Chapter Seven
Liam
I take Hemingway up through the trails behind my house. I've seen people up here running every now and then, but for the most part, we have the trails to ourselves. Which is how I like it. In the month and a half I've been in Port Safira, I don't think I've really left my home.
At least, not to go into town. I have a private helicopter and a pilot who is always on call that I use to travel back and forth between here and the Seattle office – the home base of my slice of the ADE kingdom. I don't have to be there too often, and frankly, I prefer staying out of Seattle as much as I can these days. I'm thankful that I can do pretty much everything I need to do from my home office.
It's just one of the many perks of being in my position. Of course, as I've learned, being in my position also comes with plenty of drawbacks. Such as having a woman in my life who saw me as nothing more than an ATM. A body to pay for the upscale, lavish lifestyle she wanted to lead. That she felt like she deserved to lead.
With that whole mess six weeks behind me now, I've had plenty of time to reflect on things and I still can't help but kick myself again and again for not noticing the signs sooner. I should have known, all the way back in college, that Brittany wasn't who she said she was. Who I thought she was.
As I look back on it now, there were a million red flags that I chose to ignore because I was so caught up in her. So, head over heels in love with her. Everything from how she treated people she considered to be “less than,” to her insistence on only the finest things in life – I should have known. Should have seen it.
Hemingway runs up to me with a tennis ball in his mouth and a smile on his face. He wags as I take the ball and scratch behind his ears.
“Maybe I am a soft touch, huh?” I say. “Maybe Uncle Brayden is right about that.”
He dances in place, excitedly waiting for me to throw the ball – though, I'm pretty sure he agrees with the notion that I'm a soft touch and approves of it. I hurl it into a wide-open field with tall grass and wildflowers, watching him bound off in search of his toy.
As I watch him go, I smile. This is one thing that makes me glad to have moved to a place like Port Safira – the wide openness of it all. Seattle, although I love the city, doesn't have many wide open green spaces like this. And for a dog like Hemingway, being able to romp and play in an open field is a good thing. Sure, there are plenty of dog parks in Seattle and the like – it is known as a very pet-friendly city – but it's not anywhere near the same as having a field full of real grass for him to zip around in.
It's one of the many features of this town that I've really come to appreciate. And I know Hemingway does too. This is also a place I know Brittany would have never agreed to come to. She'd call it too rural. Too backwoods with not enough nightlife. Port Safira doesn’t have enough of the finer things and trappings of wealth she has become accustomed to.
Those are things I don't particularly need or care for. I'm a simple guy. It's something that surprises a lot of people – people who assume just because I'm wealthy, I'll have gold-plated toilets and fixtures throughout my house. That's just not my style. I'm a low-key guy who doesn't need all the trappings of wealth.
Sure, I like nice things. I just don't need to be extravagant about it all. Unlike Brittany, who seemed to have a need to flaunt her wealth – well actually, my wealth– at every turn. It's one lesson I'll be forever grateful to my father for. He was absolutely loaded, but you'd never really know it by looking at him. My father was frugal to a fault and always taught us to be humble.
He continually reminded us that, although we should enjoy the privileges we had, we should avoid being flashy or excessive about it. His mantra and one that will forever echo in my mind is that fortune – like fame and beauty – can be fleeting. Just because you have money today doesn't mean you'll have it tomorrow. It takes hard work, not extravagance, to build and maintain a fortune.
I have my own indulgences and small extravagances, sure. But, unlike my former wife, those are the exception and not the rule.
“Live and learn, huh, buddy?” I say as Hemingway bounds up to me, dropping the ball at my feet. “We won't be making that mistake again, now will we?”
I pick it up and throw it out into the field again, watching him bound through the tall grass. I sit down on a fallen log and look out over the town of Port Safira below. I take a deep breath, savoring the clean, crisp air, and marvel at the view of the Olympic Mountains in the distance.
Being out here, amongst all this natural beauty fills me with a sense of peace and tranquility – one I've been reveling in since moving. I don't think I realized how stressed out and tense living in Seattle had made me until I got here and found myself enjoying not being around people. Enjoying the wide-open spaces and the quiet solitude.
Truthfully, this has been the best elixir I could have had to help deal with everything that went down with Brittany. Just getting away and being by myself, surrounded by the beauty of the natural world – it's worked magic on me.
“I should have moved here years ago,” I mutter to myself.
A nearby scream pulls me out of my reverie and I quickly get to my feet and turn around. A woman is standing on the trail – who had obviously been jogging – and Hemingway is standing in front of her, his whole body wiggling and his tongue hanging out of his mouth. He's obviously very excited to see her.
“It's okay,” I call. “He's friendly.”
As if he wanted to reinforce my words, Hemingway sits down and looks at the woman expectantly, waiting for her to pet him. I quickly walk up to the trail and clip his leash on to the harness. He looks at me, pure adoration in his eyes, so I slip a treat out of the pouch on my belt and feed it to him, giving him a quick scratch behind the ears.
