His lip curled a little at her tone. “What’s up? Something with the trip? Look, Allie, you know that you can’t run the trips, and someone has to stay here to handle business. We can’t just close up for two weeks, and we can’t afford to cover your costs to go along.”
“It’s not about the trip, Ilya.” Alicia sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “It’s something else. I wish you’d sit so we can talk about it.”
He already knew what it was she meant to bring up. The plain white envelope on the desk told him. Theresa had said she’d talked with Allie about an offer from that real estate development corporation. Days ago. Maybe weeks at this point. She’d been holding out on him.
He didn’t sit. “Just hit me with it.”
“It’s about the quarry. And the shop.” She pushed the envelope toward him.
“Yeah. Theresa said something to me about it already.” He took grim satisfaction in the way he seemed to have surprised her. “You didn’t know that, huh? You thought you were going to sit on this and not talk to me about it?”
“Of course I was going to talk to you about it. I’m talking to you right now.”
Ah, there it was. The press of her lips together. The cross of her arms. Allie was getting pissed off at him now. In a few minutes, she’d turn cold and angry, but she’d leave him the hell alone. She’d punish him with the silent treatment, and if he was lucky, it would last until he got back from sunny Jamaica, when maybe he’d be better equipped to deal with all the bullshit that had been happening. Because right now, Ilya thought as he took a long, deliberate sip of coffee, he had emptied his pockets of any and all fucks he might have had to give.
“You waited long enough,” he said. “Theresa told me she’d presented you with an offer, like two weeks ago.”
Allie visibly took a breath before she spoke. “The two weeks you didn’t come in to work, you mean? The two weeks I handled everything here by myself? Not that it was that much different than any other time, I guess, since I handle most everything here by myself, anyway.”
“What are they offering?” He ignored what she’d said so he could push her buttons a little more. Let her keep thinking she was the only one who kept this place running. “Whatever it is, it’s not enough.”
“It’s not enough,” she told him. “It will cover what we owe on the mortgage and pay off the outstanding debts for the shop supplies, all of that. But it won’t cover what we’ve put into Go Deep over the years. We won’t come out ahead on this deal. We just won’t be so far behind.”
He tossed the remains of his doughnut in the trash, no longer hungry. He put down the coffee, too, hard enough to slop it onto her desk. “So you want to take it?”
“I want to talk to you about it! Dammit, Ilya, wipe that up.”
She yanked one, two, three tissues from the box and started cleaning up the splatters before he even had a chance. The way she always did, stepping in when she thought he wasn’t capable of handling whatever it was she then got pissed off at him for not doing in the first place.
“I’m not selling the shop,” he said.
Allie made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a groan. She crumpled the stained tissues in her hand. “Ilya—”
“You can’t want to sell it. What are they going to do with it?” he demanded.
She pushed the envelope closer across the desk, sliding it through a splotch of coffee she’d missed. “It’s all in here. They have plans to develop this side—”
He flapped a hand at her and opened the envelope, curious about what Theresa and her bosses believed his life and dreams were worth. The numbers made him sneer and slide it back toward Allie. “You think this is the first time someone’s come up with some bright idea about how they’re going to develop the quarry?”
“It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever heard of anything. Have there been other offers?” She gave him an incredulous look.
“Yeah. Couple years ago.” He shrugged, determined to downplay it. “I turned it down, and it was more money than these guys are offering.”
“I can’t believe you got an offer to buy the quarry and you didn’t tell me. Ilya, we’ve been struggling for years! How could you not even discuss it with me?”
“I knew I wasn’t going to sell.”
She would have taken the money and left him behind, and he would have had nothing.
“It’s not only up to you, you know. I own half this business. More than, actually.” Allie’s mouth thinned. “Dammit, Ilya.”
“You want to sell it off? Really? Is that what you want?” He spat the words, wishing he hadn’t eaten that doughnut or drunk that coffee. His throat burned.
He’d been trying to push her into anger, but she was quiet for a few seconds. “I think maybe it’s time. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, you know. We could get out from under the debt. Move on with our lives. You’ll need some better credit if you’re going to buy a house.”
“Who says”—his voice dipped low and dangerous—“that I have to buy a house?”
Allie shook her head. He hated that disappointed look, no matter how many times she’d given it to him. No matter how often he’d deserved it.
He scowled. “My mother isn’t going to stick around forever. She says she’s back, but you know as well as I do that it never matters, with her. She’s going to finish up whatever messed-up thing she’s got going on in her head about fixing up the house, and she’ll end up leaving again. Probably with me staying behind to foot the bills.”
“All the more reason for you to get out from under this place,” Allie began, but he cut her off.
“This place,” said Ilya, “is mine. I built this place. You can tell yourself all you want that you’re the golden princess who waves her magic wand around here to make it happen, but nothing here would’ve happened if not for me. You’ve never even dived here. Have you even set one toe in this water?”
She shook her head, eyes glittering with tears, but he wasn’t going to feel sorry for her.
“No. Because you can’t get over it.” Ilya sneered. “She died twenty years ago, Allie. She doesn’t haunt anything. She’s just dead. And you’ve never gotten over it.”
It would not have been the first time he’d ever made her cry, and he was expecting tears now. Allie didn’t cry. She recoiled, briefly, with a small, tight shake of her head and a clench of her fists before she looked him in the eye with a gaze as solid and unyielding as he’d ever seen from her.
“Sometimes,” she told him, “you don’t get over it. You just get through it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“So, I’ve been thinking.” Niko said this into the phone while he stared up at the slanted attic ceiling and pondered once again how the hell he’d ended up back here in Quarrytown in a lumpy bed with crappy sheets and too many noises sifting up through the vents.
“Oh, brother.” Alicia’s low laugh sparked a tingle of heat through him. “About what? Global warming? The reasons why pepper makes you sneeze? The existence, or not, of Bigfoot?”