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“You can change all of that,” Kelsey said, running her fork over the last piece of egg on her plate.
“I can. It’s if I want to.”
“The location is good,” Kelsey pointed out.
“I know that,” he said. “Which is why I’m considering it all. Get me that information and then I’ll reach out to Hailey if I decide to move forward. It all has to be drawn up and signed regardless.”
Hailey Bond was the family attorney. As he said, he didn’t do anything half assed.
Kelsey stood up. “This meeting went exactly as I expected. Along with your monthly financials in your email are all the information you’d want on Southside.”
“You knew I’d agree to look it over,” he said, picking up her empty plate.
“Of course I did,” Kelsey said, laughing. “Neither one of us is stupid. Reach out when you’re ready to talk more.”
He watched his sister walk out of his restaurant in her navy pants and pumps, her light green sweater with her dirty blonde hair flowing across her back.
They might be twins, but they didn’t look all that much alike.
Yet they did think the same for the majority of their lives.
2
Start Somewhere
“You should have told us what was going on, Hadley.”
Hadley looked at her mother as she was unpacking her car and carrying her clothes into the little ADU in the back of the property her parents owned.
The unit had been added about twenty years ago as a guest suite of sorts for family members. It was just over four hundred square feet and had a bedroom that fit a double bed in it, a bathroom with a shower stall, toilet, and vanity squished in it, a small living room with a couch, chair, TV and what could pass as a kitchen on one wall.
If a small stove, skinny fridge, sink, and a few cabinets qualified.
But it was free and it was the only place she could afford right now.
It might be the last place she thought she’d be when she left home for college twelve years ago, but poop happens and it was stinking up her life.
“What was I supposed to say?” she said. “Eddie was hurt and he needed help with bills. We were dating and I wasn’t going to turn my back on him.”
Even though she’d only been with Eddie for about two months before he got hurt, she’d felt like she was falling in love with him. She looked past some of the things he did because he was so nice and sweet and just made her feel so good about herself.
“We would have helped you,” her mother said. “Your father is beside himself over this. No one wants your credit to suffer.”
She sighed. “It’s not going to. My lease was up this week anyway.”
It’d been two months since Eddie had passed. She’d been trying to find another job and without much success.
Running into Eddie’s sister had been the last straw though. The disdain she got, you’d think she was the one that caused Eddie to die. From what Cheryl had said to her, she could only imagine all the horrible things Eddie lied about when he told them why she left him. She was pretty sure he didn’t tell his family that she left because she found out he wasn’t just sleeping with one person on the side but two. The second she’d found out after he died which just felt like another knife in her heart.
Last she’d heard he was out partying like he’d won the lotto. One of those parties was what led to his death, she’d heard.
Maybe she was too sensitive in life.
She’d never grown the backbone everyone told her she needed. But she wasn’t one for running.
Until now. Sometimes you did need to go back home.
“Your father wants to clear up your debt for you,” her mother said.
