"That's a no." He grabbed my arm and pulled me across the street. "Come on, golden boy. Time for education in being broke."
Chapter 8: Liam
I'd never brought anyone into a thrift store before. Not on purpose.
Growing up, thrift stores weren't cute or vintage or whatever word rich people used to make secondhand sound intentional. They were where my mom bought my school clothes. Where I found the winter coat I wore for seven years straight. Where you learned to check the seams and smell for mildew and calculate price-per-wear in your head before you hit the register.
But walking into Second Chances with Alex Harrington—watching him stand in the doorway like he'd entered a foreign country—I felt something I hadn't expected.
Pride.
"So, this is a lot," Alex said, looking around.
The store was full of racks of clothes crammed together so tight you had to muscle hangers apart to see anything. Shelves along the back wall stacked with old books, mismatched dishes, ceramic animals missing ears.
A bin of vinyl records near the door with a hand-written sign taped to it: ALL RECORDS $2 — NO RETURNS. A mannequinin the window wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a cowboy hat, one arm missing, the other posed in a permanent wave at the street.
The counter was a glass display case filled with jewelry and old watches and a collection of pocket knives fanned out on velvet. Behind it, a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain and a cardigan that looked like it came off her own racks. She was pricing items with a sticker gun and didn't look up when we walked in.
The whole place smelled like old fabric and dust and someone's grandmother's attic.
"This is organized chaos. There's a system."
"What system?"
"My system." I was already moving through the racks. Fingers sliding across hangers with the automatic efficiency of someone who'd done this a thousand times—checking fabric, checking fit, skipping past anything with stains or busted zippers. "You start at the left. Work your way right. Skip the first rack because that's where they put the stuff nobody wants. The good stuff is always in the middle or near the back."
Alex followed me. Watching. Not with the polite distance of someone humoring a friend, but with genuine fascination. He reached out and touched a leather jacket on the rack like he was handling an artifact.
"How much is this?" he asked.
"Check the tag."
He flipped it. "Eight dollars."
"Yeah."
"This would be three hundred dollars at a store near my house."
"Welcome to my world, golden boy."
He kept browsing. Pulling things off racks, holding them up, putting them back. He didn't have the rhythm—kept gravitatingtoward things that were too big or too worn or too weird. A velvet blazer. A Hawaiian shirt to match the mannequin.
He held up a knitted Christmas sweater with a big orange cat.
"Christmas is coming," he said with a big grin.
"No," I said to the cat sweater.
"It's ironic."
"It's a cat."
"An ironic Christmas cat."
"Put it back."
"You're so serious."
