Page 54 of Worth the Trouble

Then the older man sat.

He’d aged since the wedding. The silver in his hair had taken over. He set his phone face down on the cloth and left his hand on it a moment before he let it go.

“Mr. Dennison. Thank you for coming.”

“Of course, sir.”

Reginald opened the menu. He didn’t read it. “You’ve eaten here.”

“Once.”

“Then you know what’s good.”

“I know what’s expensive.”

The waitress came, and Reginald turned into somebody else for her, easy and warm. He asked about the special and laughed at her answer and ordered the trout. Jason ordered the steak, medium, and nothing else. The girl left. The warmth went with her.

“I’ve had a man asking about you,” Reginald said. “Around town. It’s an inexact science when everyone I ask is a neighbor of yours, but I’ve done it in enough towns to allow for the bias.” He turned his water glass a quarter turn on the cloth. “Quiet. Loyal. Good with animals. Nobody has a bad word.”

“That’s kind of them.”

“It’s useless to me. It tells me what people see. It doesn’t tell me what you are when the door’s shut.”

“Nothing different,” Jason said.

Reginald’s mouth moved at one corner and went flat again. He turned the glass another quarter. “There are two things in this world I would set fire to the rest of it for. My company is the second one.”

Jason waited.

“Before she met you, my daughter had never once defied me. Not once in her life. Then she stands up in front of a town council with a reporter in the room and hands them the one thing my attorneys swore could never be proven. Torches her position, her salary, and her relationship with me in about four minutes.” Another quarter turn. “Forgive me if I notice that the only new element in her life is you.”

“What she did at the council was hers. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t know it was coming.”

“So you say.”

“So she’d say. Ask her.”

“I’m asking you.” Reginald leaned in, and there was heat under it now. “Decisions like that get made on feeling. No thought for consequence. That is not the daughter I raised. That’s a woman who stopped thinking, and I’m sitting across from the reason.”

Jason didn’t move. He’d learned a long time ago that in a conversation like this one, the man who moved was the man asking. He didn’t want anything from Reginald Williams. That made it easy to keep his hands where they were.

“She didn’t stop thinking, sir. She started. You’re just not used to what it looks like when it isn’t pointed at your problems.”

The glass stopped turning.

“You think she doesn’t need looking after.”

“I think she’s had a lifetime of it, and it nearly cost her a town.”

“And your plans? Your business.”

“What about it.”

“One business is hard. Two, in a town this size, with a new relationship on top of both.” Reginald sat back. “That’s a recipe. And when one of you fails, and one of you will, what does the other one do with the resentment?”

“Then I’ll wait on mine.”

It landed. Jason didn’t need to be told it had. “You’d give it up.”