Grayson pushed off the truck and moved to stand in frontof me. “Being enough doesn’t have anything to do with your worth, Preston.”
I didn’t respond.
“It has to do with choice,” he continued. “And right now, you’re the one deciding what her choice means. Shouldn’t that be up to her?”
He let that hang there a moment, then clapped a hand on my shoulder and stepped back. “Think about it.”
Grayson patted Summit on the head and walked off, leaving me there alone and with a truth I wasn’t quite sure what to do with.
Summit whined softly at my feet.
“Yeah.” I jumped down from the tailgate, and scratched the puppy behind the ears. “I know, buddy. I know.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jess
Iwas late. An unexpected trip to the city had already thrown me off schedule, never mind the accident that had backed up traffic for over an hour on the highway.
Frantic and out of breath, I made it to the town hall only five minutes before the meeting was scheduled to start.
Of course, it was packed, and when I got inside and scanned the room, I couldn’t find an empty seat. That is, nowhere except next to Trevor. He spotted me and waved me over.
He was the last person I wanted to spend any time with, but for better or worse, we were still partners on this project, if not in life.
I took one more quick look around the room, trying to find the other committee members, but they were scattered around the room, and I couldn’t even find Preston. Not that he’d want to sit with me, but surely he’d show up to the meeting?
Then again…
I pasted what I hoped was a professional smile on my face and slipped through the row to take my seat next to Trevor.
“It’s about time you got here,” he said by way of greeting. “Here. This is the revised proposal that meets all the recommendations of the committee. I had it fast-tracked. It’s already been given a preliminary pass,” he said. “I don’t expect there’ll be any problems getting this moving forward after tonight.”
I flipped through the package of materials. Most of it was familiar, but there were a few differences that stopped me. “What’s this?” I pointed to a site map. “It looks different.”
“We made the changes your committee requested,” Trevor said with hardly a glance in my direction. “The redesign addresses all of those concerns.”
“But…this…” I flipped through the pages again, trying to make sense of what I was looking at.
At the front of the room, Tilley Beckett called the meeting to order.
“Trevor,” I said, trying to keep my voice low. “This is wrong.”
“It isn’t wrong.” Again, he hardly turned his head to look at me. “It’s different. Like you asked for.”
“I asked for a?—”
“Ssh!” Someone behind me leaned between our seats with a finger to her lips. “The meeting is starting.”
Trevor shot me a smug look, and I resisted the urge to smack it from his face.
Again, I scanned through the proposal, reading as fast as I could to catch up while the meeting began. The development vote was the biggest issue on the agenda. I knew things would move quickly.
But what I was reading didn’t make sense. Yes, they had redesigned the lots that were going in, and the trailhead access would be much less affected now. There was still someencroachment on the wildlife corridor, but I couldn’t deny that it seemed like a good compromise.
At first glance.
The problem was with the lots themselves. They were huge. Estate lots for million-dollar homes. Not the small, starter homes that would provide affordable housing like we’d been promising.
