Chapter 21
CHAPTER 21
S HANNON
“Hello? Earth to Shannon...”
I’m pulled from my thoughts, thankfully, because the reel of Troy’s painful revelation has been playing in my mind for days. I’m drained from the emotions it evokes. I look up to see Tillie standing next to our table.
When Tillie dramatically plops herself into the seat across from me, an exaggerated sigh escapes her, and she brings an energy with her that I envy. She’s like that all the time, really. She’s the kind of person people want to be around because of how they feel when they’re hanging out with her. I especially appreciate it right now because it helps bring me out of my melancholy from thinking about all my family is going through.
I force a smile, not wanting her to notice I was moping.
“Everything okay over there?” I ask.
“Oh my God, thank you so much for having a coffee waiting for me. I definitely need this today.” She lifts her mug, breathes in the aroma, and then takes a long sip. She smiles. “Yes, everything is okay, except I’m dealing with the contractor from hell. He’s making me absolutely nuts.”
“This for the house you’re renovating, right? What’s the issue?”
“He’s so annoyingly frustrating. It’s like he wants to argue with everything I say or counter every suggestion I have.”
I grin at her, and she rolls her eyes. “I know what you’re thinking,” she says.
“I’m not thinking anything. What do you think I’m thinking?”
“I think you’re thinking I’m trying to boss him around and tell him what to do. That I should let him do his job.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking that, although I figured you were probably being very vocal about what you wanted. But now that you mention it, are you trying to tell him how to do his job?”
She picks at her cuticles, staring at her hands. “I mean, not really. I’m making suggestions on how he could think better.”
I laugh out loud. I’m sure telling him how to think better went over well.
“So, you’re telling a contractor, who probably has thirty-plus years in the business, how to do his job,” I smirk as her face reddens slightly. I’m surprised because I’m pretty sure in the few weeks we’ve been friends, I’ve never seen her embarrassed.
“He doesn’t have thirty years in the business. He’s maybe thirty-five, give or take a few years, at most. But he’s distracting. He’s disgustingly handsome and always in my line of sight when I’m trying to work from the site.”
“First of all, I don’t think ‘disgustingly’ and ‘handsome’ go together. But also, why are you trying to work from the site? It’s an active construction zone with all the renovation, isn’t it?”
“Well, my neighbor at my current house is loud and irritates me with the music he’s constantly playing on the back patio. It’s so loud I can hear it in my house. Plus, I need to be there to make sure this guy stays on track.” She picks up her menu and starts checking it over. I already know what I’m getting.
“Hmm.” I try to hold back my smirk.
“What’s that for?” she asks.
“Well, what if one of your clients wanted to sit in your office while you worked on their taxes? To check you were doing things like he wanted and staying on track. Would you be okay with that?”
She cocks her head back and grimaces like my words are causing a visceral reaction in her.
“No, that’s ridiculous! I know what I’m doing. I don’t need somebody to micromanage?—”
She stops herself and pauses while she takes a long drink of her coffee. Her eyes narrow as she watches me over the rim of her coffee mug.
“I see what you’re trying to do here, Shannon. But let’s quit talking about my annoying, cocky contractor. I wanna talk about your hot, soon-to-be ex-husband.”
“Nope. Not talking about him. But let’s talk about Will.”
I tell her about what happened in the conference room with Will and that I felt uncomfortable. I scanned my thoughts after it happened before deciding how much to say to her because I wasn’t sure if I was misreading or overreacting. After thinking it through, I know I wasn’t. It’s never appropriate for him to put his hands on me and crowd my space—you don’t do that to a woman. Or anyone. People should not touch others like that without permission.
We talked about what I can do to try to avoid being alone with Will, and I’ve already been doing some of it in the week since the fire alarm happened. Though I know I won’t be able to avoid being together without others around forever. He’s basically my boss, so he could ask me to sit down and review accounts with him anytime. It would be difficult to insist we not do it in his office or the conference room, set off from the main work area.
“I’ve decided not to say anything to him about it right now. If it happens again or he makes me uncomfortable again, I’ll address it.”
Tillie shakes her head in disgust.
“I can’t wait to get leave. Between that kind of behavior and this cutthroat attitude of only taking clients they can bill per hour and milk the most money from, it’s not what I stand for. It’s also not what Jeff’s dad stood for, and I would hope Jeff doesn’t fully know everything that’s going on and condone it. Though it’s hard to imagine he doesn’t notice in these meetings how much some of these accountants are taking liberties with things like what they bill for and such.”
Panic fills my chest. She’s my one work friend. Well, she and Ruthie. Yes, one of my good friends is forty years my senior. So? With Ruthie, though, I watch what I say because the woman runs on coffee and gossip. Besides my sisters, sisters-in-law, and a casual friendship with Emily, I don’t have other friends. I don’t want to lose the one I have.
“You’re leaving?” My voice cracks. God, I’m pathetic.
Before she can answer, the server approaches the table with the food we ordered while talking about Will. It smells scrumptious. I ordered a shepherd’s pie, wanting something warm and comforting on this dreary, rainy October day. Tillie got soup and a salad, and I noticed she put hardly any dressing on her salad.
“I’m not leaving yet, but it’s my dream. I wanna start my own company, something smaller than what these guys have, and somewhere I feel good about the work I’m doing for people.”
Relief fills me when I realize she’s not leaving right now, and there’s also something else. It takes me a second to realize it’s excitement.
