Thea shook her head in disbelief. “How’d he look?”
Incredible.Not that Faith would say that out loud, not even to her best friend. Instead, she settled on, “Different.” That was true at least. But even the visual delight that was Leo in a slim-cut suit, with a close shave and his hair falling in a neat wave, couldn’t distract her from the anxiety threatening to drown her, and she shoved the laundry basket to the floor and flopped backward on the bed.
“Maybe it’s for the best.” Faith groaned and rolled to her stomach, pressing her face into the mattress.
“It really did sound like a terrible idea,” Thea agreed easily. “Too much emotional damage.”
“Right,” Faith murmured, although Thea’s assessment didn’t sit quite right with her. She didn’twantit to be that way. Didn’twantthe thought of working with someone who’d been so important to her once upon a time to be so upsetting. But there they were.
In truth, no amount of money was worth the humiliation of standing in front of her first love while he regarded her with loathing in his eyes. Yet again she relived the moment when she’d been frozen in the center of his office as his gaze traveled over her from head to toe, as hot and dark as she remembered from years ago. She was vain enough to want to die because he’d seen her looking so disastrous, especially when he looked the very opposite. He’d matured from a good-looking teenager into a gorgeous adult. How entirely evil of him.
And there she was, a total winner who was squatting at her parents’ house with no other prospects in sight and no way to keep her business operational.
Time to figure out her next move. She rolled off the bed and yanked a T-shirt from the basket on the floor, angrily folding it into a neat square and setting it on the mattress. Her college-years stint at the Gap had prepared her for that at least. Maybe the store at the Beaucoeur mall was hiring.
It took three more folded shirts before she was able to speak aloud the thought that had been dogging her all day.
“I should just ask them to reinstate my trust fund.”
Thea dramatically dropped the bowl onto the bed, but they’d made enough of a dent in the popcorn level that none spilled out. “You’d do that?”
She grabbed another shirt and angrily applied herself to making creases. She would’ve been given full control of her trust account when she turned twenty-one, but after the Leo thing, she’d been furious with her parents and too young and impulsive to consider the long-term consequences. So she’d signed paperwork disclaiming the money, and the funds had returned to her parents’ estate. She’d been almost entirely at peace with the choice until the BUILD funds dried up.
“I was so stupid.” She said it more to herself than to Thea, and she meant that for more than just the money. Yes, she’d been rash to walk away from the money, but she’d also been thoughtless with Leo and inflexible with her parents and overall too quick to pull down the walls of her own life. “I’m going to have to ask them for money even though I know they’ll say no. No way is my dad backing down.”
What other choice did she have? The state funding wasn’t coming back, the Beaucoeur school district had cut off the grant program because of budget issues, and she clearly hadn’t sacrificed enough goats to get a federal grant. It’s not like she could charge the kids.
Thea frowned. “Maybe Aiden could—”
She leaned forward and rested her hand on her friend’s knee. “Thank you, but I’m not asking your boyfriend’s construction company if they want to sponsor a tutoring center.”
“He would though.”
Thea’s smile was so radiant that Faith didn’t even have the heart to roll her eyes over the happy-couple smugness. “I’m sure he’d find a way to do it if you asked.”
While Thea basked in her private little cocoon of relationship bliss, Faith made her way through her T-shirts, calculating expenses as she folded. The amount she needed to meet payroll, conduct student outreach, upgrade the technology, keep paying rent on the office… Even if she hadn’t insisted that her parents dissolve her trust fund, there wouldn’t have been enough in there to keep BUILD running on a long-term basis anyway. She needed a partnership with renewable funds.
Hell, even asking them for a small loan to keep a few full-time tutors and buy the tablets they needed might be a stretch given how un-liquid her parents always said their finances were. But if she gave up the lease on their office and worked out of public spaces—the library, unused classrooms in a few of the school buildings—she might be able to make it work for the upcoming school year. Of course, she had no idea how she’d ever be able to pay the loan back, and it likely meant living at her parents’ even longer. So much for the independence she’d been so proud of since she’d told her dad to go to hell the day of her graduation party.
“You’re buzzing.”
Thea’s words pulled her attention away from the ancient Beaucoeur High School shirt she had in a death grip. “What?”
She nudged her phone toward her. “Your phone.”
Faith dropped the shirt, struggling to contain the nerves that twisted through her stomach. The number had a Beaucoeur area code, so it could be anyone from another staff member calling to quit to her landlord refusing to return her security deposit. Her phone brought nothing but bad news these days. She snatched it off the pink quilt and took a steadying breath before tapping the Answer button.
“Hello?” She was going for confident and breezy, but the voice that emerged was little more than a wheeze.
A pause, then, “Faith?”
She recognized the rasp of Leo’s voice immediately. Her knees turned to water, and she immediately sat down on the bed. At least she tried to. What actually happened was that she missed her target by several inches, and her ass clipped the mattress and knocked her off-balance, sending her sprawling to the floor.
“Hello?”
His voice sounded tinny as it traveled from her phone’s speaker on the carpet near where she lay like a starfish, staring at the bright white of her childhood ceiling.
“You okay?” Thea hissed, peering anxiously at her from the safety of the queen-sized bed. Faith waved her away and groped for the phone, not even bothering to pull herself into a sitting position. Flat on her back felt like the proper way to have whatever conversation was in store for her.
