The Cost of Opening the Door | A "Sterling Point" Fanfiction

Aug 24, 2026

This mystery YA drama is a fanfiction novel based on the TV series Sterling Point. Following a mysterious inheritance, Anne Jacobson arrives in Canada only to encounter Ramona—a girl looking strikingly like her dead mother. As a brass key, hidden letters, and a recorded cassette reopen the 12-year-old hotel fire mystery, Anne, Ramona, and Rory must navigate buried family secrets, substitutes, and grief to uncover what opening the door truly costs.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

AccessFree to download

Sterling Point: The Cost of Opening the Door

Chapter 01 — The Face at the Ferry

Chapter 02 — The Room Behind the Ballroom

Chapter 03 — Substitution

Chapter 04 — The Story Beatrice Tells

Chapter 05 — Saltwater Evidence

Chapter 06 — The Shape of a Lie

Chapter 07 — What the Tape Kept

Chapter 08 — The Name in the Ledger

Chapter 09 — The Cost of Opening the Door

Chapter 10 — Low Tide at Sterling Point

01 — The Face at the Ferry

The house had been rearranged while Anne was gone.

Not dramatically. Beatrice had not moved the piano or turned the beds around. She had shifted the small things: the blue bowl from the kitchen counter to the shelf beside the sink, the stack of mail from the hall table to the dining-room sideboard, the framed photograph of Elise and Anne from the living-room mantel to the narrow bookcase.

Those changes made the house feel less like a place someone had cleaned and more like a place someone had entered without permission.

Anne stood in the doorway with her overnight bag still in her hand. Outside, afternoon pressed hot and damp against the windows. The screens rattled whenever the wind came off the water, though the water itself was hidden behind the houses on Bay Street and the tall stands of beach grass.

“You’re back,” Beatrice called from the kitchen.

Anne looked at the photograph. In it, she was nine years old, missing one front tooth, her hair pulled into two uneven braids. Elise stood behind her with both hands on Anne’s shoulders. Her mother was smiling at the camera, but her eyes had turned slightly away, as though someone just beyond the frame had called her name.

“I said I’d be gone two days,” Anne replied.

“You said you might be gone two days.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Beatrice appeared holding a dish towel. She had changed into the clothes she wore for work at the clinic: navy pants, a pale blouse, sensible shoes already dusted with road grit. Her short gray hair was damp at the temples.

“Your room is made up,” she said. “I washed the sheets.”

“They were already clean.”

“They smelled like the windows were open.”

“They were.”

Beatrice folded the towel once, then again. Since Elise died, she had become very good at folding things that did not need folding.

Anne set down her bag. “Did you go through the kitchen?”

“I put away the dishes.”

“No. I mean the cabinets.”

“I threw out the spoiled food.”

“Which food?”

“Anne.”

The warning in her name was soft, but it landed with the weight of a locked door.

Anne looked past her toward the kitchen. The refrigerator hummed. On the counter sat a grocery bag full of canned soup, crackers, and cereal. Beatrice had bought the kind of food Elise would have called emergency food, though Elise had been the one who kept three varieties of it in the house. Soup for bad weather. Crackers for stomach trouble. Cereal for the mornings when neither of them could manage anything else.

Anne had gone away because the house had grown too full of her mother’s absence. She had spent two nights with a friend on the mainland, sleeping in a room where nobody had ever known Elise’s laugh, nobody had a drawer full of receipts bearing her handwriting, and nobody paused in the hallway because a certain floorboard sounded like a footstep.

She had thought distance might make returning easier.

It had only made the house rearranged.

“I’m going to the ferry,” Anne said.

“For what?”

“To get some air.”

“You can get air here.”

“Not the same kind.”

Beatrice’s mouth tightened. “Take an umbrella. There’s weather coming in.”

The sky over Sterling Point was bright at the center and dark along the horizon, where clouds gathered in a long bruised line beyond the harbor. Anne took the umbrella from the stand anyway. She did not say goodbye.

The ferry terminal sat at the end of Water Street, between the public pier and a row of warehouses whose siding had gone silver with salt. In summer, tourists filled the benches with beach chairs and canvas bags. They bought ice cream from the kiosk and complained about the ferry schedule as if the Atlantic were a poorly managed bus route.