“Will you please take me with you when you go?” I chuckle, and I’m mostly kidding. I’m sure the last thing Tillie needs is to drag a new accountant along to slow her down. She’d have to do so much to get me fully trained.
She swallows the spoonful of soup she put in her mouth, and then her expression turns serious. “Would you really consider going with me?”
I lean back in my chair and think for a second. “Actually, yeah, I would if you were serving that kind of client and running a business focused on integrity and service.”
“Oh my God! We could be business partners,” Tillie exclaims. She whips out her phone and starts swiping through it at a rapid pace. Then she stands up and comes over to my side of the booth. “Scoot over.” When I do, she climbs into the booth with me and shows me her phone.
“What am I looking at here?”
The internet page she has open shows a small house with a dilapidated sign falling down and disappearing into the overgrown yard. It’s just inside the border of Aron Falls.
“It’s where our business could be! I’ve been watching this place. It’s zoned commercial and used to be an insurance agency. It needs a lot of work inside, so the cost is relatively low, but I’m not ready to take the leap yet. Well, that and it’s not for sale yet. It had been, but then they took it off the market. I have enough money to buy it when it does go up again. It’s overwhelming thinking about getting the inside up to par.”
I watch her face for a few seconds. “You’re serious?”
“Of course I’m serious. The money doesn’t scare me. I’m afraid to dive in by myself. But if I had a partner, a friend, who was like-minded, it would be less scary and more fun.”
Tillie flips through the pictures, and she’s right. The inside is pretty much down to the studs. It looks like somebody had started to renovate it and stopped.
“It’s got a functioning bathroom, so that’s something,” Tillie says. She stands, goes back to her side of the booth, and begins eating again.
“How much would I need to come up with to go in with you?”
“I could just buy the house on my own. I guess that’s the benefit of being single with no kids and no pets. Plus, I’m a little bit of a workaholic. I have plenty of money. I’ve been able to save up over the years. But we would need to cash flow the renovations inside. So, it would probably be a while until we could be up and running.”
It doesn’t escape me that when Tillie talks about being single with no kids, it’s not with elation. Something flittered across her face, and I think it was sadness. Though she quickly masked it.
“We could focus primarily on small businesses since they’re neglected in this market and have to go to the big city to find firms that will take them. Ooh, we could even concentrate mostly on women-owned businesses. Not that we would discriminate against male-owned businesses, but we could focus our work on female small business owners in Aron Falls and Elladine and the surrounding towns. It would be so awesome and empowering.” Excitement fills me as I talk.
“Yes!” Tillie slams her fork down on the table, and several of the other diners glance our way. Her cheeks turn a rosy shade of pink, but she looks around at the surrounding tables and then loudly asks, “What? Can’t a girl be excited?”
She turns back and resumes eating like it was nothing. After we’re finished with our meals, the server brings us more coffee.
“I know we’ve only been friends for a few weeks or so, but I feel like I’ve known you forever. I promise I’m not a gossip. But I want you to know that if you want to talk about what you’re going through with your divorce, I’m here. I’ve been there.”
She looks down, no longer making eye contact with me. She’s divorced?
“You were married?”
I watch her as she takes a sip of her coffee, gripping her coffee mug tightly. The corners of her mouth turn into a frown, and then she looks up at me.
“I was married for a short time, but I’ve been divorced for way longer. Even though there were no kids involved and, well... I know it was really hard to go through. And I hated my ex by the time we got the divorce. It’s clear you don’t hate yours.”
Tillie holds my eye contact, almost daring me to challenge what she said about me not hating Troy. I don’t take the bait because, of course, I don’t hate him.
“No. I don’t hate him. He’s a good man, but... we grew apart. I felt like I lost myself to what our life was. I had hopes and dreams, and I didn’t accomplish many of them because I was so busy living our life.”
“Well, what were your hopes and dreams?”
“I wanted to get my CPA license, and I wanted to own an accounting firm or at least be a senior partner in someone else’s by the time I was thirty.”
“Did you not want kids? Or to be married?”
I feel my eyes widen. Why would she think that? “Of course, I wanted to be married and have kids. I love having kids, and I loved being married when it was good.”
Tillie’s eyes narrow somewhat. “Huh.”
“What does that mean?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. You talk like those dreams have to be mutually exclusive. Think about it. We were just discussing the possibility of starting our own business, so it’s not like that dream is dead. You have children, and you had a husband who...”
When her voice trails off, I glance up at her, and her eyes tell me she has more she wants to say.
“What?” My voice is quiet, and I’m positive I already know what she’s about to say.
Her eyes swirl with a mixture of seriousness and sadness. She tilts her head and looks at me, silent, for an uncomfortable amount of time.
“Tell me now if you don’t want me to be frank because holding my opinions in isn’t one of my strengths.” She eyes me for a solid thirty seconds, giving me a chance to tell her to mind her own business. I don’t. “Okay. On the day of the fire alarm, while your husband was searching the crowd for you, it was evident he still has feelings for you.”
“He wasn’t looking for me.”
Tillie rolls her eyes. “He most definitely was looking for you. Did you not see the relief spread across his face when he saw you? I also saw that same relief on your face when he came out of the building. You don’t look at him like a woman looks at a man she dislikes or hates.”
“Because I don’t dislike him or hate him. That’s all.”
“That much is clear.” She chuckles.
“What’s so funny? It’s true.”
“Sweetie, the only thing that’s true is you look at him like a woman looks at a man she loves.”