“I’m sorry.” Jo was the first to speak several minutes later, after coffee had been refilled, tempers had been defused, and Cole had shared a brief synopsis of his torment with his mother, his former teacher, and the mayor. “What’s the problem here?”
“Um . . . all of it,” Cole responded, somewhat dismayed. He’d always known her to be an attentive listener, and he was pretty sure he couldn’t have been any clearer. “I have no idea what to do now. I can’t lose her. You know?”
Cassidy and Jo looked at each other, and Jo shrugged and then turned the other direction and looked to Doc—for answers, it seemed—and Doc just smiled and shook his head.
Jo turned back to Cole. “And why would you lose her?”
Why were they all staring at him like he was whispering Shakespearean sonnets in Klingon? What about any of this was difficult for them to understand? “Because I don’t know how we’re supposed to just go on with our lives like New York never happened.”
“But . . . I . . . So why . . .”
Doc stepped into the middle of Jo’s stammering. “Let me try a different approach, since I think Jo’s kinda stalling out here a bit. Are you saying that before yesterday, nothing had ever happened between the two of you? No conversations about whether to be a couple? No chalking things up to bad timing? No jealous outbursts when you were dating other people?”
His mother decided to join in on this fun little game they were apparently all developing for Hasbro. “What about when you brought that girl from Boulder home with you?”
“And what about when Laila and Seb were flirty when he first moved here?” Jo pushed, leaning in. “I still think that one would have happened eventually if Brynn hadn’t come back.”
“What?!” Cole scoffed, and then it morphed into laughter. Ridiculous. “Laila and Seb weren’t ‘flirty.’”
Jo rolled her eyes. “You can’t be serious, Cole.”
Doc continued, “No anything when you’d had a little too much wine at a wedding?”
“No! Of course not.”
Cassidy leaned in and tapped her knuckles on his arm. “You guys went to dances together. In school, I mean.”
“Well, yeah. I mean, we all sort of went together . . .”
“And school trips. Camping trips. Vegas!” Cassidy slammed her fist on the table with a level of excitement that should only accompany the discovery of a new planet. “You mean to tell me nothing happened when the two of you went to Vegas? Nothing that you agreed would just stay there . . . ?”
Okay, this is madness. “Read my lips, you guys. Nothing. Ever. Happened. Not until yesterday.” He glanced at his watch, still set on eastern time. “Day before yesterday. Why is that so hard to believe?”
Doc and Jo shared a few seconds of silent communication—mostly just Doc smiling and Jo rolling her eyes a lot—and then they turned in unison toward Cassidy.
“Do you want to tell him or shall I?” Doc asked.
Cassidy sighed. “I’m his mother. I should be the one to do it.” She scooted her chair noisily toward him and then tapped on the side of his leg until he turned to face her. Once they were knee to knee and, apart from puzzled glances over his shoulder at Jo and Doc, she had his attention, she said, “You’re in love with Laila. You always have been. And I’d be willing to bet the last dollar I have that she’s every bit as much in love with you.”
“Right.” The corner of Doc’s lips curled. He lowered his boot to the floor and opened up the file of papers in front of him. “Now that that’s all cleared up, what do you say we get down to business.”
* * *
Cole didn’t have much time to try to make sense of what they were telling him about Laila. Not when the bombshells just kept coming.
“I don’t understand,” he finally said, for easily the hundredth time that day. “You’re seriously telling me that Grandpa was just buying up abandoned buildings in Adelaide Springs for the better part of thirty years?”
“So it seems.” Doc handed deeds to Cole one at a time. “The office space Spruce House rented to make room for more residents in the main building. Ken Lindell’s insurance agency downtown next to the Bean Franklin. An entire strip of empty storefronts down on the south end of Main Street.” Three more deeds in a row. “All owned by Bill, doing business as WECC Management Group, LLC.”
Cole sighed and shuffled through the stack of papers, not that any of them made a lick of sense to him.
“I’m sorry, Mom, but I just don’t understand how you didn’t know anything about any of this. You’re a member of the LLC, right? Isn’t that what you said, Doc?”
