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“Unfortunately.” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Not that he admitted anything in our meeting, but he definitely wasn’t proclaiming his innocence either.”
If I’d been somewhere more private, I would’ve kicked at something just to have an outlet.
“He didn’t seem … criminal when he hired us,” she said. “He was so nice.”
“I know.” My jaw was tight around the words. “I know I did the right thing, but?—”
She interrupted as soon as my voice trailed off. “Don’t you dare feel bad about this, Cameron Marcus Wilder.”
At the motherly tone—honest to God, my sisters could not help themselves—I rolled my eyes a little. “The full name wasn’t necessary.”
“It is if you’re feeling even a shred of guilt.” She cleared her throat, and the sound of a door closed on the other end of the phone. “If that story is true, and he’s involved in half the things the articles are saying, you’d feel even worse taking a single penny of that man’s money. If we have to lay the guys off for a couple of months until we can find a build to replace it, they’ll get unemployment.”
“I know,” I said as my stomach churned. The trip to Portland, and the last-minute meeting with the sweet, grandfatherly old man who turned out to be involved in numerous illicit and highly illegal activities, was the last thing I needed to cram into an already insane week.
Back at home—a handful of hours away in Sisters, Oregon—we had a family fraying at the edges with my dad being sick. His decline from his third round of cancer was getting more and more apparent. As the oldest son still at home, I carried that weight too. How to step in where my dad and stepmom needed me. And for the most part, that was keeping Wilder Homes running like a smooth machine. It was the income for half our family, practically. Not just myself and Greer, but my dad and Sheila were still on payroll as minority owners—their share was worth twenty percent of the company, with Greer and I splitting the remaining eighty.
Weeks earlier, I’d promised my older brother Ian a job when he moved back home from London. He wanted to be back in Oregon because of Dad. My youngest sister, Poppy, had started helping out in the office.
Our collective grief was enough to deal with on any given day, but I couldn’t help but feel a staggering sense of failure that I’d just pulled our entire company out of a job that would’ve been our biggest, grandest, and most visible project to date.
A four million dollar crown jewel, tucked away in a lush piece of property in Western Oregon.
“How did he take it?”
My answering laugh was dry and humorless. “I can comfortably say that I’ve never been sworn at in such a creative manner in my entire life.”
She whistled. “That good, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, this is why we have a contract with very specific language, right? He can’t sue us.”
“He certainly wants to,” I said. “Believe me, he threatened that with very colorful language as well.”
The thought of it, undoubtedly the worst meeting I’d ever had in my life, left my bones cold and my skin uncomfortable.
I hated being stuck inside that office, knowing the consequences that came with it. Even though I knew I’d done the right thing, it left me feeling restless. A squirming itch that I couldn’t get rid of until I figured out how to make this right for the people who worked for us.
The sun was bright and warm, and I tilted my face up. The pleasing heat on my skin didn’t go very far to settle my nerves.
Normally, it did.
Being outside and working with my hands was my favorite thing in the world.
But even the sun couldn’t touch what was happening inside me at the moment.
Even though the decision to back out of the build was right, the burden of the consequences was breathtaking.
And no one would shoulder that burden except me.
“Well,” Greer said slowly, and I knew she was thinking through the millions of issues that would arise as a result of this. “I’m staying at Mom and Dad’s for a couple of days to help out. So I’ll start crunching numbers. We had to turn down some jobs because of our calendar for the next couple of years. I’ll circle back around and see if any of them still need a builder.”
Some jobs? We turned down more than that. A dozen at least had inquired, and we’d said no to every single one of them, passing them on to local competitors to boot.
“Okay. Thanks, Greer.”
She hummed. “We’ll be okay, Cameron. We’ve had slow years before.”
