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He had been set to close a deal to demolish an entire city block in the center of Houston, ready to build luxury apartments and state-of-the-art office buildings from the ground up. Plans had been drawn up, permits accounted for, architects on board. They were even ready to go with advertising individual apartments to investors and future owners. Everything was perfect.
Except on the day the papers were meant to be signed, the representative of the selling party thought they’d just go ahead and demand an extra hundred million on top of the agreed price. The whole thing was ridiculous. Brendan had actually laughed in the guy’s face because it was so absurd. After being told no, that wasn’t how business worked, the man threw a tantrum, like anactualtantrum, knocking over chairs and everything, and left without a further word. Brendan had seen people act in plenty of crazy ways over the years, but this took the gold medal for sure.
So, the deal was off. All of the side companies Brendan had lined up work for, all of the contracts that would be null and void now, all of the people he would have to tell that it had all gone wrong under such ridiculous conditions when this contact whom he had negotiated with through the entire deal, the one who had always seemed so reasonable, had turnedinsanein the last few, vital moments of the deal. He’d stood there with everyone else as awkward chatter blossomed around him. But as the magnitude of the failure before him started to sink in, Brendan hadn’t quite been able to hear what was being said; there was a buzzing in his ears as if he was underwater. Then there was a pain in his chest, like a fist crushing some of his ribs together, and a numbness in his fingers…
The next thing he knew, Brendan was waking up in the back of an ambulance, an oxygen mask strapped to his face and his shirt ripped open to allow electrodes to stick to his chest, monitoring his heart rate.
He nearly grimaced at the memory of it, though he kept his expression flat so that Tina wouldn’t ask what was wrong. It wasembarrassing. The entire office had seen him like that, helpless on the floor. Brendan had always taken a lot of pride in his physical health; he exercised daily, going running early in the mornings, taking vitamins and eating well according to what the top nutritionists said. He had more than enough money to make sure he had the best of everything, and at his yearly checkup just a few months beforehand, the doctor had declared him fit as a fiddle. Apparently not.
Later, through a very stern lecture from a senior cardiologist, Brendan had learned that chronic stress could damage the lining and muscles of the heart over time, eating away at them. Clots could form, along with high blood pressure, and the whole thing could amount to basically having a bomb in your chest. It had been one of the grimmer learning experiences of his life, the most morbid of debriefings.
So, at thirty-two years old, he’d had a heart attack bad enough that he’d nearly died on the boardroom floor, a heart attack bad enough that he would need to be on blood thinners for the rest of his life and keep his blood pressure under wraps.
To say it had put things into perspective was the understatement of the century. So here he was, a cardboard cutout of himself, his much more capable sister taking the lead, and feeling like he didn’t have a purpose anymore.
He looked out the window onto the street below. There were people dressed in office attire, out grabbing lunch and coffees to see them through the rest of the afternoon; people in gym wear; a few groups of students from the nearby arts college, their technicolor hair visible from miles away. Brendan watched all these different sorts of people swirl together, brushing shoulders, off in a million different directions. Here he was, sitting still, watching it all pass by with no idea of what direction he should be going in.
“Brendan?”
He looked back up at Tina who was watching him over the rim of her wine glass.
“You can take more time off, you know,” she said in that gentle way of hers. “There’s no time limit.”
Brendan smiled at her warmly. She knew him too well. “Gonna sweep the business out from underneath me?”
She scowled at him for that, and Brendan laughed.
“You know that’s not what I mean,” Tina huffed, taking a sip of her wine.
“No, I know. I don’t particularly want to go back but…”
“You’re bored.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“That was a statement, not a question. Youarebored, I can tell.”
“I’m notthatbored.”
“No, I mean it’s not like you constantly flick through your phone while you’re at lunch with your sister.”
“You’re on your phone too.”
“I’m reading emails.”
“You should be having a break.”
“So should you, especially considering you’re the one currently on aliteral vacation.”
Their bickering eventually fell away as they ate and scrolled through their respective phones, content to just be in each other’s presence for a little while. Brendan went back to his habitual searching through property listings, all of them a blur of condo after condo, maybe a small-town house on the edge of the city or in the suburbs. Brendan widened his search to see what was floating around in Texas as a whole in an effort to remind himself that Houston wasn’t the center of the universe.
The newest listing immediately caught his eye.
FOR SALE
Green Acres Farm
300 acres of fertile farmland.
