Page 73 of So Close

“But it’s not a viral campaign. Or even one that’s about to go viral.”

“No. No, it’s not.”

“So—”

“Auburn—”

“Look,” she said decisively. “I’ve been giving this alotof thought. There’s really no choice here. I don’t have the money.Wedon’t have the money.”

“I don’t have the money.”

“It wasn’t yours to have,” she said.

“But this is happening because of me. Because I made a bad investment. A bad choice. If I’d been a good steward for Home Base, I would never have had to put you in this position. I could have given you weeks or even months to come up with the money. Hell, I could have done a Contract for Deed or even financed the whole purchase for you.”

She made a face at that. “What makes you think I would have let you dothat?” she teased, and for just a moment, the levity in her voice helped. Made him feel like things were going to be okay.

“The point is,” she said, “there’s no money.” She made it carefully neutral, like that might make him forget the circumstances. “And given that fact—I think it’s pretty damn obvious that it’s time for me to back down. Call off Carl.”

“I think we should at least talk about the alternative.”

She was shaking her head. “No. Don’t even say it, Trey. I know you’ll hate yourself if you say it. If it were just you, Iknowyou’d do it. You’d do some kind of crazy self-sacrificing grand gesture and give me Beachcrest. But it’s not just you. And I know you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if a hundred and fifty people lost their jobs. You’re not that kind of man.”

“You mean,” he said darkly, “you’re not that kind of woman.” Because right now he hadnoidea what kind of man he was. Not the man who’d gone toe to toe with her in a hospital room, for sure, but not, by a goddamn long shot, the man she deserved. The man he’d set out to be, the kind who would never steal from someone he cared about the thing that mattered most to her. She was going to lose Beachcrest. The woman in front of him was going to lose the place she lived, her livelihood—herlife’s dreambecause of him.

He was no better than Patrick.

Worse, he was no better than his father.

“There’s only one thing to do,” she said. “We’ll talk to Carl. He’ll understand.” Her eyes flicked to his face, suddenly seeing, with an understanding so instant and thorough that it almost made him howl with grief, what that was going to mean to him. “Oh,” she said. “We’ll have to tell him. What—”

“What I did. That I fucked up.”

“You made a mistake. People make mistakes all the time in business.”

“I got greedy,” he said. “I knew that investment was riskier than our usual tolerance, but I thought—”

“You thought if you grew this company big enough to sell that you’d be in a position to make sure Brynn lived in a bigger house and Carl got to retire in comfort,” she said. “I know that’s what you thought.”

And there she was, giving him the benefit of the doubt because that’s the kind of person she was, one with a heart so big it could hold everything—all the strays who wandered into Beachcrest, all the world’s mistakes, the loss of the thing she’d wanted most.

“I got greedy,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about Brynn or Carl. I was thinking about me and my reputation and the next big thing. I was looking ahead instead of focusing on what was in front of me, and now Ishouldbe paying for it. But—” his chest was so tight that it came out choked. Strangled. “Instead, you’re paying for it. Tell me how the fuck that’s fair.”

“It’snotfair,” Auburn said. “If you think that’s what I’m saying, you’re way off. But it’s also life. Beachcrest was never mine, Trey. I didn’t have the money. I never had the money, and that wasn’t anything to do with you. It was just the truth of my life. It was crazy, naive, idealistic, for me to think that just because Carl said it would be mine one day that somehow,magically,it would.”

More than anything, he hated the way she’d just said the wordmagically, as if magic were something she had believed in before but didn’t anymore. Something she’d grown out of.

“You know, and I know, that the well-being of all your employees combined has to outweigh just mine,” Auburn said.

He couldn’t bring himself to agree with her. He just couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come out of his mouth, wouldn’t move past the choke point in his chest.

“Trey.”

People didn’t always know what they wanted. They wanted to live in a shack when there was a mansion for sale, to retire in a hovel when there was a luxury condo in the offing. They couldn’t see that they’d placed their faith in the wrong man, that it was only a matter of time before they’d be worn down to the nub or blown away like dust.

She took both his hands. Hers were warm; he could feel that his were like ice.

“We need to talk to Carl.”

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