Page 31 of Against the Current

Once I start selling houses, we’ll have plenty. We’ll be set.

He’d only ever known his mother’s career to be lucrative.

Ryan put on a pair of sweats and an old university sweatshirt.

“What makes you think you’ll be good at selling real estate?” Trisha asked.

Ryan froze and looked at her. It was the first time she’d ever suggested he wasn’t good at something, and it stung.

Trisha lowered her gaze and let her shoulders slump forward. It was clear she was sorry.

“I should never have come back here,” she muttered. “Not after everything your family put us through.”

Ryan did not remind her of what her family had done. He imagined it was just as painful for her to remember that—maybe even more so.

Downstairs, Ryan ate breakfast with his kids and parents and went outside to check on the snowman. Using supplies from the kitchen, they fixed up his face and even made a small companion snowman beside him, using the gorgeous, blue-skied day for all it was worth. By afternoon, the roads were clear, and they called a tow truck to pull Jackie’s car back onto the road. Before she drove away, she hugged Ryan and said, “Bright and early tomorrow! Nine o’clock sharp!” It was when they planned to have their first meeting as a team.

Trisha remained icy all day and didn’t see his parents at all.

But the following morning, Trisha got into gear and got the kids ready for their first day in Nantucket schools. They were up and out the door by seven fifteen sharp, leaving Ryan to mosey around the enormous mansion, listening to music and getting ready. In the Historic District, where Sutton Real Estate was located in a beautiful old-world building surrounded by oaks, Ryan grabbed a cup of coffee from a swanky place that charged too much. By the time he met his mother, he felt spry and eager to learn everything about real estate.

But the minute he entered Jackie’s office, he felt something off. Jackie wasn’t as lively and soft as she’d been back at theSutton Estate. Her smiles were sharper; her responses were harsher.

It didn’t take Ryan long to realize something was very wrong.

“Mom?” Ryan hesitated and looked down at his hands. “Is there something you want to tell me about the business?”

Jackie’s eyes quivered. She looked as though she was weighing whether she could lie to him—him, her adult son.

Jackie took a breath. “Okay. Maybe it’s clearer than I realized. The business has fallen on hard times. But…” She clasped her hands. “But that’s why I wanted you here. I know you can help us get back on track. You have magic in you, Ryan. People trust you. People are drawn to you.”

Ryan leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. His stomach felt bubbly and strange. He imagined telling this to Trisha later and promptly decided never to mention it.

“Look,” Jackie said, pulling out a stack of pages upon which were lists of upcoming appointments. “Sutton Real Estate is still relatively well-trusted. When people search for ‘real estate Nantucket,’ we still come up online, most of the time. But that’s where you come in. We need to come up first. Someway or another, numerous clients were stolen from under me. I don’t know how that happened. Social media? TikTok?”

Ryan furrowed his brow. His mother was speaking too quickly for him to make full sense of it. But Trisha was in her sixties. New technology wasn’t her forté. It wasn’t his favorite thing in the world, either. But he could figure it out.

He had to.

“Do you know who took your clients?” Ryan asked, curious if it was one or several real estate companies.

Jackie shook her head and raised her mug of coffee. “But the strange thing was, it all happened at once. It was like the universe conspired against me.”

Ryan’s head thundered.

“I don’t know what to do,” Jackie confessed. “Your father can’t work, as you know. And we’re in our sixties. All we really want to do is travel and read and play with our grandchildren.”

“That’s what you should be doing,” Ryan said softly.

Jackie’s eyes echoed embarrassment. Ryan was suddenly reminded of his grandmother—how, until after her death, she’d maintained their belief in an enormous Sutton fortune that hadn’t existed. He remembered how Grandma Dana had threatened to remove him from the will if he remained married to Trisha. He remembered how, when Trisha found that out, Trisha threatened to leave him.

“I don’t want us to lie to each other anymore,” Ryan said suddenly.

His mother raised her eyes to Ryan and nodded. “No lies.”

Ryan let a beat pass. “When’s the next showing?”

“We have a few for a house in Siasconset later this week. Asking price is three million,” Jackie said. “I need to go out to the house and check on some things.”

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