Page 59 of Coffee Shop Girl
I had to believe we could do it.
20
Maverick
This wasn’t good.
Not. Good.
Bethany fit into my arms like my body had built itself to accommodate her. Holding her against me had left me weak as a kitten. No deployment, surgery, board meeting, or sales presentation had ever taken my courage in the same way.
My feelings for Bethany had long ago crossed the professional line. Watching her stand up to Jim, saucy blue eyes narrowed like cold firecrackers, sent a thrill through me. Pride, too. She was all vulnerability and rage in the same breath.
She could take care of herself. Shehadtaken care of herself. But I didn’t want her to have to do it alone. No, I wanted to step in. That’s how I knew that this had gotten out of hand. While I would have stepped in to protect any client, I wouldn’t have held them for that long. Imagined their soft lips on mine. Or forced myself to leave hours past closing.
I wanted to prove to Bethany that she wasn’t alone. That the burdens weren’t hers to bear. But how wrong would that be? In a few weeks, I would be gone.
And she wouldbe alone.
I sat in my truck and stared at Grandpa’s house with a mental sigh.
Only a few weeks lay between me and completion on this project. A few weeks to prove my business idea, sell the house for some initial capital—not that I needed it, but it would help—and tell Mallory,Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t want to be your CRO.
If I could walk away. Not just from Mallory, but from Bethany, too.
The way things looked?
I stepped out and slammed the door behind me, the smell of her hair still burning my nose.
21
Bethany
That night, I stared at an empty binder.
Maverick said the new operations manual would be the beginning of the new Frolicking Moose, and I believed him. It was the place where we made coffee-tinged magic happen. Where profitability put more money into my bank account, and that money brought me a certificate to support my sisters and sell real estate.
But executing that new coffee shop required energy and time that the girls had been taking up.
Daily trips to the library, grocery runs, meal coordination, and the stress of living with two other people who suddenly saw me as a mother figure. Ellie still didn’t even seem sure that she liked me, which made it hard to force her to sweep and do her laundry. Two weeks of living with them had made it abundantly clear that neither of them had really been taught how to clean.
Putting together this stupid operations manual had forced me to see exactly what was going on in the shop. To intimately face the failure of Dad’s attention to detail. To stare down every speck and spot to which I’d been turning a blind, overwhelmed eye.
For every process I knew about the shop, more questions popped up that I was clueless about. Maverick combed through Dad’s paperwork to get clues when we didn’t know answers. Called vendors. Even contacted Dad’s most loyal customers. And he constantly had decisions for me to make. All of that meant the operations manual had inched forward like a broken slug.
But now it loomed in front of me.
Everything I wanted seemed to lie on the other side of this. We couldn’t truly improve until we’d swept our way through every part of this store, put in an efficient process, and documented it.
My brain hurt just thinking about it.
Jim’s expression ran through my mind, tugging at an already-weak system. The wariness of his gaze. The utter lack of caring. I couldn’t decide which was worse: that he’d left the girls willingly for the summer, or that he’d figured me out so quickly.
This wasn’t just a goal. This was their lives. This was Ellie and Lizbeth facing down the ugly Jim monster.
Court rooms.
Custody battles.
