The Sweetheart Secret Read Online Free PDF

it would never be the same, not without Emma.
    Had Daisy made a mistake? She’d been so sure that if she just took the bull by the horns and came here, getting the renovation wheels spinning, so to speak, that Emma would follow.
    â€œWe used to have so much fun here, Em,” Daisy said. “Don’t you remember that summer we spent on the beach? The—”
    â€œDaisy, I’m not interested in that place. I don’t know why my mother thinks I should be. It’s a family albatross. All it did was drag my grandparents down, then my parents when they took it over, and now it’s got you wrapped up in its tentacles.” She let out a low curse under her breath. “Why are you so intent on getting it up and running again?”
    â€œBecause Aunt Clara asked us to.”
    Emma sighed. “I know that, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. You would think my mother would just let that place go after . . . everything.”
    â€œWhat do you mean? Aunt Clara loves the Hideaway.”
    â€œ
Used
to love it,” Emma said. “Now it’s just . . .”
    â€œJust what?” Daisy sensed that shadow again, the closed door. She waited, but Emma didn’t explain.
    â€œIt’s just another disaster,” Emma said. “Do you know how much work it needs?” Daisy turned the corner and for a moment, she saw the old Hideaway Inn, the two stories of sky blue siding with soft white trim, the wide front porch that stretched from one end to the other, the lush green lawn, the gauzy kitchen curtains drifting lazily in the breeze. Then the mirage cleared and she saw the reality.
    A faded building with broken shutters dangling like missing teeth in a welterweight’s smile. The lush lawn had gone brown and dead. The kitchen windows were boarded up, and the front porch sagged to one side.
    â€œOne hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars worth of work,” Daisy said and let out a sigh. She’d been hoping the contractor had been wrong, that maybe he’d overestimated, to scare her off from such a giant project. “I got an estimate.”
    Though seeing the inn now, Daisy had to wonder if the contractor had instead
under
estimated. A lot. The vacation retreat she remembered from childhood had become a sad, rundown ghost.
    â€œYou did? When?”
    â€œI called someone the day I left the hospital. I told you I was serious about this, Em.”
    Emma laughed. “Dase, I’ve known you all my life. You’ve never been serious about anything. I’m the one who overanalyzes and overschedules and over-everythings. You’re the one who lives on the edge.”
    Emma was right. Maybe it had been a part of being raised in an untraditional house. Maybe her mother had instilled some kind of wanderlust or need for spontaneity in her only child. Daisy had dropped out of school at seventeen, got her GED at twenty, but had flitted from job to job all her life. She’d never lived in one apartment long enough to celebrate two holidays. She didn’t balance her checkbook, didn’t bake cookies, didn’t make friends with the neighbors.
    And yet, here she was, in a town as traditional as turkey on Thanksgiving. Trying to be a dependable, mortgage-paying, tax-filing grown-up.
    â€œEven if we wanted to fix up the Hideaway, where are we supposed to get
two hundred
grand?” Emma asked. “That place has sucked my mom’s bank account dry. What money she had left from when she and my dad took over for my grandparents was wiped away in the years that she let it go.”
    â€œI’m working on getting a loan, Em. We can get it up and running, just like it was before. Don’t you remember how much fun we had here? How for a little while, everything was”—Daisy took in the depressing sight before her, and tried her best to remember the way the inn used to be—“perfect?”
    â€œDaisy,