Page 10 of Love Is Brewing

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll call them back.”

Her father sighed. “It’s killing you to turn anything down,” her father said. “Don’t be that way. There are only so many hours in the day. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone, least of all your mother and me.”

“I know,” she said. Lip service like always. “It’s hard.”

“Get my father’s words out of your head,” her father said firmly. “He’s gone and you know I’ve never felt that way.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said. “I know that. But like Ben, sometimes words and memories don’t fade.”

Her oldest brother, Ben, got the brunt of it for not wanting to follow in the legal footsteps of the family. Then when Ben went to college for brewing, their grandfather really came down on her brother hard.

Her brother added to it by growing his hair long and doing everything he could to be the opposite of what their grandfather stood for.

She wished she’d had the courage to do those things.

Instead, her middle name might as well be Switzerland.

Not that she wouldn’t have been an attorney because she loved her job.

But she would’ve liked to have told her grandfather to go shove it now and again.

Maybe if she had, people wouldn’t have considered her so noncommittal or wishy-washy in her personal life.

Professionally, she was known as being firm, rigid, and once she got her teeth into something, there was no letting go until she got what she wanted.

It always made her wonder how she could have such distinct personalities between the two parts of her life.

“It’s easy for me to tell you to forget it and move on, but things linger. Your mother will tell you she had to deal with it more. She worked for Grandpa.”

Phoebe laughed. “And she lasted. God only knows how.”

“Because she fell in love with me,” her father boasted. “And I wasn’t about to let her leave.”

She’d found out years later that her father had stood up to his father and threatened to leave the firm if her grandfather fired her mother so her father wasn’t distracted.

Her grandfather was a lot of things, but one thing he couldn’t stand was bad public opinion. And losing his son from the family law firm would have surely done that.

Phoebe liked to think she got her courage from her father too.

To come here on her own even though a few weeks in she was bored out of her mind when she wasn’t working.

Thankfully there was enough work to keep her busy, but on the weekends, Lordy, she was sitting home channel surfing.

She wasn’t one to go clubbing, but she’d try anything to not just stare at farms in the distance on her way to work.

Southern Pines was famous for golf and horses.

Two things she wasn’t interested in.

Maybe she should try to take one of them up.

Nah, not happening.

“Good thing for your stubbornness, Dad,” she said.

“You know a thing or two about that,” her father said.

“I’ll take it as a compliment,” she said.

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