My grandmother left me her mountain lodge—valued at $1,360,000. My father, who cut me off at eighteen, showed up to the will reading smiling. “We’ll turn this into a family business,” he said. “Together.” Then the attorney reached the final clause—and the entire room went silent.

She gave me a long look over the rims of her glasses. “That sounds nice. What does it mean?”

“It means I’m not turning it into a luxury development. I’m not replacing the furniture with things no one can sit on. I’m not raising rates so high that the families who’ve been coming here for years can’t come back. I’m not painting over the wood. I’m not selling. And I’m not letting my father near operations.”

Tom actually smiled at that last part.

“Well,” he said, “that’s a decent start.”

Marianne crossed herself lightly and muttered, “Dorothy would’ve liked you saying it plain.”

I also knew plain feeling wouldn’t be enough.

My father was right about one thing, though I would never give him the satisfaction of admitting it aloud. Love for a place is not the same as running a place. Dorothy had taught me the rhythms and values of the lodge, but she had also spent sixty years accumulating instincts I could not inherit by sentiment. So I learned the rest the only way there is to learn such things: by asking questions, listening hard, taking notes, making mistakes where they were survivable, and not pretending expertise where I had none.

The books first.