Today the terminal was nearly empty.

A gull hopped along the roof of the ticket booth. Wind drove scraps of paper against the chain-link fence. Across the inlet stood the old hotel, three stories of boarded windows and pale stone stained dark beneath the cornices. The Sterling Point Hotel had once been the largest building in town. Now its upper floors looked blind.

Anne had known the hotel all her life without ever entering it. Everyone knew the shape of its ruin. The fire had happened twelve years earlier, before she could remember anything clearly. For years, people said the hotel would be repaired. Then they said it would be converted into apartments. Eventually the signs went up warning people away from the seawall, and the hotel became part of the background, useful mainly for giving directions.

Anne walked toward the ticket booth and saw the girl standing beside it.

For one dislocated second, Anne thought she was looking at herself.

The girl faced the water with her back turned. She wore a faded green jacket despite the heat, black jeans cuffed above scuffed boots, and a canvas bag slung across one shoulder. Her hair was dark and cut just below the jaw. The breeze pushed the ends against her neck in the exact restless way Anne’s hair moved when she forgot to tie it back.

The girl lifted one hand to hold her hair away from her face.

Anne stopped.

Her body reacted before her mind caught up: a hard, stupid leap of recognition. Her mother, perhaps. Elise stepping out of an old photograph. Anne at twenty-five. Anne from a future she had not yet reached.

Then the girl turned slightly, and the illusion broke.

The face was not Anne’s. The mouth was wider, the cheekbones sharper, the eyes a different shade of brown. But the resemblance remained in the arrangement of things, in the tilted head and the guarded stillness, as if both of them had learned to wait for bad news.

The girl looked at Anne.

Neither spoke.

A truck rattled over the bridge behind them. Somewhere down the pier, a metal hook struck a cleat with a hollow clang.

“Is the ferry running?” the girl asked.

Anne glanced at the posted schedule. “If the captain feels generous.”

“Good to know.”

“You’re not from here.”

It came out less politely than Anne intended.

The girl looked toward the hotel. “No.”

The ferry horn sounded from the far side of the inlet. A white vessel eased away from the opposite dock, its wake spreading in two bright fans.

“You waiting for someone?” Anne asked.

“My ride was supposed to meet me.”

“Who?”

The girl’s expression closed a little. “I don’t know yet.”

Before Anne could ask what that meant, a voice came from behind her.

“Anne?”

Rory crossed the terminal from the direction of the marina. He wore a red work shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and carried a coil of wet rope over one shoulder. His hair was damp, either from the water or the heat. A smear of grease marked one cheek.

He was looking at the other girl.

The moment lasted less than a second, but Anne saw it happen: recognition, relief, the quick movement of his body toward someone he believed he knew.

Then Rory stopped.

“Oh,” he said.

The girl turned. “I’m not Anne.”

“I know that.”

“You called me Anne.”

“I thought you were…” Rory looked at Anne, then back at the girl. “I thought you were her.”

Anne folded her arms. “She’s standing right here.”

“I can see that.”

“Can you?”

The girl’s gaze moved between them. She seemed amused, though not kindly. “You must be Rory.”

He shifted the rope on his shoulder. “Have we met?”

“No. My mother mentioned you.”

That changed his expression. The humor went out of it.

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Mara Vale.”

Wind snapped the loose corner of a notice on the ticket booth. Rory stared at her.

Anne felt the name settle into the space between them.

Mara Vale.

She had heard it in fragments all her life, never spoken at home unless someone was angry. Mara had caused the fire. Mara had stolen from the hotel. Mara had disappeared. Mara was dead.

Elise had said the last part only once, when Anne was eleven and had found an old newspaper clipping in a drawer.

“She died a long time ago,” Elise had told her.

Not Mara died. Mara had died. The distinction had stayed with Anne because it sounded like a door being shut.

Rory lowered the rope. “Mara’s dead.”

“I know,” the girl said.

There was no challenge in her voice. That made it worse.

