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“Eli?”
“Yeah.” I study her features. No way. “Elizabeth?”
She nods. “Just Liz now. How are you?”
Elizabeth Stringer was the most sought-after girl at Neubrook High. At one point, I even kissed her at a dance, before she ended up with Garrett. I don’t know what happened after high school, but she looks like any other woman closing in on middle age.
“I’m good. Uh, visiting for a while. You?”
“Not bad.” She motions to the barstool, so I sit. “Coffee?”
“That’d be great.”
She turns and takes a pot from the hot plate. “I bought Smiley’s about two years ago. The Smileys retired.”
“Oh. That’s great. How’s business?”
“We’re doing well now. The whole town is turning around.”
“Yeah?” I sip the coffee, glancing at it. Damn, that’s good. “What changed?”
“Michel Toussaint,” the woman beside me says.
A shiver of excitement moves through me. “Michel? What do you mean?”
“He came back,” Liz says. “About a year ago. Starting fixing things.”
“Fixing things?”
“Bought up all the empty shops,” the woman beside me continues. “Nancy, by the way.”
“Hi. Eli.”
Nancy nods. “You should see Main Street now. Michel got a bunch of folks from New Onyx to open shops here. Restaurants too. Not fast food. Nice ones.”
“The whole economy is improving,” Liz explains. “He’s still dealing with the commercial district. Garrett and his hoodlum friends won’t budge.”
“Even with increased rent prices,” Nancy says, cutting into her pancakes. I don’t recognize her, and she looks to be more my mom’s age, so it’s likely I didn’t know her. “Garrett’s digging in his heels.”
“Interesting.”
“Not everyone likes what Michel’s done,” Liz says, leaning on the counter. “But most of us do. You remember what Garrett was like in high school.”
“I do.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not much different. He hates Michel, but I think Michel knows that and kind of likes it. Garrett picked on him a lot back in the day.”
“Yeah.”
To say the least. Garrett’s constant taunting of Michel is how we ended up being friends. I couldn’t stand by and let it happen, so I put myself between them whenever possible. It wasn’t enough, but I did what I could.
“So Michel is back? He lives here?”
Liz nods, waving at another customer who comes in. “He’s got a rented house over on Ainsley Place, but he’s building a home in one of the empty factories. He’s going to have loft apartments downtown. Can you imagine? It’s like New Onyx, only without traffic and crime.”
I chuckle. “Wow. Neubrook is coming into the modern age.”
“Kind of. Michel is preserving a lot of what makes it nice to live here. He’s keeping the charm. Like this diner.”