Cassidy shrugged and pushed her chair back from the table. “You know . . . Dad handled it all. I didn’t know that he’d bought up all those properties—”
“Weren’t there board meetings or things you had to sign or—”
“I trusted him, Cole. I didn’t ever worry about whether he was cheating me out of something or how much money I was going to make. It wasn’t like that. He started this little LLC, and he and Mom were the owners, and when I turned eighteen, he let me sign something so I was an owner too. I figured he was just trying to help me feel like an adult. When Mom died, I remember he had me sign something to remove her name. It’s not like we were staying up to look at profit-and-loss statements after you went to bed. I honestly hadn’t thought anything about any of it in years.”
“And Bill wasn’t exactly one for open, transparent communication anyway, as we all know,” Jo said as she placed her hand on Cole’s shoulder and refilled his coffee. Coffee she had very kindly brewed without initiating even a single well-deserved guilt trip about the perfectly good pot of it he had poured down the drain. “It seems as if Owen was the only one who really knew anything.”
Cole looked up at her. “Hang on. Owen? As in the new owner of Cassidy’s?”
“Well, yes and no.” Doc held his cup up for Jo to refill and then smiled at her as he thanked her. “This is where things get interesting.”
* * *
Something smelled good. Food. There was food that smelled good. And Cole hadn’t had anything to do with it.
“That can’t be right.”
He sat up in the king-size bed he’d bought himself when he moved back in with his grandfather. The bed upgrade had been Laila’s idea, to help him combat the feeling that he was never actually going to achieve independent adulthood. As she’d said at the time, “Only big boys get to sleep in big-boy beds.” There hadn’t been space for much else in the room, but he liked it that way. Less space equaled less clutter.
“Are you up?” His mother opened the door a crack but didn’t peek her head in, thankfully. Not that he was particularly indecent, with his T-shirt quilt pulled up halfway over his bare chest, but big boys didn’t like their mommies barging into their rooms.
“Yeah. Sort of.” He yawned and peered out the window to evaluate the positioning of the sun. “What time is it?”
“Nearly eight thirty. I thought we could eat some breakfast and talk before I have to go.”
Ah, yes. That’s right. It had just been a glorified layover in which she made a brief appearance in her son’s life, brought clarity and confusion to crises both financial and romantic, and, apparently, made an omelet or something. All in a day’s work for Dr. Dolan-Kimball.
“You bet. Be right out.”
* * *
As it turned out, she’d done a little more than whip together an omelet. Eggs Florentine. His mother had made eggs Florentine. Perfectly poached eggs, homemade hollandaise, and all.
“That was delicious,” he commended her. “No offense, but I did not know you could cook like this.”
“Are you kidding? Where do you think you learned?”
“Um . . . culinary school? And Grandma, of course.”
“Well, okay. That’s true. But I’ve gotten better.”
“Clearly.”
She stood to gather the dishes, but Cole beat her to the punch. “Sit. I’ve got it.” He took the plates and utensils to the sink and ran some warm water over the sticky yolk residue and then left them to soak. “So have you thought any more about, you know . . . everything? What are you going to do?”
“About the property?”
“Yeah.”
She shrugged. “Sell it, I guess.”
He grabbed the coffeepot from the counter and poured himself more. He moved toward her cup, but she put her hand over it and he returned the coffee to the burner.
“I’m not sure you understand, Mom. This is a big deal.” He turned back to face her. “This isn’t the Adelaide Springs you remember. It’s growing. Quickly. All this property Grandpa bought—it’s not worthless. And people are going to be willing to pay. But I think it’s important that you sell to the right people. I feel like the decisions made today are going to determine the future of this town for a long time.”
“I agree.” She nodded. “So what do you say? Do you want them? I’ll make you a screaming deal.”
His lips flapped as a burst of air, carrying a laugh with it, escaped. But his mother remained sitting there, her eyes watching him over her coffee cup as she sipped, and she didn’t seem to get the joke. “What, you’re serious?”
“Of course I am. It seems like the perfect solution to me.” She set her cup down. “How great would it be to open your own restaurant? And I was thinking we could give Ken the option to buy the insurance agency, sell some of the other properties to locals if they want them . . . Whatever. I’m sure we could get enough money by selling some others for you to renovate the building you want. Then you and Laila could settle down and—”
“That’s a little premature, don’t you think?”
“Well, whatever. But you don’t want to leave this place, Cole. I know you don’t.”
