Page 33 of One Happy Summer

“We’re good. I saw him in April. He remarried not that long ago, and his new wife, Kate, is pretty nice.”

“Do you feel like you need to be around your mom because of what happened to your stepdad?”

He lets out his breath heavily through his mouth. “I did feel like that when it first happened, but I was also in the middle of getting a start-up off the ground and couldn’t be here as much as I wanted to be. It was a tough time for all of us.”

“I bet,” I say. “Your mom and your sister seem to be doing okay, though?”

He turns his head toward me. “Yeah, I think so.”

“You’re not really an open book, are you?” I say, reaching over and poking him on the arm.

“Sorry,” he says, with a lilt. “It takes a lot for me to open up.”

“You don’t say,” I tease.

He rolls over onto his side, facing me again. “What else do you want to know?”

I place an index finger on my chin as I contemplate. “Ever been married?”

“Oh, no. Not even close.”

I laugh. “Me either. Um . . . let’s see . . . last girlfriend.”

“Wow. You’re really grilling me now.”

“This is my subtle way of asking if you’re dating anyone.”

“The last boyfriend for you was Declan Stone, I’m guessing?”

“If you want to call it that,” I say. “And stop trying to bring it back to me. I’m asking the questions now.”

“No girlfriend,” he says. “And the last one was probably three years ago. I’ve mostly been focused on work.”

“And that is not running a bookshop?”

He makes a sort of uncomfortable-sounding laugh. “No, the bookshop was me coming back home after a business I started in Fort Lauderdale failed.”

“Oh yeah, that’s rough.”

“You ever own a business?” It’s so dark out here in this backyard, I can barely make out the ribbing eyebrow lift Briggs gives me.

“Nope, but I once played a cyborg who owned a trinket shop, and we were having a hard time getting supplies because of an intergalactic war that was going on. So, I’m basically an expert.”

He laughs, and I can barely see the white of his teeth. “It’s . . . a little different than that.”

“What kind of business?”

“Software,” he says. I think that’s all he’s going to tell me but then he takes a breath and continues. “AssistGen was the name. At its core it was a virtual assistant app we designed to anticipate the needs of the end user. It could do a bunch of things, like schedule appointments and manage tasks and even offer personalized recommendations based on preferences.”

“Oh wow, I didn’t take you for a nerd.”

He chortles. “A nerd who lost his company. So not a very good one.”

“I wonder how many times Steve Jobs had to start over.”

“Yeah, he didn’t, really.”

“Shoot, I was going for something inspiring,” I say.

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