Page 7 of That Kind of Guy

He nodded, thinking. “Sucks.”

“Yep. See you later.”

I made my way back to the office, walking instead of driving since it was only a few blocks and I enjoyed seeing the town this way. I pushed thoughts about Will and his family out of my head as I neared the main street and ran into several people I knew. I said hello to the bookstore owner, chatted with a teacher from the high school, and stopped to say hi to Keiko, the owner of a local restaurant.

“Everything okay with the power outage last night?” I asked her. “I always worry that when the power comes back on, the surge will damage something in the kitchen. You should let my crew take look in there to make sure everything’s okay.”

Way back in the sixties, Queen’s Cove was designed for a population of maybe five thousand people. With the extra load from the tourists on our electrical grid in the summer, and the tall trees falling onto power lines during big winter storms, the town seemed to be enduring more power outages, more often. And sometimes, for a day at a time.

Keiko waved a hand. “Oh, yes. Avery always has it handled.”

Right. Avery Adams. The corner of my mouth tugged up when I thought about how irritated she was when I asked if she needed help.

Avery Adams was a curious one. Early thirties, shoulder-length auburn hair in a cute, choppy cut, and bright blue eyes the color of the pen I wrote with. Great body. Gorgeous smile, although she never shone it at me, only customers and staff. She was cute—super cute—and she couldn’t stand me, which only made me want to talk to her more.

I think it was that women didn’t usually find me irritating. They found me funny, charming, helpful, interesting, handsome…

But never irritating.

I wasn’t sure what my end game was, annoying her like I did. It wasn’t like I wanted a relationship. I wasn’t that kind of guy, not like Will. Will had always been that family kind of guy, even when we were kids. Me? Not so much. I had my business, I had my friends, and I had my brothers and parents. Relationships got complicated.

Now, if Avery could do a casual kind of thing, then we’d be in business.

“Emmett?” Keiko asked, and I got the impression I had spaced out while she was talking. “How is Kara doing?”

“Who?”

“Kara. How is she doing with the move?”

My heart sunk again, and I thought about Kara growing up in Victoria, away from her grandparents and all the people that helped Will and Nat with raising her. Queen’s Cove was the village that was committed to raising Kara, just as it was for everyone who had grown up here.

“She seemed okay,” I told Keiko, thinking about Will driving away this morning with Nat in the passenger seat and Kara waving at me from the backseat. “The power outage last night just reinforced their decision to go.”

I remembered the day Will told me that Kara was sick. It was renal failure, and the doctors were putting her on dialysis until they could find a donor. That was a bad night. I sat with Will at his kitchen table while he found solace in the bottom of the bottle, a rare indulgence for him. It wasn’t fair, but there wasn’t a single thing we could do.

I thought they were managing okay with dialysis. It wasn’t ideal, but they were managing. Then Nat let it slip that the power outages added another layer of stress to their already upside-down life. Will had bought his parents’ house that he grew up in, next door to my parents, and the wiring was old. They installed a generator, but a surge damaged it. They couldn’t win, and finally, they gave in.

My chest wrenched with frustration. I hated that there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about this.

I had spent years building a successful construction company with my brother. We had started with nothing. I’d done well for myself. I was in my mid-thirties, I had a nice car and a beautiful, custom-built home. I had more money than I needed, but I was completely powerless against this, and I couldn’t do a thing to help them.

Keiko sensed my mood and patted my arm. “It’s going to be okay.”

I nodded at her, but I wasn’t sure about that. “Thanks. I’ve got to run. See you later, Keiko.”

I made my way to the office down the street, thinking about the power outages the whole time. Our entire town was affected by them, not just Will and Kara. Every business had to either close or come up with a solution. Every resident had to have their flashlights ready every time a tree swayed. It had been like this for as long as I could remember.

I passed town hall and frowned to myself. The power outages never came up in town hall meetings. No one seemed as frustrated with the outages as I was, everyone just accepted that this was part of living in Queen’s Cove and we couldn’t change it.

One person could change it, though.

“Is Isaac available?” I asked the receptionist, a young woman smacking her gum and staring at her phone.

She shrugged. “Probably. Go on in.”

“Thanks.” I flashed her a grateful smile before heading into the office behind her.

Isaac Anderson, mayor of Queen’s Cove for probably a decade, was sitting at his desk and reading the local paper. He looked up with surprise when I entered.

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