Page 95 of You Met Me There

He looks at his shoes, then up at the clouds floating across the blue sky. I watch him as he thinks, the thoughts all silently crossing his face as his tongue presses against his teeth and the shadow under his brows deepens.

“I don’t want you to be afraid,” I say.

“I don’t want to be afraid,” he murmurs. “But I need some more time. Maybe I need therapy, or just to talk to my mom about it. Get it all out of my head—I don’t know.”

My teeth catch my lower lip as I chew on it, my anxiety showing itself. Luke’s hand moves to my face, and I shiver as he brushes his thumb over my lip. The touch is so gentle, so tender.

“Can I have more time?” he asks.

I nod. “I’ll be here when you’re ready. You don’t have to be afraid I’ll leave again. I’m not running anymore, no matter what you decide. I promise.”

Chapter 47

Luke

“Dad, I really think it’ll be okay until I get back in a week and a half. Can we just push back the timeline a little bit?”

“No. We can’t keep pushing it back, Luke,” Dad says through the phone. “The contractors are on a tight schedule as it is. You know that. Pushing back the reno will just make them withdraw their bid. Don’t forget, we ultimately wanted them because they have the lowest bid of all the other highly qualified contractors. Yes, they do great work, but we also gotta save where we can. We have to nail this down now and let them start.”

Dad’s clearly in over his head with the Bat Cavity, and he’s trying to get me to come home for a few days to work out all the logistics alongside him. The place is a dump, and like any real cavity, it’s giving me a blasted headache.

I stop my irritated pacing down the gravel driveway. “Fine. I’ll try to fly out there in the next day or two. I’ll look at flights.”

Dad audibly sighs through the phone. “You’ll be happy when we get this up and running. It’ll take a load off your shoulders to finally hand this over to the builders. Speaking of taking a load off, how’s our troubled house in Atlanta?”

“You mean the one we have Gray covering? Terrible. The house is never up to par. We have to fire that guy before he makes it worse.”

“Probably for the best.” Dad sounds resigned to the idea. “Honestly I never liked the guy.”

“Me neither.”

“Alright,” he says, “I’ll do it next week. I’ll let him loose.”

I hold the phone a little closer to my ear, tilting my head. “You’re not gonna make me fire him?”

“No, of course not. You’ve got enough going on. You’ve been gone all summer, flying back and forth whenever I need you. Let me take care of this.”

Although we’re equal business partners, my father usually leaves the hard conversations to me, whether it be with our employees, contractors, or the tenants. He prefers the background gig—contracts, payroll, ads for our rental listings, that sort of thing. I’m honestly shocked he’d take the initiative on firing someone.

“Are you sure you can handle it?” I ask. “Gray might put up a fight about losing his job.”

Dad scoffs. “Let him. If he’s going to whine about me firing him for slacking on his job, then I’ll point out his attitude, and it’ll be the exact proof I need handed to me on a silver platter. I’ll tell him I thought we hired a grown man, not a child.”

“Wow. Dad, I didn’t know you could be so …”

“Harsh?”

“I was going to say to the point. But harsh is pretty accurate.”

He chuckles, his deep voice echoing through the phone from his home office. “What do you think I did before you joined the business? I’ve had to fire plenty of slackers. It doesn’t get easier changing someone’s life like that, but you stop caring about feelings the longer you do it. As long as you know for certain they don’t deserve to be a part of your operation.”

“What if firing them puts them in a bad spot?” I ask. I’ve fired people before, but I know Gray is dealing with a lot of his own struggles, the one off the top of my head right now being his broken arm and all the medical bills he’s acquired.

“What do you mean?” Dad’s voice is gruff.

“Like, what if he can’t get back on his feet after we fire him? What if directing someone else’s life by our own choices makes them resent us? Or, even worse, makes their life hell? What if firing Gray makes him lose his chances at a good life because he can’t move forward?”

He’s silent for a moment. I follow a squirrel with my eyes as it scampers up a nearby pine tree, thinking I’ve said too much.