Page 12 of The Weekend Crashers
Maggie takes the key, but seems to be eyeing the front door.
“Our welcome tea begins in an hour,” Belinda says. “And our on-site restaurant is right down that corridor, and they have a full-service bar. Please order some refreshments on the house.”
The young blonde woman reaches for the keys. “Thank you. I’m Piper, by the way. Maggie’s daughter.”
Belinda wouldn’t have assumed that. They don’t look alike. Or maybe she’s just unskilled at noting that sort of thing. She and Max don’t have any children. The inn is their baby.
Maggie follows her daughter’s lead and heads to the stairs without another word to Belinda.
Not a great start to the weekend.
Chapter Eight
Piper opens the door to the guest room, Maggie just one step behind her. The walls are a muted sage color with off-white crown moldings. It has polished wood floors and two full-sized beds with crisp white linens and patchwork quilts. Ornate frames containing sepia-toned prints of historical New Hope decorate the walls. A sideboard table features an antique porcelain teapot and a copper clock.
Piper doesn’t understand why the bachelor party triggered her mother so badly. Personally, she thinks the guys add to the festive atmosphere. She couldn’t help but notice one is about her age and looks like the actor Austin Butler. The world is full of attractive men.
“Well, this is more what I’d expected,” Maggie says, and Piper is relieved. Back on track for a good weekend. Maggie walks into the bathroom and calls out, “Oh, Piper. Come in here—there’s a clawfoot tub!”
“In a sec,” she says, flopping onto one of the beds. She didn’t sleep enough last night.
She woke up at two in the morning thinking about Gretchen, about what happened at the Betsy Toledo show. And about Ethan and the disappearing engagement ring.
The irony is that she has this whole weekend with hermother, someone she usually talks to about everything, and she can’t talk to her about this. If she admits to Maggie that she’s fretting about an engagement ring, she knows what her mother will say:You’re too young, you should be focused on your career, now’s the time... live it up.The subtext of all of this being,Don’t make the mistakes I made.
“Have you had time to look at the workshop itinerary?” Maggie asks, sitting on her bed with a hank of burgundy yarn that she starts winding around her knees. Her mother always insists on hand-winding instead of investing in a yarn spinner. She told Piper that the act of winding it before knitting a project creates a sense of intimacy with the yarn that she finds integral to the whole process.
“Not yet.”
“We have a welcome tea in an hour and then an all-day yarn market. I signed us up for Know Your Yarn, a lacework class, and Beginner’s Brioche. I texted you a link. They have the instructors’ bios listed, too.”
Piper picks up her phone, sends Ethan a check-in text telling him they made it and that the inn is “super cute” and that she’ll talk to him later.
“Hey, why does this name sound familiar?” Maggie says, squinting at her phone screen.
“What name?”
“This instructor. Hannah Elise.”
“Wait,” Piper says, pulling up the retreat on her own phone and scrolling through it. “Hannah Elise is teaching here?”
“That’s what it says. Do we know her?”
Hannah Elise is a crochet designer whose edgy knitwear made her famous on TikTok. Her pieces are intricate and bold, with cutouts placed strategically to accentuate curves and bright color-blocking that made even the simplest pieces stand out.
“From TikTok,” Piper says. “@HaloHannahKnits. I’ve sent you her videos.”
“Oh, right. I like her stuff.”
“I can’t believe she’s here,” Piper says. She never imagined she’d have to go to New Hope, Pennsylvania, to meet Hannah Elise from Brooklyn. She follows the link to the classes she’s teaching. It appears she’s mostly doing crochet workshops, not knitting.
“Let’s learn crochet,” Piper says.
Maggie looks up from her winding. “We only have a few days here. I think we should focus on the advanced knitting workshops.”
Their first disagreement of the weekend. Piper is eager to meet Hannah Elise, but she’ll try to do things Maggie’s way for the next few days. Judging from her overreaction to the bachelor party, her mother needs some R & R. And really, this whole weekend is a gift. Piper shouldn’t be a brat about it.
“Sounds good,” she says. “Wanna go check out the yarn market?”
