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He gave me a tiny wink and was gone.
I folded my arms on the table, dropped my forehead on the table again, and groaned.
Chapter 4
Ian
Harlow: Just making sure I didn’t hallucinate your offer because it’s not too late to take it back.
Me: Do you feel like your subconscious would manufacture that?
Harlow: Good point. If I were hallucinating anything, it would be a winning Powerball ticket and a kindly housekeeper who bakes cookies and does my laundry.
Harlow: Which reminds me, you’re probably not offering laundry services with this gig, are you?
Me: My goodwill only extends so far.
Harlow: Worth asking. If you said yes, I wouldn’t give Sage a vote.
Me: Cookies are negotiable, though. Sheila can’t help herself when she knows someone new is in her immediate vicinity.
Harlow: OMG, I didn’t even think about that. I’m ninety percent there.
Me: Why didn’t you come over last night? I had to eat all the pizza by myself.
Harlow: What a hardship. I didn’t tell you to buy pizza, so that’s on you, buddy.
Harlow: I needed a little time to process it. Overthinker, remember?
Me: Right. Did we come to any conclusions?
Harlow: Ugh. Well, dinner was awkward, so that was a few points in your favor. My mom is frustrated with me, as per usual. I swear, I try to stay out of her way, Sage and I cleaned up all the dinner dishes, and she still sat in her chair and watched us like we were going to blow up her kitchen if I loaded the dishwasher incorrectly.
Harlow: I’m telling you, I’ve been an inconvenience since the day I was born, Ian. I’m just glad they don’t treat Sage that way because I wouldn’t have lasted twenty-four hours here.
Harlow: Where’d you go?
Me: Sorry, had to walk away for a second. You’re not an inconvenience to me, Keaton. And if they make you feel that way, it says more about them than it does about you.
The replies stopped for a few minutes after that, and I was glad for it. There was a special sort of anger buried deep under the surface of my skin, something only reserved for Harlow’s parents. I was six years old the first time I felt it, and throughout the years, I’d witnessed more than my fair share of them, wishing she’d fit into whatever definition they held for the right way to live. The right way to support yourself. The right roles for a wife and mother.
Maybe it was part of my unforgiving nature or the skepticism that I always wielded like a weapon, but even all these years later, I could never understand how they made her feel. Had always made her feel.
While I stood in the kitchen and finished my cereal, I kept a close eye on my phone screen, but it seemed like we’d found a natural stopping point in our morning texts. I finished getting ready for work, raking my hair back and winding a tie around it to stay anchored at the back of my head. In the mirror, I angled my head, studying the beard covering my jaw.
Maybe I’d find time to sneak into the barber shop downtown, trim up the beard, and take a couple of inches off my hair. Enough that I could still tie it back, but just … clean it up a little. Not for any particular reason, of course, but my entire family had been giving me shit about needing a haircut since the moment I arrived.
My phone rang, and my heart jumped, then settled back into place when I saw my brother’s name instead of Harlow’s.
“What’s up?” I said after punching the button to answer his call.
“Need you in the shop this week,” Cameron said. The sounds of a humming jobsite were already loud in the background. Looks like he was trying to beat me this time, which had me smiling. “Ivy is going to meet you over there in a little bit. She’s got some ideas for the store and wants to talk to you about floor samples.”
Cameron’s girlfriend was the new family mogul, which meant a different sort of busy for all of us. Cameron and my stepsister Greer had been running the family construction business for a solid decade already but lacked the time to bump that business up a level.
Enter Ivy Lynch, who had all the subtlety of a semitruck when she set her mind to something. Ivy and I had formed a begrudging truce after not getting off on the right foot when she’d first moved to town. But with her giant inheritance and somewhat frightening business acumen, she was transforming an empty spot of land on the outskirts of downtown Sisters into a storefront for Wilder Homes.
One meeting as a family was all it took, where she handed us individual binders with profit/loss projections and explained how the responsibilities would be distributed, especially in the first couple of years of getting it up and running.
