Page 23 of The Summer I Destroyed You

“Get your shit,” Liam says calmly, “and don’t let me catch you around any of my jobs again.”

I don’t know who’s more surprised—me or the guy who just lost his job. I’m not above firing people—I do it all the time—but this wasn’t the outcome I was looking for.

Liam turns to me. “You ready to come inside?”

I nod, waiting until he’s opened the door to say anything. “You didn’t need to fire him.”

“Don’t tell me how to run my business and I won’t tell you how to run yours,” he replies. “There’s your new ceiling. Is it what you wanted?”

I glance from the ceiling to him and away. The ceiling is perfect. His response was perfect. He doesn’t let men treat women like garbage. He doesn’t let me treat him like garbage either.

As loath as I am to admit it, Liam Doherty isn’t the villain I wanted to believe he was. Only one of us seems to be doing anything shady at all, and it’s certainly not Saint Liam, who wants to preserve Lucas Hall for free.

“Yes,” I say quietly. “It’s exactly what I wanted.”

He opens up a schedule on his phone. “We’re due to have the seats installed by the end of the week. I’ll let you know when they’re done.”

I wish I could find something to bitch about to make this exchange feel the way it’s supposed to, and I can’t find a goddamn thing. “Thanks,” I tell him, my voice softer and more uncertain than normal as I turn to walk out of the store.

Why does it all feel so incomplete? Why am I sad that the job is nearly over? I should be thrilled.

I pull out my phone when I reach my car. I haven’t texted him once since I discovered who he was, and I’m weirdly anxious to do so now. But that doesn’t stop me.

Can you give me a quote on a build-out for the bookstore? Stella will send you the specs.

Yard Boy

Not sure I want to help with your dastardly plan to take over the city, but I’ll look it over. We could use a bookstore.

Dastardly plan? I just want to make Elliott Springs a spectacular place to live.

My mistake. I thought you and your cronies were buying up all the buildings really cheap to run everyone out of business. Then you bring in big-name stores and charge them twice as much.

Four times as much, but yes, that about sums it up.

Elliott Springs is changing whether you like it or not. If it’s not me doing it, it’ll just be someone else.

I suspect you could stop it if you wanted to.

Except I don’t want to. The people in this town treated me like shit for half my life. I owe them nothing.

Destroying other people isn’t going to make you feel any better.

That suggests to me that you’ve never destroyed an enemy before. It’s actually quite fulfilling.

I wonder if that made him laugh. I hate that I care.

14

LIAM

When I got out of the hospital on crutches, I had more offers of assistance from girls I’d known or dated than I ever could have imagined. Women offered to cook, to clean, to do my laundry. I even got more interesting offers, of the “you don’t have to return the favor” variety. I knew I should be saying yes to at least some of these—I was a changed man, after all, ready to settle down—but there was this bone-deep boredom that kept me silent.

I was finally ready to do the right thing—the thing my family had been on me about for years—but it felt like a sort of death.

In February, I limped into Beck’s bar. “Liam,” said a girl I knew from high school, “you’re breaking my heart, honey. I’m coming over this weekend to cook for you.”

I didn’t want her in my home, mostly because I didn’t want to be stuck trying to get her out of my home, but wasn’t this what I was supposed to want? A woman who’d notice if I was missing for three days? Someone I could care about too?

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