Chapter 31. The Right Google Search Can Work Wonders
The Right Google Search Can Work Wonders
“Are you okay, Kim?”
I looked up from my laptop and met Ellie’s concerned eyes.
We were in her bakery, and it was a cool mid-October night, two weeks away from Halloween, and one week away from the street fair—and the fourth wedding I was supposed to go to with Rob—so we were in the home stretch of finalizing things for the festival.
But I hadn’t been focusing on the tasks I was supposed to be doing, because I’d been staring at the same email draft for the past fifteen minutes.
“You’ve been awfully quiet,” Ellie said. “Want to tell me what’s on your mind?”
“I’m fine. Just thinking about the festival.”
“Are you?” She was completely ignoring the chalkboards for the signs and directions that she was supposed to be working on. “Did I tell you that Alec met up with Rob last night?”
Hearing his name still tore a fresh wound in my heart. “I don’t need to know that.”
“He looks miserable,” Alec said from where he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, tying strings together to make buntings for the festival decorations. “Thought you might want to hear about that.”
“Serves him right.”
My two friends exchanged a long look. Alec sighed, abandoned his buntings, and straightened his legs. “You two are hopeless. He tells me he’s fine, but clearly he isn’t, because he’s grumpy all the time. He misses you.”
I pretended not to hear him and busied myself by typing a long nonsensical paragraph for the email, only to delete everything a few seconds later.
“We know, and you know, that you miss him, too.”
“I don’t.” My reply came out louder than I intended. “I don’t miss him, okay? I made a mistake, he made a mistake, we’ve both moved on.”
“Neither of you have moved on,” Ellie said bluntly.
“He’s cranky and unhappy, and you’re snapping at people like you’re about to bite their heads off.
We care about both of you, and we want you both to be happy.
Together or separately, I don’t really care, as long as nobody is sulking like this. So tell us what we can do to help.”
“There’s nothing anyone can do. I lied to him, he lied to me, and I don’t know if I can move past that.
We’re not even in an actual relationship, and he’s already being dishonest.” And it had hurt too much, because it was a reminder that he was just like any other men out there who had betrayed my trust.
Ellie sighed. “I’m sorry. I know how hard it must be.
I won’t even pretend to know what Rob was thinking, but it must have been hard for him, too, to be trapped between a rock and a hard place.
Knowing what the store means to you, while at the same time knowing what his dad was doing and not being able to say anything about it. ”
At that, I looked up. “Is he still putting in hours at his dad’s firm?”
“He is,” Alec answered. “His dad has been pushing him to make the switch to full time, because he’s very confident the Goodwin project will go ahead.” He hesitated for a beat, briefly glancing at Ellie, before continuing. “I should probably also tell you that Lucy has been around.”
A dull ache thumped in my heart at hearing that. “Has she?”
“He’s mentioned that she’s been texting, asking to meet him for coffee. I think she’s trying to get back together with him.”
Maybe this was all for the best. He was getting his life on track, proving to himself and his father that he could do more with his life, and now that his ex was back in the picture, he could finally start building that forever happiness that he believed so much in.
“Good for them. They make a good-looking couple.”
Ellie exchanged a look with Alec.
Time to change the topic. There were more important things at play, so I needed to set aside my heartbreak and focus on the issues that matter more.
“We should get back to work. This festival is all we’ve got to convince the other owners on the strip to turn down the Goodwin offer.
We have to pull it off. If it doesn’t work, we’re all screwed. ”
And I really, really needed it to work.
Because I’d lost Rob, and I couldn’t afford to lose my grandmother’s legacy as well.
I left Ellie’s bakery and drove home with the plan of showering and going straight to bed after.
Jenna was away on a work trip, so the house was empty when I got home.
I jumped in the shower and washed away the exhaustion of the day, but my mind was too awake to go to sleep after.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Rob, and the street festival, and Opa’s health, and Rob, the redevelopment plans, and the yarn store.
And Rob.
Maybe an hour of mindlessly scrolling through YouTube and watching funny duck videos would help me relax and forget everything that was going on in my life.
I opened my laptop while waiting for my hair to dry, and that was when I saw the link I’d saved from weeks ago—the link to the article written by the architectural historian.
I clicked on it and reread the piece, my gaze snagging on the third paragraph of the article.
The historian had claimed, based on their research, that our shopping precinct had been supposedly designed by an architect named Marion Mahony Griffin.
Google told me that she was once an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright and was widely considered as one of the first licensed female architects in the world.
She had even helped design Canberra, the capital of Australia, as well as several well-known landmarks across America and Australia.
The historian believed that the brick buildings on our street were one of the earliest properties she had designed, allegedly not long after she graduated from MIT in 1894, although they admitted there were no public records substantiating this claim.
I stared at my screen, my brain turning over rapidly.
Does this mean there’s historic significance to our area?
I opened a new page and typed “heritage sites” into the search box. Google spat out an extensive list of results, and before long, I’d gone down the rabbit hole of reading everything I could find about heritage sites and Marion Mahony Griffin.
One hour later, I finally resurfaced with a vague idea of what I might be able to do.
If the historian was right, that our row of shops had originally been constructed back in the 1890s, it would make the place over a hundred years old.
Typically, sites older than fifty years would be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
That, coupled with the fact that one of the most prominent architects in the world had designed the place, should probably be enough to stop any planned developments to the site.
The only problem was, how could I prove that the place had been designed by her?
I went back to the article, found the historian’s contact details, and drafted an email. My heart was hammering behind my rib cage as I explained who I was and what I was looking for, then sent the email before I had a chance to overthink it too much.
Closing the laptop, I went to bed, not expecting to see a reply until Monday.
But when I woke up the next morning, there was an email from the historian sitting in my inbox. The thundering of my heart was deafening as I tapped it open.
They admitted that there were no official records to validate their claim.
But they listed all the facts that made them arrive at the conclusion, and they all added up to a very strong possibility: The style of our brick buildings was called the Prairie School, which was a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architectural style usually marked by horizontal lines, flat roofs with broad overhanging eaves, and rows of large windows.
Griffin was regarded as one of the founding members of the style, and this was the only cluster of buildings in the entire city of Port Benedict to have that distinctive design.
Attached to the email were scans of old, yellowing photographs of Griffin visiting the city and posing with a friend, who was one of the early owners of the current site of the Plaza.
The historian strongly believed that Griffin had most probably designed the buildings as a favor to her friend and hadn’t been properly credited as the person responsible for the designs.
My hands were shaking as I rushed to type a reply: Would this mean that the precinct could possibly be classified as a heritage site, considering its famous architect?
Their reply came twenty minutes later: Absolutely.
Well, fuck.
This could change everything.
I texted Ellie, who immediately called two minutes later.
“Kim, you’re a genius.” Her voice was overcome with excitement. “If we can pull this off, we might be able to convince everyone that they can’t sell to Goodwin and that would stop the development plans!”
“We might,” I said. “But from what I’ve read, it would probably take us a while to get the heritage application approved.”
“That’s okay. We’ll get the process started as soon as we can. In the meantime, we should get in touch with Goodwin. I’ll ask Alec to call Jacqui and tell her about this.”
For the first time in the past two weeks, there was a flash of hope blooming in my chest, the first bright spark of something positive.
And it gave me the tiniest bit of hope that maybe everything would turn out okay.