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She’d also been dealing with guilt for not trusting him like she knew she should, especially since he had been working so hard for her. Helping her with her business plan, planning to go with her to pick out the horses, and she’d been listening the night before to the sawing and drilling in the stable.
It wasn’t that she had been unkind to him. She hadn’t. But she wasn’t happy with how things were between them, how she was holding up her side of their friendship. It felt like he was doing so much more than she was, and she didn’t like that feeling.
And yet, the idea of letting go, of daring to trust again, seemed so hard.
She was still thinking about it as she left the house, walking out onto the path and finding that he was waiting for her.
“Good morning,” she said, smiling.
“Someone had a good night’s sleep,” he said, grinning back at her.
He seemed to be so even-tempered. Whatever happened, he rolled with it, and his calm assurance was a great foil for her tendency to worry.
It was a tendency she was working on, because she knew the Lord was in control, and there was no need for her to be concerned, but it was still hard to lift her fingers off of everything she wanted to hold onto. To let go of her expectations for how things should unfold and turn out.
“I did. Although I heard you working in the stable until almost midnight.”
“Did I keep you up?” he asked immediately, concerned.
“No. I just felt guilty. I hope you know that I appreciate so much all that you’re doing. From the business plan to whatever you were doing in the stable last night, to going with me this afternoon to look at the horses.”
He smiled, like her telling him that she appreciated him meant something to him. “It’s my pleasure. And I’m serious about that.”
“Hopefully I can pay you back.”
“I just enjoy being with you.” He didn’t stop to let that sink in, although she loved the way that sounded. She didn’t want to compare everything that ever happened to her with her ex, but that was one of the things that had hurt, when she had realized that he really didn’t care about being with her. Didn’t care about spending any time with her, didn’t want to be around her.
“I don’t need you to pay me back. But I did get a call last night from one of my people, and after just a cursory inquiry into land values in this area, it seems that your property is worth millions. How many millions, I’m not entirely sure, but definitely in the tens of millions. With almost a half a mile of beachfront, that really makes it valuable.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. I was working last night, but I thought that you might have changed your mind about what you want to do once you heard that. You could be a millionaire if you decided to sell and get out.”
“What would you recommend?”
He seemed to have so much business sense, and it seemed to be almost a no-brainer that selling would be the smartest thing to do. Businesswise. Although, the cottage was her mother’s, and she loved the quaint little town of Strawberry Sands. She really didn’t want to sell.
“I think that’s probably up to you. But that should ease your mind. If the riding stable doesn’t work out, if you can’t make a go of the business, there is that to fall back on. I don’t think you’ll have trouble finding a buyer, especially if you’re willing to take a couple million less than the going price, and you can definitely start fresh somewhere else. It would be up to you.”
“Yeah.” She spoke softly, thinking. Trying to imagine all the repercussions of selling. She hadn’t even considered, until she heard millions. Should the amount of money her land was worth really influence her into changing the direction she was going? Not if she thought she was going in the direction God wanted her to. And she had been sure about that.
Was this just a red herring?
“So your recommendation would be to try, see if we can make it, and sell if it doesn’t work out?”
“You want my honest opinion?” he asked, looking over at her as the breeze from the lake blew her hair and she pushed it back. The wind whipped her dress around his legs and made her smile, because it was so fresh and clean and gave her energy clear down to her toenails. If they weren’t headed to church, she would have taken her shoes off.
“Yes. I want your honest opinion.”
“I think anytime you go into something thinking that if it doesn’t work, you have a backup plan, it’s a bad idea. If you’re going to do something, especially if you’re going to go into business, but anything, our relationship, a job, even buying horses, whatever, I think you want to go into it with your whole heart and soul, thinking that you’re going to do everything you can to make it succeed. If you go in with a backup plan, with an in-case-we-fail plan, you might not be desperate enough to see the options that you need to see in order to make it work.”
“That makes sense. But now that I know how much the ground is worth, it’s going to be really hard not to think about it like that.”
“I didn’t want to not tell you. I didn’t want you to think I was keeping anything from you. Plus, it wasn’t that hard to figure out. You could do it yourself.”
“But I didn’t. And I appreciate the fact that you’re being honest. That you’re not trying to hide things from me. That means a lot.”
Certainly, especially after the relationship that she’d been in before, which had been a lot of Todd hiding things from her and lying to her, she was almost sure that if Todd knew what the property was worth, he wouldn’t have told her. In fact, when he visited yesterday, he might have known. He definitely hadn’t mentioned it.