Anne watched Rory’s face change as he tried to fit the new fact into the town’s old version of the story. He glanced toward the hotel, then at the girl’s canvas bag.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to collect her things.”

“Her things?”

“She had a storage unit.” The girl nodded toward the parking lot. “The claim was under her name. I got a letter after she died.”

Rory rubbed the grease on his cheek with the back of his wrist and only spread it farther. “Mara had a storage unit in Sterling Point?”

“Apparently.”

“Where?”

“I’m still looking.”

“You could ask at the harbor office.”

“I did. They sent me here.”

“The ferry office?”

“The woman there said the old unit records were moved when the waterfront changed hands.”

Anne looked at the hotel again. A strip of plywood had come loose from one of the lower windows. It knocked against the stone in the wind.

“What does your mother have to do with the hotel?” she asked.

The girl’s eyes returned to her. “You tell me.”

Anne felt the question as a small shove.

“I don’t know anything about her.”

“That’s what everyone says.”

Rory glanced at Anne. “Maybe Nora can help. The town archivist.”

“Where is she?” the girl asked.

“Municipal building, up the hill.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“I can drive you.”

He directed the offer toward the girl.

The name came a moment later, after Anne had already noticed the choice.

“Ramona,” the girl said. “My name is Ramona.”

Rory nodded. “I’m Rory.”

“I know.”

The ferry docked with a shudder. A deckhand threw a line around the cleat. The vessel’s engine throbbed beneath the boards, vibrating through the soles of Anne’s shoes.

Ramona stepped toward the ramp, then paused. “Is the hotel still empty?”

“Mostly,” Rory said.

“Mostly?”

“Don’t go in there.”

“I didn’t ask if I should.”

“There are unstable floors.”

“There are always unstable floors in abandoned buildings.”

Rory gave a short laugh, but his attention stayed on her. “The city’s putting up new fencing next week.”

“Why?”

“Survey crews. Redevelopment.”

Anne looked at the plywood, the rusted balconies, the hotel’s faded lettering. “They’re tearing it down?”

“They’re deciding.”

“That sounds like tearing it down.”

“It usually is.”

Ramona’s fingers tightened around the strap of her bag. “I need to see it before they decide.”

Rory took a step toward her. “I said don’t go in.”

“And I heard you.”

The exchange was quiet. No one on the ferry appeared to notice. A woman in a sun visor wheeled a cooler down the ramp. A child dragged a plastic shovel behind him, its blade bumping over every seam in the dock.

Anne should have left. Instead, she watched Ramona board.

At the top of the ramp, Ramona turned back. For a moment her face was framed by the ferry’s white rail and the dark water beyond it. The resemblance was gone from her features, but not from the angle of her shoulders.

Rory looked at Anne.

“I didn’t mean to…”

“Call her my name?”

His jaw tightened. “I thought she was you.”

“That’s not better.”

“I know.”

The ferry horn sounded again, louder this time. Anne stepped aside to let the passengers pass. Rory stayed where he was until the deckhand shouted for him to clear the ramp.

“You coming?” he asked.

“Where?”

“Home?”

She almost said no. Instead, she turned toward Water Street.

“I need to check something.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you if I find it.”

The house was warmer when she returned. Beatrice had opened the kitchen windows, and the curtains breathed in and out over the sink. On the sideboard, the mail had been sorted into three neat piles: bills, advertisements, and letters addressed to Elise.

Anne stood over the letters.

Beatrice had not thrown those away.

She carried the pile into the living room and set it on the floor beside the boxes Beatrice had been clearing from the hall closet. Most were labeled in Elise’s handwriting. Winter clothes. Tax papers. Recipes. Anne recognized the narrow, slanted letters immediately. Her mother’s handwriting had looked impatient even when she wrote thank-you notes.

At the bottom of the closet sat a box marked OLD FAMILY.

Anne lifted the lid.

Inside were photographs, a cracked watch, two envelopes fused together by damp, and a small brass key on a ring of blue thread.

She picked it up.

The key was dark with tarnish except where her fingers rubbed the shaft. A paper tag hung from the ring. On it, in Elise’s handwriting, someone had written:

SERVICE 14.

