Page 16 of Worth the Fall

“What are you thinking?” I asked, wanting clarification for anything regarding the resort and its finances.

Sometimes, I got locked into a single idea that I couldn’t see any other way around. Which was why I liked asking my brothers and the staff for their input. In the end though, we’d have to choose the option that would be the most profitable and make the most sense long-term. When it came to the resort, it was never short-term thinking. It was about adding to the legacy.

Patrick stood up, hustled into the kitchen, and pulled open a drawer. He returned with a notepad and a pencil and started sketching.

“Okay, so picture this.” He turned the notepad in our direction to show the rough drawings that were still somehow completely understandable, even to my untrained eye. “Mountain chalets with multiple rooms. Like three or four bedrooms, each with their own bathroom. A kitchen. A living room. Fireplaces.”

“More than one fireplace?” I asked.

“In some of them, yeah. It’s romantic,” Patrick noted as he tapped the pencil on top of the pad, his mind obviously racing with ideas.

“Why would people choose a chalet instead of just getting adjoining rooms in one of the main buildings? Or stay in a suite?” Matthew wondered out loud, and it was a fair question. One I would have asked too.

“So they can stay longer. Plus, our biggest suite is only two bedrooms. But it still feels like you’re in a hotel room. This would be more like staying in a home.”

It was a really smart idea. “I don’t hate it. At all. I’ll need the numbers so we can compare the building costs, and then I can run some projections.”

“Done,” Patrick said. “Plus, with something that size, the price could easily be double what we generally charge for a suite. Maybe even triple? I don’t know. That’s your area of expertise.”

“I’ll need your help selling it to Dad.” I pinned them both with a look that said we had to do this together.

It wasn’t that our dad didn’t listen or think our ideas were good enough to implement. It was more that he liked the three of us working together as a team.

One O’Grady got shot down every single time.

The old man’s response was always the same. “What do your brothers think?”

It was all of us or none.

That was the only way this resort worked. And I respected that.

DIDN’T SEE THAT ONE COMING

BROOKLYN

Istepped into the hallway, making sure to leave theprivacy, pleasetag on my hotel room door as I closed it behind me. I’d been at Sugar Mountain Resort since I’d walked out on Eli that afternoon, and I really needed to figure out a game plan going forward. Staying here had been impulsive and was supposed to be temporary, but things with the divorce had progressed so quickly that I didn’t have it in me to think about permanently relocating until that part was finalized. It was as though my brain could only handle one life-changing event at a time.

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