Page 89 of Faking it with my Bad Boy Crush

"He wasn't big on direct compliments. Preferred the indirect route." I squeezed her hand. "But he believed in you. This whole island believed in you. And now some big fancy publisher in New York believes in you too."

"Okay, we need to stop, because I will absolutely cry into the display case and that seems unsanitary." Tessa wiped her eyes, laughing. "Anyway! I came bearing news and also to warn you that Richard Sterling is outside, looking like a man about to deliver either very good or very bad information, and I genuinely cannot read his face well enough to know which."

I glanced through the front window and spotted Richard's careful, deliberate walk toward the bakery door—the walk of a man who'd spent forty-five years learning to control his body language in front of judges and juries, which made him nearly impossible to read even now.

"That's ominous," I said.

"Very ominous. Good luck. I need to go call my agent back and possibly hyperventilate somewhere private. Hey, maybe I should write a sequel. It can be about Kaya and her lawyer boyfriend, Edgar. Why do you call him ‘window boy’ sometimes? If it’s a cute story, I can include it."

“I’ll tell you some other time. Let me talk to Richard.”

Tessa disappeared into the back as Richard entered, removing his glasses to clean them on his shirt in the universal gesture of a man stalling for time.

"Maya. Do you have a few minutes?"

"Sure. Should I be worried? Ethan's not here—he's meeting with Patterson about logistics for the new job."

"This isn't about the case. Not directly." Richard settled onto a stool at the counter, looking uncharacteristically uncertain. "I wanted to talk to you about something I should have said weeks ago."

I wiped my hands on my apron and sat across from him. "Okay."

"When Ethan first brought me into this case, I'll admit I was skeptical." Richard's voice was careful, measured. "Not of the fraud allegations—those were compelling from the start. But of you. I'd spent decades representing corporate clients, watching small business owners get outmaneuvered by better-funded legal teams, and I'd developed a certain... cynicism about whether the little guy ever actually wins these fights. I worried Ethan was chasing a lost cause, that you'd end up losing your bakery and your savings both, and that I'd be helping him make a beautiful, doomed gesture instead of an effective legal strategy."

"You never said any of that."

"I know. I kept it professional, kept my doubts private, did the work regardless because Ethan asked and because the fraud was real regardless of whether we'd win." He turned his coffee cup slowly, not quite meeting my eyes. "But I want you to know I was wrong. Not just about the outcome—though obviously I was wrong about that too—but about you specifically. I underestimated what it means to actually fight for something you built with your own hands, generation after generation. I've spent my career representing people who lose things and simplyacquire more. You were never going to let that happen. I should have recognized that from the start instead of quietly doubting whether you had the resources to survive this fight."

I felt something warm and unexpected settle in my chest. "Richard, you didn't have to say any of this."

"I did, actually. Because there's something else." He finally met my eyes. "Forty years ago, early in my career, I represented an investment group in an acquisition very similar to what happened to you. A family fishery in Anacortes, three generations, similar manufactured legal complications. I didn't know the surveys were falsified—I want to be clear about that, I wasn't complicit the way Caldwell & Associates was here—but I also didn't ask enough questions. I did my job competently and let myself not wonder too hard about why the numbers looked the way they did."

"What happened to them? The fishery?"

"They sold. Under duress, for far less than fair value. I told myself it wasn't my responsibility to investigate my own client that thoroughly. I was young, building a career, and looking too closely at uncomfortable questions felt like professional suicide." His jaw tightened. "I've thought about that family more in the last six weeks than I have in the previous thirty-nine years combined. Watching Ethan risk everything to expose exactly the kind of fraud I once helped facilitate through willful ignorance—it's been something of a reckoning."

"Richard—"

"I'm not looking for absolution," he said quickly. "I'm telling you this because representing you and Ethan pro bono isn't just generosity, Maya. It's the closest thing to making amends that I have left. Every hour I spend defending your bakery is an hour I'm finally asking the questions I should have asked decades ago."

I reached across the counter and took his hand, this proud, careful man who'd just handed me forty years of quiet guilt like it was something fragile.

"Thank you for telling me," I said. "And for what it's worth, I don't think you owe me an apology. You didn't falsify anything. You didn't coordinate fraud. You made a mistake of omission a long time ago, and you've spent six weeks actively correcting course, at significant personal cost, for people who aren't even paying you."

"Ethan would say that's not enough. That good intentions don't undo old harm."

"Ethan says a lot of dramatic things lately. He recently gave a public confession to two hundred people and called it Tuesday." I squeezed his hand. "You're allowed to have made mistakes decades ago and still be a good man now, Richard. That's kind of the whole point of everything that's happened here. Building instead of destroying. Choosing better, even late. Especially late."

Richard's eyes went suspiciously bright, and he cleared his throat with the particular gruffness of a man who did not cry in bakeries as a general policy.

"You sound remarkably like your grandfather," he said. "I only met him a handful of times, but Ethan talks about him constantly. I begin to understand why."

"He had that effect on people. Made you want to be better just by expecting that you already were." I smiled. "For what it's worth, I think he'd have liked you. Anyone willing to sit in a bakery and confess forty-year-old professional regrets to make things right—that's exactly his kind of person."

"High praise, from what I've heard of the man." Richard finally smiled, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. "Now. Practically speaking, I came to also discuss the ethics hearing timeline and some strategy, if you have a few more minutes."

"I have all the minutes you need. Though fair warning, Tessa just sold her novel to Random House, so there may be intermittent celebratory shrieking from the back room."

"She sold it? The island gallery story?"