Pearl squints at me like she can ferret out that I slept with him in Hawaii, he’s pissed at me for ghosting him, and I noticed today that every time anyone said Chandler’s name, Grey would clench his fist and get this look on his face.
I actively ignore the squint and stare at the chessboard. Not really my game, but I can kind of tell that Grandpa’s losing.
“It’s hard to see Bean & Nugget in someone else’s hands,” I acknowledge. “I’m not exactly impartial here.”
“Should’ve come to me for money,” Grandpa says while he moves one of his pieces.
“I didn’t know until too late.”
“He should’ve come to me for money.”
He being Chandler.
And while I adore my grandfather—he’s the last of the really good men in the world, I swear he is—I don’t intend to insult my cousin in front of him.
“Is the new guy cute?” Pearl asks as she carefully selects a piece and moves it, knocking one of Grandpa’s pieces off the board.
Grandpa grunts while my entire body has an oh my god, yes, reaction to the question.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Grandpa asks.
“Sabrina’s single. If he’s cute—”
“You didn’t ask if he was single.”
“Oh, honey, if he’s not, that’s solvable.”
I force a laugh I don’t feel. “Miss Pearl, I am not seducing a man to get the family café back. Sorry, Grandpa. I have my lines.”
“This is war, Sabrina,” Pearl replies. “You need to use all of your feminine wiles on him.”
Grandpa grunts again and takes his turn.
“What are you doing?” Pearl says to him. “Are you trying to throw this game? If you didn’t want to play, you should’ve just said so.”
“If you wanted to play this game, you’d quit talking about my granddaughter’s wiles.”
Pearl looks at me.
I hold up my hands in surrender. “Okay. Okay. I’m clearly a distraction. I’m going. But here. I snuck some lemon scones out of the kitchen today.”
There’s nothing guaranteed to make this entire room of senior citizens move faster than the promise of my grandma’s scones. Jitter, who was happily panting on his back while getting all of the love from three different friends at once, whimpers, flops to his belly, and slinks behind a pink flower-patterned couch to get out of the way of the mad rush of senior citizens.
Poor puppy’s tired after a good day at doggy daycare.
“You pay for these?” Grandpa asks.
“Getting fired for stealing on the new boss’s first day wasn’t in my plans, so yes. I paid for them.”
One more old man grunt.
The only other time I’ve seen him grumpy was when Grandma died.
He’s hurting. Bean & Nugget was a part of his family too. He built it, and he lived long enough to see Chandler squander it.
Wonder if he heard too that the new owner is planning to completely change everything.
I hope not. But I know it’s a legitimate possibility. My friend told me he knew he wasn’t the only contractor in town who was contacted about getting a quote.
Other people will be talking about this soon enough.
I kiss Grandpa on his puffy white hair and squeeze his shoulder gently. “Don’t give up on me, okay? I won’t let anything happen to Bean & Nugget, even if it’s not ours anymore.”
“We have faith in you, Sabrina,” Pearl says.
I’m talking big talk, and I don’t know if there’s enough faith in the world for me to pull this off.
I know I need to apologize to Duke—to Grey, as he asked everyone else to call him today. I know I need to get on his good side. And I know I need to use every tool at my disposal to stop him from ruining Bean & Nugget.
So after visiting Grandpa, Jitter and I head to the grown-up version of the clubhouse that Laney, Emma, and I hung out in all the time after Theo dubbed us the ugly heiresses in grade school.
Silver Horn isn’t a treehouse in my grandparents’ backyard though.
It’s—actually, I can’t tell you what it is.
Or how I get into it.
All you need to know is that I’m camped out at a bar that Grey won’t be able to find, and I’m surrounded by friends.
I need help.
It’s a hard thing to ask for, but I do. I need help.
“Can you get the scoop from Chandler on anything with Greyson Cartwright?” I ask Jack, one of my triplet cousins. We’re sitting on curved suede benches beneath a painting of Snaggletooth Creek’s original gold mine. It’s hung on a brick wall with red velvet curtains on either side of it that follow the curve of the benches around to give our seating area a modicum of privacy.
We do get a little swanky in certain places in the Tooth.
But they still let me bring my dog inside—again, provided he shakes it all out before coming in—which is why Jitter is panting happily on my feet and against my leg, gazing at my cousins with absolute adoration while they both work on their laptop computers, doing research on my new boss their way.
Jack winces and rubs his chest right over the dice printed on his black T-shirt. “You know how Chandler didn’t tell Emma that the Ol’ Snaggletooth statue was his fault and not Theo’s?”
My eyelid twitches. “Gosh, no, doesn’t ring a bell.”
Decker delivers me the don’t be an ass look to end all don’t be an ass looks. “We’re starting to realize our dear cousin is fucking batshit. Or at least an egomaniac. Even if he’d tell us anything about how he set up this sale so quietly with a dude he supposedly knows from somewhere, I wouldn’t trust it. That guy and I were best friends? Doubt it. He owed me a favor? Don’t believe it. He reached out to me and wanted to buy a shop in the mountains and the timing was good? Nope, nope, and nope.”
“Cosigned,” Jack says.
He, Lucky, and Decker are genetically identical. All white-skinned, brown-haired, and blue-eyed, though their styles are so different that it’s easy to tell them apart. Jack, the engineer, has short-cropped hair and is always in jeans and geeky gamer T-shirts. Decker’s a novelist who wouldn’t be caught dead in jeans or short hair. He’s totally the scruffy mountain dude perpetually in hiking pants, performance fabric T-shirts—long-or short-sleeved depending on the weather—and puffer vests. Lucky’s not with us tonight. He’s a nurse and has less flexibility than his brothers, who both work from home.
Or from Bean & Nugget, as Decker did today so he could spy on the new boss too.
Not that Grey seemed to realize who Decker was, even though the triplets had an appearance in that viral video too. And the fact that Willa and Cedar, my weekday morning crew, didn’t tell Grey who Decker was either speaks volumes to how much they’re leery of the new ownership too, no matter the smiles and gratitude they expressed.
The triplets also might be Laney’s half-brothers, which I didn’t tell you, because I’m only back on gossip for a very specific reason and this is not it. However, they’re obsessed and it’ll come up eventually.
Probably within moments, considering the door just opened and Theo’s carrying Laney inside.
Not something any of us would’ve seen coming three weeks ago, let me tell you.
Theo’s been in hiding most of the past week after getting exposed in Emma’s viral wedding video as being the biggest solo creator on a very popular adult entertainment website. Yes, that kind of adult entertainment website. He never showed his face in his videos, so it was a big deal when people figured out who he was, what he looked like from the neck up and with clothes on, and where he was from.
Since Emma left for her solo honeymoon and the rest of us got home, he’s retired from his profession largely because of Laney. She broke her leg skiing last week, and when he found out she was hurt, he finally got over himself, apologized for being an ass to her in Hawaii, and begged her to be his girlfriend.
She didn’t ask him to quit his naked side hustle.
He insisted on doing it himself.
And if Emma were here, she’d be absolutely loving everything about this. At least, pre-Hawaii Emma would’ve been.
I don’t know how she’ll feel now.
Laney and Theo making up and falling in love after years of animosity is the only thing I currently believe in wholeheartedly. And yes, I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t believe in relationships.