Page 59 of Negotiating Tactics

I chuckled. “Believe it or not, I wanted to be for a while.”

“Really?” she asked, surprised.

I nodded. “I know. Shocking, right?”

She studied me for a moment. “Not at all. But what made you want to be one?”

I didn’t answer immediately but then looked at Alex and was again struck by our connection, the bond that still shocked me.

What shocked me even more was that I wanted to open up to her, felt a desire to share parts of myself I’d shared with no one else.

“When I was a kid, there was a lawyer who helped my family out. I had thoughts of doing the same thing once, but it didn’t work out,” I said, shrugging nonchalantly.

I’d long ago gotten over the disappointment, but it was interesting to look back at it now. Becoming a lawyer had seemed as possible as becoming a werewolf or a superhero, though my mother and grandmother had always told me I could do anything I wanted.

“What’s the story?” Alex asked.

“Well, it all started in Connecticut,” I said.

She furrowed a brow. “Okay.”

“That’s where I grew up. Did you know that?” I asked.

Alex shook her head. “I wasn’t sure where you were from,” she said.

“And you didn’t ask?” I asked.

She smiled. “I didn’t want to pry.”

I kissed her cheek. “Questions from you aren’t ever prying, Alex,” I said.

I stared at her until she nodded and then continued, still surprised that I was willingly discussing this, eager to in fact.

“My mom was from New York, but she worked at a country club in Connecticut during the summers. My sperm donor spotted her, thought she was an easy target, and the rest is history. When she found out she was pregnant, she went to him. From what I understand, he sent her away and didn’t ever look back. So, Mom dropped out of college, and she and my nonna got a place and tried to survive,” I said.

“Your nonna? She’s Italian?” Alex asked.

I smiled. “She was.”

Alex cleared her throat and then looked at me with a little hesitance in her eyes.

“Spit it out,” I said, feeling myself smile back at her.

“So, it sounds like Prescott didn’t provide for you,” she said.

“Not one nickel,” I responded.

“So…how did you make your money? Birdie forbade me from searching on the internet about you, so I have no idea,” she said.

“Search if you want to, but you won’t find much, and I pay a small fortune to keep it that way. But to answer, I made my money in real estate,” I said.

“Really? How did you learn about real estate?” she asked.

“The hard way. But that lawyer who helped me actually put me on the path. Me, Mom, and Nonna always struggled, and when I got into high school, we moved into another shitty apartment. It should have been condemned. The owner was the quintessential slum lord, and some do-gooder lawyer sued him. All of the tenants got a nice little settlement, and for the first time in my life, we had money to get a decent place. A little house, nothing to write home about, but we were grateful. Nonna insisted I keep the sidewalk shoveled and the lawn cared for, and the landlord noticed me and hired me for maintenance and said I could work for him as long as I stayed in school. It just snowballed from there. I got an associate’s degree in business—I never saw Nonna more proud than she was that day—and my business grew from there,” I said.

“Noah, that’s such an amazing story,” she said.

I shrugged. “Sure. But it was mostly just pure stubbornness that kept me going.”

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