“Noah, hi.” I set down the shucking knife, wiped off my hands. “What can I get you?”
He set the empty glass to the side. “Another brown ale would be a good start, and if it’s not too much trouble, I’d thank you to stop staring at my wife.”
Oh…shit.
“Sorry about that. Not my intention. I’m terrible with faces,” I said, grabbing a fresh glass. “There are so many people that I semi-recognize from high school and I kept thinking she looked familiar but I couldn’t remember her name. Between names and faces, I’m always forgetting someone.” He stared at me while I poured the beer, his expression flat. “Now I realize I saw you two at the town council meeting. The one where they threw together that plan to change the hours of operation.”
“Yeah.” He nodded when I set the fresh beer in front of him. “It’s always something around here. Either the town wants to make it more difficult for us to do business or they’re hollering at us for not doing enough business. There’s no winning.”
“Then why do you stay?”
He laced his fingers around the pint glass and lifted his shoulders. “How long have you been back here?”
“Since May,” I said. “About four months.”
“And where were you before this?” He took a sip, adding, “You don’t remember faces, I don’t remember gossip.”
I glanced over at Naked again. It was a madhouse in there. “Overseas. Singapore, most recently.”
“Right, yeah,” he murmured, like that sounded familiar. “And you’ve been gone a while?”
“More than a decade. Closer to thirteen years.” This seemed like a highly indirect way of answering my original question but I had time to kill here. “Why do you ask?”
“You have to give yourself time to adjust. You can’t come home to Friendship after living in any major metropolitan area for any period of time—let alone a damn decade—and expect to do anything but rebel against this town in the first couple of months.” He met my eyes, nodding like he wanted to hammer home the point. “It takes time to understand this place and to accept it for what it is rather than what it is not.”
I stared at him for an uncomfortable minute. It felt like he’d hammered that point right between my ribs.
He went on, saying, “I moved home after working in corporate litigation in New York City. That wasn’t the plan as far as I was concerned but my dad passed suddenly and decisions had to be made and—” He blew out a long breath and stared into his beer for a second. “And this is the last place I ever thought I’d end up but I wouldn’t change a single thing.”
“I’m sorry about your father,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
It was possible that I had known in a passing comment kind of way but I’d always worked hard at tunneling my vision down to the handful of things I could immediately fix and manage, and a guy several years behind me in school losing his father wasn’t one of those things. Even if my parents had said something, I probably would’ve rattled off some standard condolence and suggested they send flowers that I’d pay for.
Coming all the way around to the other side of that tunnel vision made me feel like an asshole now. An asshole who prioritized stability and safety for his family above all else but an asshole just the same.
“Thanks,” Noah replied, nodding in the way people did when talking about loss. “I’m sorry about the legal troubles your parents are having but I know Adrian and his firm. You’re in good hands.”
“Expensive hands,” I said. “Pretty sure I’ve paid for all of his great-grandkids to go to college on private islands by now.”
“He’ll get them out of this and then you can get the hell out of here.” He took a sip, shrugged. “Unless you’re thinking about staying.”
Without conscious thought, my gaze turned back toward the café. Sunny was behind the counter now, a radiant smile on her face as she keyed in orders. “It’s crossed my mind.”
“Then learn to accept Friendship while you figure out what you can change about it.” He stood, dropping a credit card on the bar. “For this”—he motioned to the pint—“and my wife’s group outside.”
I glanced over at him as I ran the card. “What did you change about this town?”
He shifted to watch his wife and her friends, his clear, full gaze cutting right across the dining room. I recognized something in that gaze, something I understood but couldn’t enunciate.
Eventually, he said, “I changed anything I could get my hands on and I did it unapologetically. I made things I was proud of, things I cared about, and I made my own place here because I had to. I wasn’t the same person who left after high school and I couldn’t find a reason to pretend I was.” He shot me a sidelong glance. “Give it a real chance. Once you stop fighting it, everything falls into place.”
Noah escorted his wife and her friends out as the first rumbles of thunder sounded overhead. A dark blanket of clouds had settled low over the water after sunset and it now seemed like the skies were about to open up. As if we needed another destructive thunderstorm. The town was still cleaning up from the last one.
I flagged down Zeus, saying, “Let’s work on clearing this place out, moving these tables along. Tell the kitchen to start shutting down for the night. I want these people home before it gets bad out there. I’m going to help Sunny with—” My phone buzzed in my pocket. Adrian, speak of the devil. “I have to take this but then I’m going over to Naked.”
“You got it, boss,” he said.
I jogged toward the back stairs to take the call with a shred of privacy. “Were your ears burning?” I asked. “Because I was just talking about you.”
