AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Both my parents were gone now; they’d adopted me when they were older and had both suffered health problems in their late fifties and died within a year of each other. Hooker’s Paradise had carried on, and it felt like a little piece of my mom that I could visit every two weeks without fail.
This week, we were in Minnie’s living room seated on a mismatched assortment of chairs and couches. I’d claimed a rickety dining chair with a seat that sagged in the middle, a piano at my back, surrounded by walls of old photos. The venue rotated every week, but Minnie consistently had the best snacks. I grabbed a garlic knot from a dish in the center of the table and tore it open, giving up on the granny square.
I wasn’t much of a crocheter, but being here with my mom’s friends—and my own girlfriends—made me feel like I was still part of a family. As a foster kid who got adopted out at nine years old after a hellish journey through the system, belonging was precious.
Abigail arched a dark brow, eyes sparkling. “Uh-huh. A desperate situation,” she repeated. “And now you have to work with him?”
“That’s the most surprising thing,” I said, picking up my hook. “I’ve never seen Regis Greene so…competent. He really put his foot down.”
“Maybe he hit his head and it started his brain working again,” Minnie suggested, frowning at her work. She sighed and ripped out the last row of work she’d completed, then gave up and grabbed her glass of wine. She was only slightly better at crocheting than I was, so maybe my spot in the club was safe for a while yet.
My job, on the other hand, was not.
“What’s that look for?” Minnie asked me.
“I’m just contemplating whether unemployment is preferable to working with Anderson for a month. Or if I’ll have to suffer through it and lose my job anyway.”
“None of that, now,” Minnie chided. “What would your mother say?”
I huffed. “She’d tell me that everything will work out as it’s supposed to.”
“That’s a lot less comforting when you’re staring down the barrel of unemployment,” Abigail noted.
“What are the chances you’ll save the theater?” Sophie asked.
I shrugged. “Depends on the town councilmembers. I’m sure Anderson will have some slick proposal that promises them untold riches and droves of tourists. How can I compete with that?”
“You come up with a better plan,” Minnie said as she refilled glasses of wine all around.
I sighed. “Like what? He’s going to walk up in front of the council and everyone else at the gala and show them pretty graphs with lots of profits. I’ll just be telling them about history.”
“What if you proposed to turn the lobby into an event space?” Sophie asked, tilting her head. “They’ll see how well it works for the gala, and it’ll be a lot easier to build than a full teardown and rebuild.”
I arched my brows. “Hmm. Anderson won’t see that coming.”
“Jerk,” Abigail muttered, and I smiled at her. At least I knew these women would always be in my corner.
“A vote on the theater isn’t the worst idea in the world,” Evelyn, a white-haired friend of my late mother’s, noted. She was the sole knitter in the group, but the rest of the die-hard crocheters let her come along despite her transgression. Probably because they didn’t want to shit their brains out for three days after being served a cup of innocuous-looking tea. Evelyn tilted her head at me. “You’ll get to refurbish the lobby to its former glory, so you’ll have the advantage. It’ll remind everyone what we’ve let slip. It might even teach that city slicker the value of our history.”
My lips curled into a snarl. “I don’t think Anderson knows the value of anything except swanky rush-job developments he can sell at a tidy profit.”
“And tweezers,” Abigail noted. “I’m sure he knows the value of tweezers by now.”
Glaring at her only made her smile widen. Sophie said nothing but rolled her lips inward as if to hide her grin.
“He’s quite a looker,” Minnie observed. At my outraged squeak, she shrugged. “Am I wrong?”
“Whether or not Sebastian Anderson is handsome is irrelevant,” I argued.
“On the contrary, my dear,” Minnie replied, a glint in her eye. “I saw the way he looked at you when I opened the door to the meeting room. He’s got the hots for you, girl. I think you should use that.”
“I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.”
“Oh, don’t be a prude. He liked your shoes.”
“My shoes?”
“Your shoes. He noticed them.”
