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And they were with each other all the time, and they never seemed to get sick of each other, not really.
Maybe it had still really only been a month, though.
But then another month went by, and she was just happy. And when she thought of the idea of the restaurant, it seemed perfect, and when she thought of being a social worker, it seemed wrong in some way.
So, she was confused.
Niles started talking about getting his dad to co-sign on a loan to open the restaurant, and she laughed him off and said they were just talking, it wasn’t serious, and Niles agreed with her.Yeah, like my dad would ever do that. I’m the black sheep of the family.
But Niles’s dad was a business owner. Not in Shepherdstown, but in Charles Town, where he owned a pawn shop which did brisk business near the race track and casino there. Niles’s two brothers also owned businesses, though neither of them lived close by. One of them had become a pharmacist and opened his own independent pharmacy. He lived in Silver Springs, Maryland. And the other owned his own chain of nail salons.
Both of the brothers had originally gotten loans from their dad to start their businesses and both had paid him back.
There was a precedent, anyway.
“You should do it without me,” Dahlia said to him. “You don’t need me. Besides, I should bring in an independent income because if we both work at this restaurant and it fails, what happens to both of us?”
He grinned at her. “You’re talking like we’d be a household.”
She shrugged, grinning back. “I guess I am.”
His grin got wider.
“I mean, it’s been two months,” she said. “That’s crazy.”
He nodded slowly. “Insane.”
“We need to make sure that we mesh.”
“I think the meshing between us is pretty obvious.”
“Yeah,” she said, grinning at him.
He leaned back in the chair where he was sitting. They were out on the porch at his apartment. “The, uh, the lower apartment in this building is available. It’s got two bedrooms. You have a little walkout deck on the ground floor, too, where you can still see the river. It’s not like this.” He gestured around. “But it’s nice. You ever been down there?”
She felt a little thrill wash through her. “Are you asking me to move in with you?”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “The landlord here wouldn’t mind letting me switch my lease to down there.”
It was nice that he wanted to do it, and she liked the idea of living with Niles, but it was impossible right now. “I can’t leave Tommy in the lurch like that.”
Niles let out a low chuckle.
“Don’t,” she said, her stomach turning over. It was to the point where she never even mentioned Tommy, because Niles always got like this.
“We couldn’t ever inconvenience Tommy, of course,” said Niles.
She glared at him. “I wouldn’t do that to anyone,” she said. “I signed a lease. I made a commitment. I can’t do that. It’s not about him, it’s about me. I’m not the sort of person, who—”
“Sure, sorry,” said Niles, shrugging. “It’s crazy for us to move in together this quick anyway.”
“It really is,” she said.
DAHLIA FELT IMPENDINGdeath when she entered the apartment.
She was doing her field practicum, and she and the social worker she was shadowing were doing a home visit for a woman who was doing really well with her methadone supplements and was holding down a job and had visitation with her two children, who were currently living with their paternal grandparents.
The dad of the babies, he was out of the picture, or at least that’s what the woman—she was a dwarf named Maisie—had said. He had not been interested in getting clean, but Maisie had been shaken when her children had been taken from her and the custody given to her boyfriend’s mother. (Admittedly, the grandmother had been the children’s primary caretaker more often than not.) Anyway, Maisie had cut ties with her boyfriend and had been working really hard to get herself back on track. She was doing amazingly.