Anne turned the key over. The teeth were narrow and uneven. A flake of green paint clung to one side.

“Find something?”

Beatrice stood behind her.

Anne closed her fingers around the key. “What is this?”

Beatrice looked at it, and the color left her face so quickly that Anne nearly dropped it.

“Put it back.”

“Why?”

“It’s nothing.”

“You labeled it.”

“Anne.”

“You knew what it opened.”

Beatrice crossed the room and reached for the key. Anne stepped back.

“Where did this come from?”

“Your mother kept a lot of things.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.”

Outside, a truck groaned along the street. Through the window, Anne saw a man stapling a large white notice to the telephone pole at the corner. The paper lifted and snapped in the wind.

She went to the window.

NOTICE OF STRUCTURAL SURVEY

STERLING POINT HOTEL PROPERTY

ACCESS RESTRICTED AFTER AUGUST 18

Below the bold letters was the town seal and a date for the survey. At the bottom, in smaller type, were the words: Possible demolition pending assessment.

Anne read it twice.

Behind her, Beatrice said, “Don’t make this into something it isn’t.”

Anne looked down at the key in her palm. The metal had warmed against her skin.

At the ferry, Ramona had asked about the hotel because her mother had left something there, or because she believed she had. Either way, Mara Vale had not been a distant name from an old newspaper. She had been in Sterling Point when the hotel burned. She had possessed a storage claim no one had collected.

And Elise had kept a key marked with the number of a service room.

Anne closed her hand around it until the teeth pressed into her palm.

“What did my mother know?” she asked.

Beatrice did not answer.

That silence was not grief. It was not confusion, forgetfulness, or the accident of someone dying before she could explain herself.

It was a choice.

Anne put the key in the pocket of her jeans.

Then she picked up her phone and searched for the municipal archive’s hours.

02 — The Room Behind the Ballroom

The municipal archive occupied the basement of the old town hall, beneath a stairwell that smelled of wet stone and floor wax. Anne arrived twelve minutes before closing and found Nora Alvarez behind a counter stacked with banker’s boxes.

“You’re Elise’s daughter,” Nora said.

Anne stopped with one hand still on the door.

In Sterling Point, people said that as if it were a greeting, a warning, or a mild accusation. Since the funeral, her mother’s name had become the first fact anyone reached for.

“I’m Anne.”

“I know.” Nora glanced at the phone in Anne’s hand. “You called about the hotel.”

“The Sterling Point Hotel.”

“That’s the one.”

“There’s a key. My mother kept it.”

Nora’s expression changed only slightly, but Anne noticed the pause, the narrowing of her attention.

“What kind of key?”

“Brass. There’s a number stamped on it.”

“Do you have it with you?”

Anne touched her pocket. “Yes.”

Nora looked toward the clock on the wall. “I can give you twenty minutes. Public files only. Anything restricted or uncatalogued needs a request form, and requests move slower than the ferry in January.”

Anne pulled out the key. Its stamped number, 214, caught the fluorescent light.

Nora did not touch it. “That isn’t a guest-room number.”

“What is it?”

“I’d have to check the old service plans.”

Anne waited.

Nora sighed and disappeared between the shelves.

A minute later, a voice called, “You didn’t get this from me.”

Anne followed her into the narrow aisle. Nora unfolded a blueprint across the top of a box labeled COASTAL PROPERTIES, 1989–2010. The paper had browned along the edges and curled where moisture had seeped in.

The hotel’s ballroom occupied the center of the plan, a long rectangle facing the ocean. Behind it ran a corridor marked SERVICE ACCESS. Small rooms opened off either side: linen storage, electrical, staff changing, refrigeration. At the far end, near the seawall, a square had been crossed out in red pencil.

214.

“Service office,” Nora said. “Or it was. The numbering changed after the fire.”

“Can I see it?”

“You can see the plan. The building is posted and fenced.”

“People still get in.”

Nora gave her a tired look. “That is not the same as being allowed in.”

Anne folded her fingers around the key. “When did the numbering change?”

“After the closure, according to this.” Nora traced a handwritten note in the margin. “New locks installed. Corridor sealed pending structural review.”

“Who installed them?”

