“She isn’t selling to you,” I said. “I want to be clear, so it’s on your notes. She’s grateful for the offer and she’s read every page of it. She isn’t selling.”
There was a pause in London.
The man on the other end ran acquisitions for a group with thirty-one hotels and an office on a square I used to walk across on my way to meetings with my father. He was not a bad man. He had offered a fair price for a forty-room hotel on the harbour at Tobermory, with its own boat and a bar that had been in the same family for three generations, and he had offered to keep the staff for two years, which is standard, and he could not understand why a woman of seventy-one with no children who wanted it was saying no to him through a negotiator in a flat…
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