Page 18 of The Beach Shack (Laguna Beach #1)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A fter Rick left, Meg sat at Tyler's dining table for a full five minutes, staring at the box of old records, trying to make sense of what she'd just learned.
Rick's worried voice echoed in her mind: "She's eighty years old and has nothing saved for retirement." The notebook lay open in front of her, filled with his decades-old concerns about monthly payments that had drained away Margo's financial security.
She needed air. Space to think.
Meg grabbed her keys and drove without thinking, muscle memory guiding her toward the coast. The familiar route to Main Beach that she’d taken countless times as a teenager when she needed to think.
The afternoon sun was still warm, but the beach crowd had thinned to joggers and a few families packing up their umbrellas.
Meg found a parking spot and walked down to where the rocks formed a natural jetty, waves washing over the lower stones in a steady rhythm that had always helped her concentrate.
She climbed carefully to a flat boulder that offered a good view of the horizon and pulled out her phone. If there was one thing she was good at, it was research. Surely she could find some clarity in facts and legal precedents.
Inheritance trust obligations , she typed into Google.
The results were predictably generic—legal websites explaining basic trust structures, nothing that addressed decades-old verbal promises or mysterious monthly payments.
She tried business partnership buyouts and silent investor agreements , but the information felt abstract, disconnected from whatever Richard Turner had actually committed to fifty years ago.
Meg opened her email and started typing to Jennifer Chen, a friend from business school who’d gone into corporate law:
Hey Jen, Hope you’re well. Quick hypothetical question—if someone made a verbal agreement to make monthly payments to an investor, and that obligation continued even after the investor died with no heirs, would there be any legal?—
She stopped typing and stared at the screen. How could she explain this without revealing her family’s private business? And what if Jen asked follow-up questions, wanted details Meg didn’t have ?
Delete.
She tried again:
Hi Jen, Working on a case study about family business obligations. If a founder promised ongoing payments as part of an informal investment agreement, but documentation was minimal?—
This was ridiculous. She was trying to turn her family’s secrets into an academic exercise. Even if Jen could provide legal insight, it wouldn’t help Meg understand why Richard had made such a promise in the first place, or why Margo had continued honoring it at such personal cost.
Delete.
As she turned to pace across the rock, her phone slipped from her hand and landed with a soft thud in the sand below.
“Perfect,” she muttered, climbing down to retrieve it. The phone was fine, coated in fine sand, already working its way into every crevice.
She brushed it off with her sleeve, but grains of sand clung stubbornly to the screen and case.
Of course. Even her technology was rebelling against her need to control and analyze everything.
Meg sat back down on the rock, phone forgotten in her lap, and finally let herself really absorb what Rick had told her.
This wasn’t about legal precedents or business structures.
This was about her grandfather—a man she barely remembered—making a promise that had shaped her family’s life for decades.
A promise that Margo had honored even when it meant financial strain, late payments to suppliers, and Rick’s frustrated departure from the family business.
Why? What could Richard have owed that was worth fifty years of sacrifice?
She watched the waves roll in, each one erasing the footprints in the sand and smoothing the beach clean for the next set of marks.
Maybe that was the point Rick had been trying to make—some obligations couldn’t be researched or analyzed away.
They simply existed, woven into the fabric of who you were and what you owed to the past.
But that didn’t mean Meg had to accept the mystery blindly.
If Margo was going to trust her with the Beach Shack’s future, Meg needed to understand its financial reality.
Not just the numbers, but the story behind them.
The choices that had led to this moment where bill payments were delayed and equipment repairs postponed while mysterious obligations were honored with clockwork precision.
A jogger passed by on the packed sand below, earbuds in, lost in her own rhythm. Meg envied her focus, her simple forward motion that didn’t require untangling decades of family history.
Meg’s phone buzzed with a text from Anna:
How’s the first day of Shack management going? Remembering to eat actual meals ?
She smiled despite her confusion. Anna, checking in from Florence. Anna, who might actually know more about the family’s financial history than Meg had ever bothered to learn.
But not today. Today she needed to sit with what she’d learned, let it settle before adding more voices to the mix.
Anna was building her own life in Italy, finally getting the artistic recognition she deserved.
The last thing she needed was Meg dumping decades-old family mysteries into her peaceful fellowship.
The sun was lower now, painting the water in shades of gold and orange. Meg realized she’d been sitting here for over an hour, her research efforts having lasted all of fifteen minutes before dissolving into the larger questions that couldn’t be answered with Google searches.
She climbed down from the rocks, brushing sand from her jeans.
Tomorrow, she would ask Margo more questions.
Not confrontational ones, but genuine curiosity about Richard, about the early days of the Beach Shack, about the choices that had shaped the business Meg was now supposed to help manage.
She would listen instead of analyzing, try to understand the heart of the mystery before worrying about its financial implications.
But tonight, she would let it be. Some problems couldn’t be solved in an afternoon, no matter how thoroughly you researched them.
As she walked back to her car, Meg’s phone chimed with another email from Brad—something urgent that required immediate attention, as always. She glanced at the subject line, then deliberately slipped the phone into her pocket without opening it.