Four Rooms and a Dream

Journal Entry No. 3

By Hunter

So there we were—keys in hand, vision in mind, sleeves rolled up—ready to open the doors and make a little money back. Or so we thought.

Turns out, the building wasn’t legally operable.

It needed a whole stack of inspections, which it of course failed. The kind of inspections where the inspector doesn't even need to speak—they just raise their eyebrows, and you know it’s bad.

But Olivia and I, maybe stupidly, maybe stubbornly, decided to hang tight. There was still something here. A trace of soul in the woodwork. A flicker in the windows. And yeah, maybe in some dreamy corner of our hearts, we thought we might even get rich.

What we got instead was a very different kind of richness.

That first year, the county let us open only four of the rooms. That’s all they’d sign off on, thanks to an aging wastewater system that barely limped through the health inspection. Fixing it? That would have to wait. The budget was tight. Real tight. Construction wasn’t going to float the mortgage on its own. So we got creative.

We turned those four rooms into little sanctuaries. Olivia cleaned, scrubbed, and styled. I patched, built, and wired. We did our best with what we had—and we made it matter.

Then something unexpected happened.

People started to show up.

The kind of people who had given up on this place. Families who once stayed here religiously, year after year, decade after decade. They’d heard whispers that someone was bringing Tower Circle back. That a young couple had bought Mr. Gray’s old motel and was putting love back into it.

So they came.
And we greeted every one of them.

We heard stories that shook us—guests who’d gotten engaged at Tower Circle. Who celebrated anniversaries here. Who brought their babies here, year after year, until they were old enough to bring their own kids. We weren’t just running a motel. We were opening a time capsule.

Suddenly, my construction work felt different. I wasn’t just fixing walls or replacing old plumbing. I was restoring memory. Rebuilding a piece of someone’s childhood. Giving people back a place they thought was gone forever.

The first season wasn’t flashy. We didn’t strike gold. But we made it through. We held tight. And we managed to save just enough to fix the plumbing in time for season number two.

Now, we were really getting started.