was always at capacity, always turning people away. His recommendations would give Tess all the business she could accommodate, and then some.
In the fall, Simon and his husband, Jonathan, had taken Tess on an antiquing trip to replace her family’s rather dated furniture with lovely and gracious pieces like bedroom sets and mirrors that would better reflect the period of the home. The main part of the house, where guests would stay, was all but finished, the bedrooms outfitted with gorgeous ornate bedroom sets from another time, interesting and delicate stained-glass lamps, and touches like silver hairbrush sets that women of the past would’ve used before bedtime.
Now it was time to tackle the shuttered part of the house, to create her sanctuary. Tess had figured winter would be the perfect time to do that.
And, as she settled back down onto the window seat and watched the snow accumulate outside, she knew the time had come to start that project. The first step was opening it up. But every time she thought about it, she noticed a gnarling in the pit of her stomach. Why didn’t she want to do it?