Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ava
I fluffed the pillows on the daybed in the downstairs office for the third time. They kept sinking. Why did they keep sinking? They looked like they were trying to melt into the bed and disappear, but I wasn’t having any of that.
“Ava!” Jules called from the couch. “Your timer thingy is beeping again!”
Shit! I hadn’t even heard it. I hustled out of the office—which was close enough to the kitchen that I had zero excuses on that front—and pulled my vegan, gluten-free scones out of the oven. They weren’t burned, but that was too close for my liking. Changing so many ingredients had proven more challenging than I’d expected, and this was my fifth attempt in as many days to make a batch with a texture I could get behind.
And maybe even serve to my customers, but I wasn’t holding my breath.
The girls were coming today to get our financing squared away for the house so that we could get the appraisal and get this deal closed. I couldn’t quite shake a frantic anxiety that kept me moving. And cleaning. And baking. And organizing. It felt like if I stopped at all, everything would fall apart.
Jules appeared behind me, inhaling deeply, her face breaking into an adorable smile. “Those smell incredible.” She reached for one, but I hurried the tray out of reach.
“They have to cool first,” I reminded her. “We’re already fighting a losing battle here. Best to follow protocol.”
Jules snorted, half her lips dropping so that her smile took on a sarcastic tone. “A losing battle?”
“You know, with all the substitutions. Gluten-free flour is an absolute bear to work with. I honestly don’t know how home bakers do it. I have a degree and I still can’t get the texture right.”
“Ava,” Jules leveled a sobering look my way, her soulful eyes holding me hostage, “every batch you’ve made this week has been variations of amazing. Were some a little denser? Yeah. Were some a little drier? Yup. But not a single one was bad.”
I paused in the middle of transferring the scones onto a cooling rack. “You don’t have to baby me. I can take the criticism.”
“I’m not babying you. I won’t eat something that’s inedible. And I will dole out constructive criticism if it’s warranted. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have devoured all your previous efforts with this recipe. You’re single-handedly destroying my waistline.”
I grabbed an aqua mixing bowl to start in on the icing. “I can’t give them away yet. They haven’t passed inspections. Hey, I meant to ask you, how’s the job hunt going? You had an interview this week right?”
Between the bakery, the house, and helping Ben learn to cook, I hadn’t checked in with Jules nearly enough. She’d been so fraught about not being financially stable that I really should be doing more to support her job search. At least, that’s what a good friend would do. At present, I wasn’t certain I still fit that bill.
“Yeah, at the fast food place off the highway. They offered me the position.”
The despair in her voice was heart-wrenching. I didn’t have to ask to know it wasn’t a job she wanted.
I stopped mixing and turned to face her. “Don’t take it.”
She frowned. “But I need the money. I can’t afford to be choosy right now.”
“You can,” I argued. “You can stay here as long as it takes for you to find a job you actually like. Plus, I’m going to need your help renovating. Even if we get a business loan, we’ll have to do a lot of the work ourselves to cut costs. Trust me, something else will come along.”
She worried her lip. “Ben did offer to help me get a job at his real estate agency. It would be better than flipping burgers.”
I almost dropped my whisk. “He did? When?” He hadn’t mentioned anything to me about it. “You actually spoke with him?”
“Yeah. He came by the other day to try to clear the air and get back on speaking terms. He also said I have you to thank for that, so thank you. I appreciate you backing me even when I’m not there.”
An uncomfortable feeling—something an awful lot like guilt—twisted around my gut. But I wasn’t dating Ben. I needed to talk to him first. Then I could sit Jules down and sort all this out. So I just smiled at her and went back to whisking.
“You should take him up on that,” I told her. “If you feel like you can handle seeing him that much, that is. It’s a really flexible job, which will be nice once we start in on the B&B.”
“I did think about that,” she agreed, reaching for a scone.
This time I didn’t stop her. I did hurry to drizzle some of the icing on it before she took a bite, though.
“I don’t know if I can, but after talking with him I’m more open to trying it,” she continued, swallowing her first bite. “I need to take a class and a test, too, and they both cost money.”
Before I could tell her for the thousandth time that I was happy to front her some cash, the door flew open and Riley bounced in, followed by Viv and Gianna.
“Alright, ladies, we have a lot to discuss,” Gianna said without preamble. She sat down at the tiny table in the kitchen, getting out her laptop and typing furiously.
“Hello to you, too,” I replied. “Anyone want some tea with your scones?”
“God, I love coming here,” Viv sighed, taking the seat opposite Gianna.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” I turned to Gianna, raising a brow.
“Nothing caffeinated, please. I’ve already drunk my body weight in coffee,” she answered.
I moved to grab the kettle, but Jules was already filling it at the sink. Instead, I pulled out my basket of tea and set it down on the table.
“Alright, Gianna. What’s our first order of business?” I asked.
“Our LLC is all set,” she began, tearing her gaze off her laptop to look at each of us. “The paperwork went through fine, everything is squared. But I’ve been looking into mortgages, and we have a decision to make.”
