Chapter 2 Hargrove and Co.
Addie Hargrove had learned, over the past four months, that there was a very specific quality to silence in a room where someone was about to deliver bad news, a held-breath stillness that arrived about ten seconds before the actual words did, and she had gotten good enough at recognizing it that she could usually brace herself before the sentence landed.
She recognized it now, sitting across the scarred oak worktable from her firm's accountant, Priya Okonkwo, who had been reviewing the same three spreadsheets for the better part of twenty minutes without saying a single word out loud.
"Just say it," Addie said. "Whatever the number is, I'd rather hear it than watch you not say it."
Priya set down her pen. The workshop around them held every physical sign of a business that had, until recently, been thriving, blueprints for the county courthouse restoration pinned along one wall, a set of hand tools that had belonged to Addie's father laid out on a felt cloth like surgical instruments, a half-finished scale model of the old harbor lighthouse sitting on a side table where her father had left it the week before he died, still unfinished, because there had always been more time until suddenly there wasn't. Addie had kept the model exactly where he'd left it.
She told herself it was because she was too busy to move it.
She knew, somewhere underneath that story, that it was because moving it would mean admitting he wasn't coming back to finish it.
"You have forty-one days before the note comes due," Priya said.
"The full note, Addie, not a partial payment.
Two hundred and ten thousand dollars, and the current cash position of this firm is not close to covering it.
I've gone through every account three times looking for a version of this that isn't true, and there isn't one. "
Addie had known the number was bad. She had not let herself know it was this bad, because knowing it fully would have meant she had to stop pretending there was a version of the next month where she could simply outwork the problem, take on more restoration contracts, bill faster, cut every remaining expense to the bone, and land somewhere close enough to survive.
Her father had taken out the loan two years ago to cover the firm through a slow stretch after the recession hit historic preservation funding hard, had always intended to pay it down steadily once the county courthouse contract came through, and then he had died with the loan still outstanding and the courthouse contract still unsigned, and Addie had spent the four months since trying to hold the whole structure together with a combination of stubbornness and denial that was, according to every spreadsheet Priya kept putting in front of her, no longer sustainable.
"What happens if I miss the payment," Addie said, already knowing the answer, needing to hear it said out loud anyway.
"Vantage Point Capital has first lien on the building and the equipment," Priya said.
"They call the note. You default. They take the collateral, which is this building, your father's tools, and the firm's name, and from what I understand of firms like Vantage Point, they don't restore historic properties, they flip them, which means everything your father built here gets sold for parts to whoever wants the land under it. "
Addie had met exactly one representative from Vantage Point Capital in person, a polished young man named Trent Osei who had shown up unannounced three weeks ago with an offer to "acquire the firm's assets at a fair market rate before the situation became more complicated," phrasing so carefully rehearsed it had taken Addie a full day to realize it was a threat wearing a suit.
She had thrown him out of the workshop, politely, because her father had raised her to be polite even to people who deserved considerably less, and she had spent every night since lying awake doing math that never came out any better in the morning than it had at two in the morning.
"There has to be something," Addie said. "A bridge loan. A different lender. I could sell the harbor lot, the one Dad bought as an investment property, that's worth—"
"Not enough, and not fast enough," Priya said gently.
"Addie, I've made calls. Every conventional lender in this city wants collateral you don't have and a debt-to-income ratio this firm hasn't had since your father took out the original note.
I'm not telling you to give up. I'm telling you that unless something changes significantly in the next six weeks, changes I currently have no path to, you are going to lose this building. "
Addie looked past Priya at her father's unfinished lighthouse model, at the blueprints pinned to the wall, at fourteen years of a small business built on the specific, unglamorous work of keeping old buildings standing when every financial incentive in the world pointed toward tearing them down instead, and felt something in her chest go very quiet and very cold.
She had grown up in this workshop. She had learned to read blueprints before she learned cursive.
She had watched her father turn down more lucrative contracts, over and over, because the client wanted to gut a building's historic interior rather than restore it, and her father had told her once, when she was maybe fourteen and asked him why he kept saying no to easy money, that some things were worth more standing than they were worth sold, and that a man who forgot that distinction eventually forgot every other one too.
She was not going to be the generation that let it go to a company that flipped buildings for parts.
The bell over the workshop door rang, and Addie looked up expecting a client or a delivery, and instead found Weston Calloway standing in the doorway in a suit that cost more than her firm's monthly overhead, looking at her with an expression she had seen exactly twice before in thirteen years of friendship, once at his mother's funeral and once, six months ago, at his grandfather's.
"I need to talk to you," Weston said. "Alone, if that's all right."
Priya, who had known Addie long enough to read a room accurately, gathered her folders without being asked and let herself out through the side door, murmuring something about picking up coffee that neither of them was fooled by.
Addie stayed exactly where she was, arms crossed, because whatever Weston had come to say, she needed the worktable between them, needed something solid to hold onto while she heard it, and she had learned a long time ago that whenever Weston Calloway looked like that, the news was rarely small.
"You look terrible," she said, because it was true and because it was easier than asking directly.
"Thank you," Weston said, and something in his mouth almost smiled despite everything, the specific almost-smile that had belonged to her alone since they were fourteen years old and he'd shown up at her father's workshop the week after his mother's funeral because he couldn't stand being in Calloway House with all the sympathy cards anymore, and Addie's father had handed him a sanding block and put him to work on a table leg without asking a single question, and Weston had come back every day after that for the rest of the summer, not because he needed to learn woodworking, but because it was the only place in his entire life where nobody wanted anything from him except for him to show up and be useful.
"What happened," Addie said.
Weston told her. He told her about the charter clause, about the thirty-five-year deadline, about Griffin's timeline and Griffin's attorneys and the eleven days that stood between Weston and losing the bank his family had built across seven generations, and Addie listened without interrupting, because she had learned, over thirteen years, that Weston Calloway did not tell stories in a hurry, and that if she let him finish, whatever he was building toward would land with considerably more weight than if she rushed him.
"So you need to get married," Addie said, when he finished. "In eleven days."
"Yes."
"To someone real. A real relationship, dating for months, that kind of thing, there's no way you have that lined up, you haven't dated anyone seriously since Camille, and even if you called her tomorrow—"
"I'm not calling Camille."
"Then who."
Weston looked at her, and Addie felt the specific stillness of the room shift, the same held-breath quality she'd recognized in Priya's silence twenty minutes earlier, except this time it was coming from a man standing six feet away from her in a workshop that smelled like sawdust and her dead father's tools, and some part of her already knew what he was about to say before he said it, because there was only one person in his entire orbit that Weston Calloway trusted enough to ask for something this large, and she was standing directly in front of him.
"You," Weston said.
Addie laughed, one short disbelieving sound, before she registered that he wasn't laughing with her. "West."
"I know how it sounds."
"You want to marry me."