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“Left? To where?”
“I don’t know.” He slumped back in his chair. “She quit.”
“What did you do?” Tess asked the same question Mia had. What was it about her friends to think he was always in the wrong? Except she was right.
“I am leaving, going back to Grand Forks. I foolishly wanted her to go with me,” Anderson confessed.
“You’re right that was foolish, Anderson. This is where she wants to be. She has never given me any indication she wanted to leave. The complete opposite, in fact. She has too much going on here to actually walk away.” Tess sat down in the chair across from him.
“There is nothing for her in this town. She has rented that place upstairs for over a dozen years. Has she ever even thought about buying a house? She wastes money on charity that she could invest.” He watched as Tess looked through the files with the rental contract and resignation letter. He didn’t even care.
“Did you ever talk to her about it? Her wasting money, that is?” Tess questioned.
“No,” he admitted. He hadn’t wanted to bring up money. The only time they ever talked about it was in the context of how badly she was paid by him.
“It’s her money to waste or invest as she sees fit. From what I have seen from her portfolio at the bank, she is pretty conservative with her money.”
“You know how much money she has?” He was surprised at her admission.
She just shrugged. “Yes, she is a bank client. Recently, she moved some money around, so I looked through her portfolio. It is my job.”
“Every month, she wastes money on rent when she could be paying a mortgage and getting some return on her money,” he argued. She was a banker; she should know all this.
“You rent, Anderson, both your home and this office. Which means you are wasting money times two.”
“We are not talking about me. Did you see that she quit her job?” Anderson nodded at the resignation letter in her hand.
He watched Tess look over it again. It was short, and the bank president read it quickly. “I am actually happy she quit. She should have left a long time ago. This job was just a waste of her time.”
Anderson looked at the woman across from him. “You know what she does?”
“No, I just know that you don’t pay her enough. A pittance, Anderson. Her income comes from other locations.”
“Income?” he questioned the word choice.
“Seriously, Anderson, I thought you were practically living with the woman?” Tess said, opening the other file in her hand and taking out the rental agreement. With both papers, she laid them on the table in front of him. “You didn’t even see that she signed these wrong.”
Looking down at the papers in front of him, he saw for the first time that the resignation letter was signed M Johnson, and the rental agreement was signed Ruth Kennedy. He saw a glimmer of hope. “These are not legal then.”
“They are legal, Anderson. She can sign either one of them any way she wants. Her name is Mary Ruth Johnson Kennedy. It’s still Ruth who signed them.” She got up to leave, dropping the papers back on the desk.
He didn’t even look up when she asked, “Why would she sign a rental agreement?”
Tess stopped at the door. “Because Ruth owns this building and has been its owner for as long as you have been here. She also owns the building I live in, the one Mia lives in, Rafferty’s building, a few others downtown, and a few rental houses around town, including yours. Ruth has slowly bought up this town and now has a major share of it.”
Anderson watched her walk out of the office and turn towards the bank. Could she be right that Ruth owned buildings in this town? This building? Every year he had her write a letter to the owner about how cold it gets in the office during the winter. He remembered her face when she told him that the owner always reads his complaints. Why didn’t she say anything?
Most likely because he treated her like a personal assistant that had no ambitions and no future. Like he had so much to offer that she couldn’t get on her own…that he was smarter than she was.
For the first time, he wondered how much money she made from writing. When she had first told him about it, he had thought it was a fun hobby to keep her busy. Now he realized that her hobby was actually her real job. No, she had said she loved her work but enjoyed her job. Now he knew that working with him had only been her job, not her career.
At that moment, he finally realized that he had to decide if he was going to give up his dream of working in Grand Forks to stay with her. This morning, he had to convince her that she loved him enough to move with him. Now he had to decide if he loved her enough to stay.
Everyone who knew her knew she wasn’t leaving, that this is where she wanted to stay. This town was the most important thing to her.
