Page 20 of Lorcan
“Oh?”
He gestured for us to resume our walk. “Yeah. Like I kept thinking about counseling. What I’m going to say to Justin. And how my first week of work went really well. My boss even cut me a check yesterday, despite the fact she normally pays every other Friday and yesterday wasn’t payday.”
“Sounds like a good boss.”
“She is. And I’m worried about disappointing her.” He continued walking.
“Why would you disappoint her?”
“Because I disappoint everyone.”
I considered. “That’s a pretty broad statement. You haven’t disappointed me.”
“Nope.” He popped thep. “But I will. I always do.”
Ouch.“Why don’t we wait on that? It’s entirely possible that you won’t disappoint me—more like I find you charming and enthralling. That I want to know more about you. I’m more concerned that you’ll find me boring—what with my lack of life experience.”
He cut a sharp glance at me. “Not hardly.”
“It’s all about perspective. My family didn’t have a lot of money, so we didn’t travel much. They were insular, so I wasn’t exposed to many other cultures. They were racist and xenophobic, so I never had true friends who didn’t look like me.”
He winced. “That would suck. I lived in Vancouver growing up, and my class had plenty of kids who weren’t white. Even back then, the city was multicultural.”
“The way Mission City is becoming.”
“That’s true.”
We came to a park bench. “Do you want to sit? It’s still pretty windy.”
“Maybe turn back?”
“Sure.”
We pivoted and then started back the way we’d come.
“How did you make it to Mission City from Vancouver?”
“I met Stephen. We actually hooked up in a bar on Davie Street in the city. But he was from Cedar Valley. He was a foreperson on a build in Abbotsford, and he said how he wanted to start his own company.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’d been on job sites for a number of years by then—mostly doing framing. Between the two of us, we had a fair bit of know-how.” He shrugged. “I moved into his townhouse in Abbotsford, and we built the business.”
As we continued to walk, a particularly strong gust of wind hit us.
His hair fluttered.
I wished I could feather my hand through it. Looked so damn soft.
He let out a breath. “We almost went out of business during the housing bust, but we weathered that. Kept going and expanding. By the end, I was supervising the job sites, and he was running the business behind the scenes. Then one day…poof.” He held his closed fist upward, and then opened his fingers suddenly. As if letting go of something into the wind.
“That sounds rough.”
“Perfect and magical until the moment it wasn’t.” He shrugged. “One Friday morning I went to work. I came home Friday night, and he wasn’t there. I figured he was in the office, but he wasn’t answering the phone. I drove over there, thinking, I dunno—that his phone was dead or he was working late or he’d had a heart attack. But the office was locked, the alarm was set, and the place was empty. So I went home and waited.
“The entire weekend went by. I called the cops, and they made it clear I couldn’t file a report, and they tried to tell me that Stephen had just gone away for the weekend and forgotten to tell me.” He snickered. “They didn’t know him. You could set a clock by his routine. Which was why none of it made sense. I went to work on Monday as if nothing was wrong. At noon, I went to the office. The door was still locked, and the alarm was set. I called Bernie, our office manager. She said she’d been fired Friday morning and told to pack up her desk.”
Pieces were slowly falling into place.
“He gave her a check, and she’d deposited it into the bank machine. I told her to call the bank. They told her it’d bounced.” He rubbed his forehead yet again.
I considered asking if he had a headache. Or if he wanted to change the subject.