“Would you please stop?!” He raised his voice more than he had meant to, but at least a decent night of sleep had put him in a better position to handle his frustration than the night before when he was knocking over every chair and barstool that dared get in his way. “Look, I mean no disrespect, but you have to stop acting like you know what I want. You have to stop acting like you know me, Mom. You only know about the Vegas trip because I told you Laila and I were going. Like, three months before we went. You never asked how the trip was, in the last seven years. For all you know, we canceled and didn’t even go. And yet you spoke of it last night like it was something you actually have knowledge of. You have to stop acting like you actually know anything about me and my life anymore.”
Cole closed his eyes and took a couple deep breaths. He didn’t want to fight with her, but he tried to hear Laila’s voice. If she were there, she would probably tell him what she had been telling him for years: “You have to tell her how she’s hurt you. You know she’d want to know. Just don’t forget to also make sure she knows how much you love her.”
“Look, Mom, I’m sorry. I just . . .” He opened his eyes, and she was gone. “Mom?” He walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway toward her bedroom after making sure she hadn’t gone outside. “Mom? Where are you? I didn’t mean to—”
“You need to see something.” She sat at the foot of her bed in the room his grandfather hadn’t made any changes to since she moved away. Her laptop was on her lap, and she patted the bed for him to join her.
“I shouldn’t have said those things. I’m sorry if I—”
“Hush. It’s my turn to talk now.” She clicked around on the trackpad and then turned the screen for him to see. “Emails. From your grandfather.” She scrolled and scrolled and just kept on scrolling. There were hundreds of them. Maybe more.
Cole took the laptop from her hands. “Grandpa didn’t know how to email.”
She chuckled. “Not so well, no. But I don’t always have phones where I am. You know? So early on I tried to teach him the basics so we could stay in contact this way.”
“Tried?” Cole was still scrolling. “It looks like you succeeded.”
“Not really. For a long time he would go to the library, and Helen Souza would type for him. When her eyesight got too bad, he went to Laila.”
He looked up from the screen. “Laila typed up emails to send to you?”
Cassidy nodded. “Yep. And helped him access the ones that I sent. Probably a couple times a week, on average. For the last . . . oh, I don’t know. Eight years or so, I guess.” She tilted her chin and studied Cole. “I’m a little surprised she never told you.”
He looked back at the screen and resumed scrolling, mostly to keep his mother from seeing the emotion welling up in his eyes. He wasn’t at all surprised that Laila hadn’t told him. It made perfect sense. For one thing, she wouldn’t have thought it was hers to tell. But he figured she also knew that if Cole knew his grandfather had gone to her for help, it would cause him to ask all the questions he’d instantly begun asking himself in that moment.
“I could have typed for him, Mom. Why did he . . .” He blinked feverishly until he could see clearly again. “Why didn’t he ask me? Why didn’t he want me to help him?”
“Cole Harrison Kimball, for as smart as you are, you’re pretty slow sometimes. You know that? Of course he couldn’t have you type them. They were all about you. If you came up with a new recipe, he told me about it. You took a trip somewhere, he told me about it. Sometimes the only thing in an email would be something funny or brilliant or kind that you’d said or done. Gosh, Cole . . . I’m pretty sure I knew every time your vehicle got an oil change. You were his pride and joy. Don’t you know that?”
“Um . . .” He cleared his throat and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No. I . . . I guess I . . .”
Cassidy took the laptop and set it on the bed behind him, then wrapped her arms around him, her cheek on his shoulder. “You’re my pride and joy, too, you know. Just . . . for the record. I’m sorry if I’m not any better at communicating that than my dad was.” He felt her smile against him. “But it wasn’t just platitudes, you know?”
“What wasn’t?”
“When I would leave and tell you how happy I was to be able to go out into the world and show some love to people who don’t have what we have. It broke my heart. Every single time I’ve ever walked away from you, it broke my heart. But I always knew you were so loved and so cared for. I’m sorry if I wasn’t there all the time, but I hope you know that being your mom is the best job I’ve ever had. You’re the most important thing in the whole wide world to me, and I never could have done the things I did if I hadn’t known I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. And, truthfully, if that wasn’t still the case.” She tilted her head up and whispered, “I’m talking about Laila.”
He twisted and opened his arms to hug her as years of bottled-up resentment surrendered to the power of love and gratitude. “Yeah. Got that. Thanks.”
He may have been slow, but he was finally starting to catch up.