I brought the scones over, even though they weren’t completely cool, sensing that everyone could probably use a little sugar rush while we listened to Gianna’s technical tangent.
“It turns out that a lot of banks don’t love offering a mortgage loan to LLCs. If we get one, it will be at a higher interest rate, and we will almost certainly have to pay more at signing. There’s a bunch more than that, but the takeaway here is that if we do this together, it’s going to cost more.”
I grabbed a scone and bit into it, briefly registering the tanginess of a cranberry. “Are there any pros to doing it that way?”
“And is there another way to do it?” Riley asked. “I don’t know anything about homeownership.”
Gianna’s dark eyes looked toward me first. “Yes. It does, as the name implies, limit our collective liability in a potentially risky business endeavor. Though unlikely that we’d get a lawsuit slapped on us by a customer, it’s possible. The umbrella of an LLC should keep us from individually going bankrupt if that happens. It also makes it easier to have all of us put equal shares into the project.”
Then she turned to Riley. “Also yes. We could apply for a small business loan, which I think Ava is probably familiar with. We could also just have one of us take out the mortgage personally and then we could all reimburse them. But, like I said, that way leaves us more open to lawsuits.”
She was right. I had gotten a small business loan to open up my bakery. I was still paying that off, but I wasn’t drowning in it. And the process had been tedious but not painful.
We spent the next two hours debating how to tackle this little hiccup. Three pots of tea later, the scones were gone, we’d collapsed onto the living room furniture like fainting ladies from a Victorian painting, and were still divided on the issue at hand. When I noted that the sun was already dropping toward the horizon, I decided enough was enough.
“Alright.” I sat up, and the room went quiet. “We have among us someone who advises businesses for a living. Gianna, what’s your professional advice here? If this were a client, what would you recommend?”
“I don’t make recommendations about mortgages,” she began. We all protested, so she relented with a sigh. “If a client asked my opinion, I would always advise in favor of the LLC. Just in case. And if it was a scenario with multiple investors, even more so.”
“Do we all agree to take Gianna’s professional advice?” I asked.
Everyone replied in varying degrees of agreement.
“Excellent,” I continued, jumping to my feet. “Gianna, what next?”
“I need to put together an application for the mortgage and we need to schedule an inspection. The bank will set up the appraisal.”
“I can schedule the inspection,” Jules offered.
And like that, all the pieces were falling into place. Gianna and Viv hadn’t committed to moving back yet, but we were all invested, literally and figuratively, in the B&B venture. It was getting real enough that I needed to start considering hiring an employee for my bakery. Handing over any modicum of control of my baby made me break into a cold sweat, but I couldn’t run it alone forever. The hours were grueling, the work demanding, and if someone was manning the cafe I could devote more time to developing recipes. And administrative work. And marketing to draw more customers.
I couldn’t put it off much longer.
I’d considered offering the position to Jules, and I may still give her the chance to turn me down, but I didn’t like the idea that we’d never be working at the B&B together if one of us was always at the bakery. And, even more importantly, it was a minimum wage job.
Jules often got grief—especially from her family—for holding out for something that she truly loved and could make a living doing, but I knew how hard she worked. She wasn’t lazy or entitled or even afraid of commitment, as far as I knew. Jules cared so hard about so much that she’d never last at a job that didn’t grab her whole heart and make her feel like she was doing something meaningful with her life.
The reason she kept taking part-time work was because she wanted to keep her hours open to volunteer. She didn’t brag about it, so most people didn’t realize how many hours she spent helping the community. Since high school, she’d worked with the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, every animal shelter I’d ever heard of, and a few food banks. And those were just the ones she’d mentioned in passing.
If Jules did take the bakery job, I’d never let her settle for it. I’d make sure she kept searching for that elusive thing that she really was meant to be doing. I didn’t think it was real estate either, but that at least had a higher salary potential.
That night we hit the town to celebrate moving our dream forward. In Cedar Springs, hitting the town involved eating at one of the five restaurants that weren’t fast food, going to the only bar on Main, and bumping into everyone else who had the same idea.
When the dancing started in O’Shea’s, Riley grabbed my arm and pulled me aside, yelling over the music to tell the others we’d be right back. I assumed she had to get to the ladies’ room, but instead she led me through the crowd, out the front door, and into the alley nearby.
It wasn’t the sort of alley where you imagine all the different ways you could get jumped. That was one of the benefits of small-town life. We only had a few alleys, and the city had decked out every one of them. String lights softly illuminated a series of benches and tables, surrounded by planters filled with summer flowers. Emerald green astroturf crunched as we took a few steps in. A group of three women I didn’t know loitered on the far end, giggling and looking like they were several drinks into their evening.
“What’s up?” I asked Riley. “Is everything okay?”
“You tell me,” she replied evenly. “I heard from my mom, who heard from Ben’s mom—who is, undoubtedly, a horrendous gossip—that you’re doing more than signing papers with him.”
Oh, bad. Oh, bad, bad, bad.