“You do, in fact,” Weston replied, scrolling through his phone. “Oooh! I think someone is going viral again!”
* * *
After settlingthe rabbits in their new home, I ventured out into the cold evening. Traffic was light, and I could have taken a car, but instead I walked down to the Harris & Schultz office. I needed to clear my head.
I had snapped photos and filmed videos of the rabbits in their new house. But I desperately wished I could send them to Avery. She would have loved the rabbits, I was sure of it. I had almost started to text her, to ask her if it might confuse them to change their names, but then I realized that I couldn’t, because I had ruined the best thing to happen in my life.
I couldn’t believe I had been so stupid. What was worse was that there had been no miscommunication issue; I had flat-out lied to her. It was all there in black and white. I had known Avery needed money. I had known she had the expensive watch. The right thing to do would have been to inform her about the watch and help her auction it off, or hell, buy it myself.
Chuck was waiting for me in the lobby of the Harris & Schultz offices when I walked in.
“You know,” he said when he saw me, “I’m incredibly disappointed in you.”
“If you called me here for a groveling apology, well, I’m not going to do it. Of course I am sorry, but there’s nothing I can do or say to win that contract back, and I wouldn’t expect you to entertain it anyway,” I said bluntly. “You want to chew me out? Go ahead. But it’s nothing worse than what I have playing in my own head right now. I lied. I ruined my family’s reputation and my company’s reputation.”
“I’m not disappointed about that; it’s just money,” Charles said. “You should have seen the things Harris and I got up to in the early days of our business. Why, one time, we were vying to win a sizable investment from a young woman who had come into a large sum of old family money. The strangest thing about it was that she had an affinity for large birds.”
“Like parrots?” I asked in confusion.
“Like emus,” Chuck replied. “So Harris and I are at this dinner. The prospective client was pretty, smart, and interesting. We needed the contract, and I, as the brazen young man I was, wanted to impress her. I flat-out lied to this young woman about how I ran an emu ranch. Harris was furious! We had to go buy a number of emus from a man in Texas and drive them to New York so they would be on site for an informal meeting with the young woman.”
He laughed at the memory. I had no idea why he was telling me the story, however.
“We won the contract, by the way, but the young woman told us later that she knew immediately that we had no clue how to keep emus. She said she had picked us as in investment opportunity simply because we had the audacity to drive twenty-four hours nonstop from Texas to New York with a herd of emus in a trailer. That investment was large enough to catapult our investment bank into international acclaim. The young woman eventually became our business partner—and, more importantly, my wife.” He grinned happily.
I smiled slightly. “I had no idea Mrs. Schultz liked birds.”
“And I had no idea you liked rabbits, but here we are.” He narrowed his eyes. “No, what I’m disappointed in is the fact that you had a good woman who would put up with you, and you just let her go. Where’s the audacity?”
“It was fake,” I said.
Chuck gave me a knowing look. “Was it?”
“No,” I admitted. “I fell in love with her about two weeks into it. I seriously can’t live without her. I can’t think. I can’t do anything without wishing she were there to share the moment with me. I made a terrible mistake.”
“How are you going to fix it, out of curiosity?” Chuck leaned back in his seat.
“I can’t!” I said, gesturing helplessly. “I blew it. She hates me. I ruined her life and her dreams.”
“It just so happens,” Chuck said, “that I ran into Avery earlier today. She mentioned what a good, strong, kind, capable man you were and how I ought to give you another chance. That it was all her fault.”
“It wasn’t,” I said bitterly. “It was my fault. Avery’s perfect. I’m basically feral. I grew up in a cult and have no sense of human decency.”
“I think you do, and Avery certainly does. Don’t give this up. Fight for it. Make the grand gesture! Put it all on the line!”
“But I—” As I stood there, the perfect plan started to form in my mind. I just needed to figure out how to pull it off.
Chuck smiled at my expression. “Take it from an old pro: don’t give a living animal as a pet. Ten emus can grow to two hundred in the blink of an eye.”
* * *
Dottie glaredat me when I showed up at her door the next morning.
“I don’t see why I should,” she said tartly when I made my pitch.
“It’s great for Harrogate. It will provide working-class jobs. And besides, who doesn’t love weddings?” I ran a hand through my hair. “Please don’t blame Avery. She loves this town, and she loves you. Besides,” I said, handing her the legal paperwork that I’d begged Hunter to draw up the night before, “I am prepared to offer a fair market value.”
Dottie raised an eyebrow.