“No idea. That would be in the facilities records, if they survived.”

Anne looked at the crossed-out square. “Was the service office destroyed?”

“Not according to this.”

A floorboard creaked somewhere beyond the shelves.

Anne turned. Rory stood at the end of the aisle in a navy marina sweatshirt, his hair damp from the weather and one sleeve darkened with grease. He lifted both hands as if she had caught him trespassing.

“Nora said you were here,” he said.

“Nora did not say that,” Nora replied.

“She said you might be here.”

“I said nothing.”

“Okay.” Rory nodded toward Anne. “You might be here.”

Anne returned the blueprint to the box. “Why are you here?”

“Because you texted me a picture of a creepy key and then stopped answering.”

“I was in the archive.”

“You were in the archive for almost an hour.”

“I was talking to Nora.”

“Good. Then you’re not dead.”

Nora took the blueprint from Anne and rolled it carefully. “The archive closes in eight minutes.”

Rory glanced at the map. “You’re thinking about going over there.”

Anne didn’t answer.

He looked at the key in her hand. “The hotel?”

“Do you know something about the service corridor?”

His humor slipped. “Kit used to take equipment through there.”

Rory’s older brother had been dead for two years. His name moved through Sterling Point like a boat seen far offshore: familiar, distant, never approached directly.

“What equipment?”

“Marina stuff. Pumps, generators, whatever the hotel needed before it shut down.” He rubbed grease from his thumb against his palm. “There’s an access gap in the seawall fence, on the north side.”

Nora’s mouth tightened. “Absolutely not.”

“We’re not going inside,” Rory said.

Anne looked at him.

“We’re not,” he repeated. “We’re going to stand near the outside and look at the building from a legally defensible distance.”

“That sentence has never been true when you’ve said it,” Nora told him.

The rain began before they reached the hotel.

It came in thin, needling drops, too light for an umbrella and too cold to ignore. Anne followed Rory along the seawall while Ramona walked several yards ahead, carrying a canvas tote beneath her jacket.

Anne had not invited Ramona. Rory had texted her.

Bring the photograph, he’d written.

Ramona had arrived at the marina five minutes later, her expression unreadable, her mother’s belongings packed into the tote. She had not asked whether Anne wanted her there. She had only looked at the key and said, “If that opens anything, I want to see it.”

The fence around the hotel leaned toward the ocean. Salt had eaten through the lower links, and the warning signs had faded until only fragments remained: NO ENTRY, STRUCTURAL, LIABILITY.

Rory found the gap beneath a section where the wire had pulled loose from its post.

“After you,” he said.

Anne crouched. Mud soaked through her jeans at the knee. On the other side, weeds and beach grass crowded the cracked pavement. The hotel rose above them with its windows boarded and its façade streaked black beneath the ballroom’s arched windows.

Ramona slipped through next. Her shoulder brushed Anne’s.

“Sorry,” she said.

“You’re fine.”

FAQs

What is the plot of The Cost of Opening the Door: Sterling Point Fanfiction?

The Cost of Opening the Door: Sterling Point Fanfiction follows Anne Jacobson as she uncovers dark family secrets after arriving at Sterling Point. Alongside Ramona—a girl who strangely resembles her late mother—and Rory, Anne investigates an old hotel fire, hidden ledgers, and buried letters to uncover the truth behind her family's past.

Who are the main characters in The Cost of Opening the Door: Sterling Point Fanfiction?

The main characters are Anne Jacobson, her newly discovered cousin Ramona, Rory, and Anne's aunt Beatrice. Together, they confront the emotional and legal ramifications of long-buried secrets in Sterling Point.

What is the core theme of The Cost of Opening the Door: Sterling Point Fanfiction?

The story deeply explores grief, substitution, parental wounds, and the cost of truth. It focuses on how adults often hide painful facts under the guise of protection and how teenagers navigate identity beyond inherited family lies.

How does this story relate to the original drama Sterling Point?

This novel serves as a fan continuation and deep-dive adaptation of the Sterling Point universe, expanding the mystery surrounding the old hotel, the town's history, and the complex relationships among the new generation.

Aug 24, 2026

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