“So, you’re going green?” Amy asks, and there’s something strange in her expression, like she wouldn’t expect that of me.
I shrug one shoulder. “I don’t like to rely on other people. If I have the panels and the mill, I can provide my own power. If something ever happens, I’ll be fine. I mean, I’m not mad about it being better for the planet; it’s not my first motivation.”
“I never thought about it like that,” Amy says, moving around me and sliding long strips of pepper from the cutting board and into the cast-iron pan, which sizzles on contact with the vegetables. “Have you lived here your entire life?”
“No,” I admit. “I grew up in town, lived with Gramps at his place. For a long time, this was just our hunting cabin. People in the family could use it, and Gramps would sometimes rent it out to friends of friends, folks he could trust. But when I finished my four years in the military and came back, I was up here at the cabin all the time. Went to Gramps and made a plan to buy it off him. He transferred the land into my name but refuses to take my money, so I’ve just been slipping it into his account.”
This is more than I’ve talked since moving back, and I can feel some of the tension I’ve held around conversation melting away.
I don’t like to talk about what happened while I was in the service. But it’s altered my way of thinking, made it feel impossible to connect with other people. Like now, with what I’ve seen, I can’t go back to being just a guy on the street. Can’t go back to making small talk without feeling like there’s some major connection missing.
Except for when I’m with Amy.
For some reason—a reason I don’t understand at all—there’s something about her that makes me feel like I can open up to her. It makes talking easy.
“Your gramps seems like a cool guy,” Amy says when I finish telling her about the time he took me to Pike’s Peak just so we could try the donuts at the top.
“Yeah,” I agree, and I realize we’ve finished the meal, our fish tacos not only done but plated far more prettily than I would normally arrange them. “Let’s move to the table.”
Maybe that’s a mistake, because when we sit down across from each other, it’s almost like we’re on a date. I swallow down the awkwardness.
“He built this table, actually,” I say, thinking about the day he did—how he’d shown me every part of the process so that, if I wanted to build my own table someday, I could.
“You’d mentioned he built this cabin with his dad,” Amy says, and something in her expression shifts away from the gentle, open look and into more of what she looked like when she first arrived here. “And the land has been in your family for generations?”
“That’s right,” I say, trying hard to keep from growling, but already feeling like she’s moving into territory I don’t want to touch. “And I plan for it to stay that way.”
“Look, Evan,” she says, setting down her taco and looking me in the eye. Not for the first time, I notice the unique combination of her eyes, the dark green rim around the outside, shades of brown in the middle, and a ring of gold around her pupil. My eyes have always been blue—though I’ve been told the shade can change depending on what I’m wearing and my mood.
Amy goes on, “I know you’re attached to this place, but I’m trying to help you out here. The truth is that it’s going to be much better for you to take money from my firm than to have the land seized from you.”
As happens pretty often to me, my body starts to move before I’ve really made a full decision in my head.
“Evan?”
“Yourfirmisn’t the good-guy organization you seem to think it is,” I say, grabbing a folder from the cabinet and spinning around. I walk over to her, tossing it so it lands on the table in front of her with asmack. “Pretty much every year—sometimes twice a year—McKay Capital Management comes up with some bullshit reason why they should be able to seize my land from me. It’s exhausting as fuck, but I know that’s the strategy—to wear me down so I eventually stop fighting against it.”
She has the file open and is staring at it, her cheeks pink. When she looks up at me, I see something at war inside her. I’d give anything to know what she’s thinking.
Her eyes scan back and forth across the table, her breath coming faster, and I sense something changing in the air around us. Maybe this is the first time she’s realized her company isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
“They’ve tried to take this place from me time and time again,” I say, crossing my arms, well aware that for the second day in a row, my food is growing cold because of this woman. “And if you try again, you’re just going to find yourself staring down the barrel of the same exact result.”
CHAPTER 10
AMY
Evan stands next to the table, his arms crossed, staring down at me as I look over the file.
I should say something to him, but I’m grappling with all the information swimming around on these pages. At first, I try to read it all at once, far too quickly, and I have to take a breath and start from the top.
McKay Capital Management first identified this property as being valuable back in 2008. After that follows a series of court summonses, nonsense charges, and civil lawsuits brought against the Thatchers year after year. At some point, they stop being leveraged against Wilbur—Evan’s grandfather—and instead at Evan himself.
It doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially considering the fact that Don told me this was a new opportunity. Something the firm had just identified as viable.
Why would he say that if this is actually some sort of legacy case? One in which they’re trying everything they can to attempt to take this land away from a family that clearly wants to keep it.
This isn’t like the other cases we’ve worked—in which people were genuinely neglectful or had a reason to want quick money. Sometimes, Don found leads through medical debt, identifying families that might need the relief our money could provide to them. They could liquidate their homes or land quickly to pay their medical bills, and we were often able to flip for a profit.
