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“Kitchen,” Rod said, quiet and clipped, “is my kitchen for seven years.” He hesitated, his voice shrinking. “I just got her to know my hand.”

“So we just—” Jacks was still working it through, his pretty forehead creased. “Okay, but I don’t get it. Why can’t we just find a new place? We could move to a different building, a cheaper one, somewhere else. We take the sign. We take Reina. We do Barbacks somewhere the rent’s not insane. Right? People move. Businesses move all the time.”

“Oh, sweet baby Jacks,” Benji started, “that is the single most—” He caught himself, but not by much, the unintentional cruelty already half out of his mouth. “It’s not the same, Jacks. You can’t put our home in a strip mall by the interstate and call it Barbacks. It’s not a Chipotle. Nobody drives forty minutes to a feeling. The whole point is that it’s here, in Ybor, on this corner. We are people’s walk home. We are seven years of people finding each other in this exact spot. You move us three miles and it’s just another bar with our name on it and none of our ghosts—”

“Benji.” Finn’s voice was quiet, an edge under it. “Ease up.”

“I’m just saying it’s a—”

“He knows what you’re saying. You’ve said it. Now let it go.” Finn looked at Jacks, gentle now. “He’s not wrong, though. That’s the hard part. A neighborhood bar isn’t a thing you can pick up and set down somewhere else. Move it and you don’t get a cheaper Barbacks. You get a stranger’s bar draped in our banners. We can’t move our neighborhood.” He paused. “But you were trying to help, and we all appreciate it. Don’t let Benji make you feel stupid for asking the question everybody in this room was too scared to ask.”

Jacks nodded, small, cheeks a little pink. “Okay. I just . . . I didn’t want us to give up if there was an easy way and nobody’d checked.”

“I know,” Finn said. “We all wish somebody’d found an easy way through this. I just don’t think there is one.”

That was the exchange that got me in the chest, because I’d walked into this bar two years ago, a man doing a job, keeping everyone at the polite arm’s length, and somewhere in those two years, without my permission, without my ever once deciding to allow it, these people had become the thing I’d sworn I’d never have again.

A family.

Benji and his glitter and his terrible parking, Jacks and his schedule, Adrian and his pastries, Rod and his queen, Finn’s dry steadiness, and Mark behind the bar with his hands flat on the wood—the whole reason I’d finally opened a door I’d kept shut my entire adult life.

And now somebody wanted to take it all away.

I felt that old instinct flare, that damned wall. I felt my heart reach for the exit. And for the second time in my life, the second time that week, I heard that voice and told it to shut the fuck up.

Because I didn’t want an exit.

I wanted the bar.

I wanted my ridiculous family and the queen in the kitchen and the man behind the taps and every closing shift I hadn’t had yet. I wasn’t willing to stand in the doorway and watch it get sold out from under us.

“So that’s it?” Benji was near tears now, the funny drained all the way out of him. “We pack up and find something else? There is nothing else, Mark. There’s no other us. You can’t rebuild this somewhere with new—”

“I know.” Mark’s voice cracked. “I know, and I don’t have a plan. That’s why I wanted to sit on it, because for once, I don’t have the right tool to fix this. I don’t even know what tool to reach for. I’ve been up all night looking for some angle, and there’s no—”

“How much?”

Every head whipped toward me.

I hadn’t planned to say anything. Words just rose out of me all sneaky and quiet, and the whole bar turned to look at the man in the doorway who never talked.

“How much,” I asked again, “to buy it, the building? What’s the number?”

A beat.

“Dante.” Mark said it gently. “They already bought it. Meridian’s got it under—”

“Meridian’s a company. Companies sell things. Everything’s got a number. That’s the entire point of a company, finding a number to make a profit.”

I came off the wall, into the middle of them, which was not a thing I did.

“You said it yourself. You can’t out-stubborn a contract. Fine. Don’t. Outbid it. Buy it from them. Find out what they paid and find out what they’d take, but stop deciding it’s over because a company signed a paper. Companies un-sign papers every day, for the right number.”

“We don’t have the right number,” Finn said. “We barely have wrong ones.”

But he’d pushed off from his spot and stepped in closer, too.

“Dante, a building on this block, what Meridian paid for the whole stretch, we’re talking about a number with a lot of—”