Jess looked up, squinting and confused, before she finally cringed. “Yikes.”
Natalie nodded. “She offered a decent amount to buy the property my sister and I inherited, but it seems like she dropped the price.”
“Wait, wait. You have a sister?!”
Natalie looked up. “Uh, yeah. Half sister. A different ‘whore’s’ kid. The town hates her and her mom, too.”
“Oh my God, stop saying whore right now. And the town should focus their judgment on your father, not all of you. He’s the one who couldn’t keep his tallywacker in his trousers. Was he at least a good dad to you?”
Natalie scoffed. “He never even spoke to me. Not one word. I was completely unacknowledged.”
Jess’s face fell. “Seems to me the town should have shown you sympathy. This shame is not yours to carry, babe. No one should treat a child that way.”
Natalie let that sink in. She scrolled back up the document, searching for the mention of the property not being sold to be developed, but couldn’t find it anywhere. She frantically scrolled down, past the amount to the very bottom of the document, and what she saw made her sinking heart drown.
Both Chelsea and Ethan had scrawled their signatures on the lines next to their names.
“What the hell?”
“What is it?”
Natalie looked up at Jess. All the energy she’d been lacking came rushing back. But it wasn’t her normal excited energy.
She was fucking pissed.
“I have to make a phone call.”
nineteen
“Ethan!”
Ethan opened one eye, saw Adam standing over him, hands on his hips in his hideous lime-green shirt and grass-stained baseball pants. He closed his eye again and twisted his body away, burying his face in the back of Adam’s sofa.
“This is the third game you missed. We lost. Our sub missed three catches you would have made easily.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled into the cushion, but he didn’t mean it. There was no way he was going to those baseball diamonds. In fact, he had no plans to leave Adam’s house at all. He’d been working from Adam’s home office, sleeping in his basement, working out in his home gym. He’d occasionally stepped onto the back deck, but the view of the sand dunes and blue lake made his chest hollow out.
Adam sank into the chair next to the couch, rested his elbows on his knees. “It’s been three weeks. I’m getting worried about you.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re clearly not. Have you been to the pond?”
“What’s the point? I signed Anne’s settlement offer yesterday. So did Chelsea. Speeler is sending it off to Natalie, but it’s taking a bit with the time change. After she signs, it’s over. I’ll have to wait and see what Anne does with the property. She’ll probably sell it immediately to a developer and turn a nice profit at Chelsea’s expense.”
Adam huffed a breath and stood, then walked to the kitchen. He pulled two beers from the fridge and came back but stalled with his hand around the cap.
“Let’s go out for a beer. I want to pop into Eighteen-Twenty and see how things are running,” he said.
Ethan sat up, gave Adam’s hand a pointed look. “You are holding the best beer in Canada. Why would we go there and drink crappy beer?”
“Are you calling my beer crappy?”
“Uh . . .” Ethan tried to think of a way to backtrack. He’d forgotten Adam and Max had just purchased the most centrally located pub in Mapleton a week ago. The location was perfect. The beer and food were not. “It could probably use . . . some . . . tweaking.”
Adam broke into a grin. “My thoughts exactly. It’s going to be amazing once we get it renovated and Max fixes the menu. The beer is a whole other thing, though. I’m glad you introduced me to Tipped Canoe. I looked into their head brewer. She’s a genius. I’m hoping that if we throw enough money at her, she’ll join us.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.”