Page 18 of The Cottage on Blueberry Bay

That’s where all my child support went,she wanted to say, but she bit her tongue. The woman wouldn’t understand the sarcasm and would think it disrespectful to make fun of the dead. She obviously thought higher of Jacob than Meredith did.

“So do you live in Blueberry Bay?” Meredith asked, changing the conversation like a natural. Meredith had learned how to talk to anyone through the firm. Her secret weapon was to let other people talk about themselves. People loved talking about themselves. “It’s such a beautiful village.”

“We do love our tiny seaside village,” Ginny said. “We take great pride in our community.”

“The public garden by the pier is gorgeous,” Meredith said, and she meant the compliment. “It’s done beautifully.”

“That’s all our gardening club, the Queen Bees,” Ginny said.

Meredith smiled at the woman. She seemed friendly enough but older than what Meredith would expect for someone working as an assistant in an attorney’s office.

“You’ll be glad to be a resident soon enough,” Ginny said. “You’ll love living here, even if you only stay during the summers like most people.”

“Oh, no.” Meredith started shaking her head. “I’m selling Jacob’s place.”

“What?” The woman’s face dropped. “That piece of property has stayed in your family for decades.”

Meredith looked at this woman. Obviously, attorney-client privilege was a real thing, but small-town gossip was, too. This woman had to know Meredith’s situation, and to flat out say that to her was a bit tacky.

Meredith wasn’t sure how she could state the obvious politely. “That’s not my family.”

“Right.” The woman frowned at that, then she shook her finger at the ceiling. “Well, if you want to know more about Jacob’s family, I lived next door to him my whole life. I used to babysit him.”

Meredith sat there, not sure how to reciprocate. She didn’t want to carry on this conversation. “Neat.”

“I remember when he first met your mom,” she said, which jolted Meredith.

She had forgotten her mother’s connection to Blueberry Bay.

“Does the Cote family still live there?” Meredith asked. Her mother’s maiden name felt weird to say.

“In the big house?” Ginny asked, and Meredith nodded. “I believe there’s a cousin or someone that owns it now.”

Meredith wondered how much this woman knew. More than Meredith, obviously, but did she understand that Meredith knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about her father and her mother’s family?

The only family she’d ever shared time with had been Gordon’s family.

Not once had Jacqueline’s family sent a birthday card, Christmas card, or even an acknowledgment of her existence, but neither had her birth father. Remy had looked up the family, did the whole DNA family tracing and tried to connect with some of their mother’s family, but she’d had no luck.

And Meredith felt perfectly fine with that while sitting there in the office of Quinn Michaud.

“Did you say he was coming?” she asked as the door to the office opened.

“Ms. Johnson,” a man said, coming through the front door and into the space. “Nice to meet you. I’m Quinn Michaud.”

Meredith took a double take at the man standing in a tailored three-piece suit that hadn’t come off the racks of L.L.Bean. He looked like he’d stepped out of a cologne commercial. She’d expected a lumberjack in a flannel, not some hot Hugh Jackman.

The elderly woman smiled at him.

“Yes, sorry about the confusion,” he said. “I thought you were stuck in traffic.”

“I had been,” she said, but his forehead creased when she said it.

“Well, you’re here now,” he said, holding out his hands. “Would you like to discuss the contents of the will?”

He pointed to a table with a few chairs around it at the other end of the space. The building looked like it had once been someone’s house, not a store, and definitely not an attorney’s office.

“I ran into a friend who’s a real estate agent, and she said she’d be happy to meet with you about selling the house, if you’d like,” he said.

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