Rich nodded. “At some point, you realize it’s not how many boxes you check, but which ones you check, and how well you check them.”
Now it was my eyebrows that crept up. “Spoken like somebody with experience.”
Rich flashed a smile that didn’t completely make me decide to start liking him, but it came close. “Why do you think I suddenly dropped everything to come to West Valley and win Kira back?” he asked.
“Kira said you never admitted she was the reason you came back. I thought the official story was something about business opportunities on the East Coast.”
Rich looked a little coy. “Maybe letting you in on that little secret will get you to stop glaring at me all the time.”
I bit back a smile. “Maybe. But if you told me what got Nick to agree to come back, I’d consider it a done deal. No more glaring.”
“Nick, huh? As the last surviving member of the Overlook Point Oath Squad, I wouldn’t peg you as the one to be curious about Nick—you know, considering he’s supposed to be the only man in the world you’d never date.”
“Maybe curiosity and a desire to date aren’t necessarily synonymous?”
He held up his palms. “Point taken. But I guess I’ll have to deal with more glares, because Nick’s reasons aren’t mine to share. If you want to know badly enough, maybe you two will have to stop playing chicken and finally talk.”
My water bottle crinkled between my fingers when I thought of Nick. When I really thought about it, Nick made me feel pathetic more than anything else. It had been seven years since I had had a crush on him. Seven years since he had asked Kira out instead of me and made it painfully clear that he wasn’t interested in me that way. It might not have all seemed so humiliating if I hadn’t written him that stupid poem the day before he had asked Kira out. I still cringed when I thought about it. Either way, it wasn’t the sort of thing that should’ve warranted an eternal grudge. And if I was honest with myself, anger wasn’t what kept me from wanting to fix things with him. It was the fear that he’d break my heart again.
When Rich had come back to West Valley, he’d practically gone straight from the plane to Kira’s school and tried to apologize for what had happened seven years ago. Cade hadn’t been in as much of a hurry, but he’d still found his way back to Iris. Nick, on the other hand, had avoided me like the plague.
That didn’t normally bother me, but I guessed I was feeling a little sorry for myself, considering the events of the last twenty-four hours. I’d broken up with the boyfriend everybody thought was perfect for me and lost the job everyone thought I was amazing at.
I might not have been certain of a whole lot at the moment, but I knew one thing: all I wanted was for things to go back to normal, even if I was starting to have more and more trouble figuring out what normal was.
“Hmm,” Rich said. He was watching me with an annoyingly perceptive expression, like he knew exactly how not fine I was. He pointed to my hands. “It looks like you’re thinking about taking that poor water bottle into the bathroom and interrogating it.”
I relaxed my grip on the bottle. “I’ve been better,” I said. “But, no offense, it’s not something I really want to talk about.”
“Just remember that it’s not good to bottle it up forever. You’ve got me, Kira, Iris, and even Cade—if you feel like venting to a brick wall that spits out bad puns and laughs at its own jokes, that is.”
I smirked. As if on cue, Cade grew considerably louder. Both Rich and I stopped talking to look toward him.
Cade’s palms were pressed together, and he was doing some kind of swimming motion, maybe still imitating a snake. Kira was pressing her hand to her forehead, and Iris was watching with a confused expression.
“Do you mind apologizing to everyone for me?” I asked Rich. “I’ve got a big day tomorrow. I think it’d be best if I head home and get some sleep.”
He watched me with a funny expression. “You sure everything is okay? Aside from the obvious issues, I mean.”
“Fine,” I said, and then I laughed after a short pause. “And that’s not code. Really, I’m fine.”
But I couldn’t help thinking how far from fine I was as I headed out of the bowling alley. I didn’t let myself dwell on any of that. All I had to do was what I’d always done. Look forward. Focus on working my ass off and chasing my goal, even when the thought made me want to curl up and aggressively breathe into a paper bag.
I can do this.
The only slight hitch in my plan was my friends would all laugh their asses off when they found out where I was planning to interview tomorrow.
Chapter 2
NICK
Everybody lived for something. Some spent their whole lives searching for that something; others found it but never quite reached it. I’d found mine a long time ago, and I woke up every day hoping for another taste. I lived for a challenge. It was my drug. When I was younger, it had been enough to find something hard and overcome it.
I’d always been clever, and that let me overpower almost every obstacle I’d come across. Then I realized it wasn’t enough to just overcome the obstacles. There were countless ways to get through a locked door, but only one perfect way: the key. My addiction evolved until it wasn’t enough to succeed. I had to succeed in a clean, precise way. A perfect way.
Take my man-child of a brother, Cade. Keeping him alive was a challenge that probably should’ve required a full-time staff of handlers and experts. It probably should’ve also required specialized tools like cattle prods and traps to keep him under control during his more adventurous moments. But it was technically a task that could be accomplished in any number of ways.
I believed there was a perfect solution to every challenge. Finding it was what gave me a rush. I loved the process of searching for the secret, whether it was subtly convincing my brother it was actually a bad idea to ride a shark—yes, even if he was wearing full-body chain mail—or finding the one faulty cog in the complicated machinery of a failing company.
I craved the perfect solution. Precision. There was a kind of poetry in the efficiency of doing something just right—without an ounce more or less effort than was required.
My brothers and I owned a company called Sion, and our work was all about that kind of precision. We found businesses that were on their way to financial collapse and turned them into virtual money-printing machines. When we showed up with checkbooks and wrote down enough zeroes, they were always willing to sell off their burden to us. After that, my job was to trim the fat. When necessary, I’d step in as a temporary CEO until I could find the key to getting the company back on track. Nothing ever quite matched the feeling of finding the one loose thread—that sometimes-minute adjustment to let every other piece fall back into place.
Today, Bark Bites was going to become Sion’s newest acquisition. It was a restaurant franchise where the menu also included a selection of items for your dog. The dogs were given a little doghouse beneath the table and a tether to be leashed. Based on the information I’d seen, Bark Bites was about six months away from declaring bankruptcy, whether the management knew it or not. They weren’t a publicly shared company, so the hostile takeover route was off the table. Instead, I was going to go the simple route. I had a meeting scheduled in half an hour, and I was going to show up with a fat check in my hand.