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I smiled thinking how Lily had just told me she’d had asecretcrush on her brother’s friend. Seemed there weren’t actually too many secrets in Laurel Lake.
I shook out the cloth napkin on the table and draped it across my lap. Opal lifted a small bag from the floor and held it out. “For you.”
I was curious, so I dug right into the tissue paper. “Oh my gosh. Is this what I think it is?” The phone book was a little thicker than the tattered one I had, but still less than fifty pages in total. I fanned through it with a smile.
“It’s hot off the presses. No one even has it yet. The town used to be the one to put it out, but they stopped doing it seven or eight years back when they got hit with some budget cuts and lost the girl who updated it. My friend Margene started doing one instead, every other year as a fundraiser. She sells a bit of ad space inside and charges people ten dollars for the book. Last time she donated over two-thousand dollars to the animal shelter. I figured the one you had was your daddy’s, so it had to be outdated by now.”
“It definitely is. Mine is over twenty years old.”
She pointed at the booklet. “That one has home addresses, home phone numbers, and the cell phones of just about every resident of Laurel Lake. Figured it would keep some of your cards from getting returned and wasting postage.”
“Thank you, Opal. This means a lot to me.”
“My number is in there, too. Anything you need, don’t be afraid to use it.”
As I slipped it back into the bag, the back cover caught my eye. There was a half-page ad for Cassidy Construction, most of which was Fox’s face.
Opal noticed my staring. “He’s not going to be happy when he sees that. The grump refuses to include his information in the book. Says anyone he wants to have his phone number already has it. A couple of months back, I told him I wanted to run a cheap ad and the money went to charity. I didn’t mention where. He grumbledfine, so I took the liberty of putting his mug on the ad, along with his cell phone number. Figured it would attract more attention than a logo.”
“Oh boy.” I chuckled. “I would love to be a fly on the wall when he sees this.”
“He’ll fire me. Again. But then he’ll realize he doesn’t know any of the passwords for the software we use, and he’d have to answer the phones and be friendly to people. So he’ll get over himself.”
“Sounds like you really have his number.”
“He wasn’t too hard to crack.”
“Maybe for you, but I find the man confusing as heck.”
Opal smirked. “He spends a lot of time fighting the war inside of him—the one between good and evil. But one thing you can bet on, Fox Cassidy will always, in the end, do the right thing. These days, that pisses him off.”
“These days? So he wasn’t always so grumpy?”
“Nope.”
“What made him that way?”
“The usual. Trying to change things that couldn’t be changed, and instead, they wind up changing you. I think we all have things in our lives that turn us into different people. Sometimes it’s for the better; sometimes it’s for the worse. But we evolve and move on the best we can.”
I certainly understood that. I wasn’t the same person I’d been even a few months ago. I nodded. “That’s very true.”
“But I have a hunch there’s another change coming for Fox Cassidy. A good one this time.” Opal’s eyes sparkled. “And for you, too.”
CHAPTER 11
A Lifetime Ago
Fox
Four-and-a-half years ago
“I’m nervous.”
I rubbed Evie’s shoulders. “Of course you are. You wouldn’t be the athlete you are if you took success for granted.”
“What if I don’t qualify?”
“There’s no room for doubt right now. You gotta leave that shit on the table.”
