Page 45 of Best Kind of Trouble
We’re having a New Year’s Eve party.
How quaint! I have plans for New Year’s Eve, obviously, but maybe I can pop by earlier in the evening.
I take a deep breath, hold it, let it out, then respond:
That’s generous of you.
The second set of messages is from a number I don’t recognize.
Hello, Briar. This is Nora.
Sorry if this is out of the blue, but Hannah passed along your contact information.
I’m the brewer/half owner of The Ginger Station, and she thought you might like to connect since you’re assuming ownership of Silver Star.
I’d be happy to help in any way I can.
Karma ambles over, and I give him a pat-down, letting his soft fur soothe me. The cautious part of me isn’t sure I should give Nora the time of day. She ignored us for months; what could she want now? But I also want to pick her brain. The Ginger Station, a brewery that makes only alcoholic and nonalcoholic ginger beers, has been wildly successful.
I fire off a quick response:
Can you meet for lunch tomorrow?
Then, thinking better of it, I add:
Actually, Hannah would murder me if we met up without inviting her. Sophie would be disappointed to miss you too. Can you meet all of us?
We agree to grab lunch at Tea of Fortune the following day, and then I text Hannah, Sophie, and Dottie and fill them in on the plan.
I get to the brewery a half hour before I told Liam to meet me this morning, and the first thing I do is make an addition to the list we started yesterday and tuck it back behind the frame:
Don’t share personal information with your employees. They might get the wrongidea.
Tuesday morning passes quickly, moments bleeding together, powered along by adrenaline and enough processed sugar that my mother would get a pimple just by looking at it.
Liam comes into Uncle John’s office with me in the afternoon to sign the contract but makes no effort to read through it before scrawling his messy signature, which makes my pulse pound. I study the ugly swirls on the paper for half a minute, feeling a wrenching sensation inside of me that I don’t fully understand, especially since I looked over the agreement. It all seems fine and aboveboard. Even so, he should know what he’s agreeing to.
We head back to the brewery in silence, but when our hands glance off each other, I could swear he brushes his thumb across the back of my hand. I steal a glance at him, but maybe I imagined the whole thing, because he’s staring pointedly ahead, his gaze on the horizon.
Later that afternoon, another couple of tourists try to enter the brewery, one of them nearly breaking the locked front door in a misguided attempt to open it. Liam collapses a huge cardboard box and writes CLOSED on it in red Sharpie, adding beneath it:
Enter at your own risk.
“Do you think they’ll still try to get in?” I ask.
He gives me a crooked smile. “Everyone likes a challenge.”
It’s the last thing he says to me all day, but then again, he keeps busy. A few of his friends from the boxing gym come in to help him keg the amber ale, and they’re more talkative than he is.
I keep busy too, making arrangements. I work out a schedule with Dottie, who will be coming in with Otis later this week to train the five part-time workers he found for thetasting room. Tinder is apparently the recruiting tool everyone should be using to hire employees, because that’s how he found them all.
I give Sophie a call too, to talk through my vision for the barrel room. My plan to hold upscale chef dinners there is risky, considering my budget is less than shoestring, but I’m determined to make it happen. I’ve already made a few exploratory calls around town to see if anyone’s interested in partnering with me, and I found a New American restaurant a few blocks away that wants in on the idea.
Sophie and I spend an hour picking out décor for the barrel room, finding cheap materials that I can order for overnight delivery, and a possible set of inexpensive but stylish furniture.
Before I go home for the night, I check the list behind my father’s photo. Liam has added something to it?—
Don’t act like an asshole. People might get the right idea.