“He just surprised me,” the woman says. “I didn't expect him to come bouncing out of the field like that.”
“Apologies,” I say.
“No, it's fine,” she replies. “No harm done. Besides, a little boost to my heart rate can only help my workout, right?”
“Say you're sorry to the nice lady, Hemingway,” I say.
Hemingway steps forward and nuzzles his head against her leg, his tail wagging enthusiastically. The woman laughs and reaches down, scratching him behind the ears and my dog looks like he's in heaven.
“Hemingway,” she says. “Unusual name for a dog.”
I shrug. “My favorite writer,” I say. “For some reason, it seems to kind of fit his personality.”
“So, you're a reader,” she says, still lavishing affection on my dog.
“As much as I can be.”
“I'm Paige Samuels,” she says. “I own Bookworms – the bookstore down on Sapphire Avenue. If you ever find yourself in need of reading material, you know where to find me.”
I nod. “Thank you,” I say. “I'll remember that.”
The woman straightens up and looks at me for the first time. And as she does, I see a shift in her face – in her eyes, really. Any trace of warmth or friendliness evaporates like a puff of smoke on the wind and in its place, is an expression colder than an Arctic front.
The sudden turn takes me back a bit, to be honest. And although I don't understand why I'm suddenly getting the frosty treatment, I do my best to mitigate it by giving her a smile.
“Hi, I'm –”
“I know who you are,” Paige says. “You're Liam Anderson, real estate developer. President of the Western Division of Anderson Development Enterprises. Yeah, I know who you are. You're just like the rest of the parade of assholes who've come through town. Just another predatory vulture intent on raping Port Safira.”
“Wow,” I say. “Well, that escalated quickly.”
“Let's just say I'm not a fan of you and your kind.”
A rueful chuckle touches my lips. “My kind, huh?”
“Yeah, your kind.”
“And what kind would that be?”
“The kind that preys on people,” she spits. “The kind that forces people who've been in their homes for decades, out. The kind that destroys local, homegrown businesses in favor of high-end stores. You're the kind that sucks all the life out of a town and ruins all of the things that made it special, and call it progress.”
The heat in the woman's voice, along with the fire I see in her eyes, is intense. I can tell that she's incredibly passionate about her hometown and obviously, doesn't like seeing the changes that are occurring. And I can't say that I entirely blame her for that.
What she doesn't know though, is that we're actually on the same side when it comes to this. No, I don't have the history in this town like she does, but I can feel the charm about it. Can see what makes it special. And I don't like seeing that destroyed any more than she does.
“I think you have me all wrong, Ms. Samuels,” I say. “I'm not –”
“For the last few months now,” she cuts me off. “I've had to fend off dozens of you vultures who think you can just come into my shop, wave some money around, and expect me to fall to my knees, thankful that somebody will take it off my hands.”
“But, that's not –”
“You people never take no for an answer,” she continues railing. “You're pushy. Arrogant. You think you can back me into a corner and expect me to just roll over and die. You people are nothing but bullies. Scumbags in nice suits.”
“Are you finished?”
Her cheeks are flushed, her jaw is clenched, and her eyes are still narrowed as she stares daggers at me, but remains silent – which I take to mean she's finished. Her words struck a nerve with me and I'm feeling pretty angry after her tirade. For her to pop off to me like that – for no reason at all – yeah, it pisses me off. She doesn't know the first thing about me.
“Good,” I reply, my voice cold with anger. “Like I was saying, I think you have this all wrong. I think you have me all wrong, Ms. Samuels. You're making a lot of assumptions here that have no basis in fact or reality.”
“Oh, no?” she says.
“No,” I snap back. “You don't know me and although you think you know my type, as you call it, I can tell that you're absolutely ignorant about what I do for a living. Just because you can Google my name and my company doesn't mean you know the first thing about either.”
“And I suppose you being here, being who you are,” she says, “while real estate developers are crawling out of the woodwork to snatch up land and drive people out, is what – a coincidence?”
I shrug. “Obviously so,” I say. “I'm not here to acquire land or build anything.”
“Then why are you here?”
I open my mouth to speak and then closed it again. She doesn't need to know why I'm living in Port Safira. It's not her business. I don't owe her an explanation. I don't need to justify myself to her. I don't owe her a damn thing.
“Why I'm here is not your concern.”
“That's what I thought.”
“Obviously, your logic and your thought process have some flaws,” I say. “Some very deep flaws.”
“You know what? Screw you,” she snaps.
Without another word, she turns and takes off down the path, continuing her jog. Hemingway watches her go, a look of disappointment on his face that he didn't get more attention from her. I reach down and idly stroke the soft fur on his head as I watch Miss Paige Samuels run down the path, clearly eager to put as much distance between us as humanly possible.
“Yeah, nice to meet you too,” I say, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “Thanks for being so neighborly.”
Hemingway looks up at me and whines under his breath. I feed him another treat and ruffle his fur.
“That's okay, buddy,” I say. “We don't need her. We don't need that mean old lady.”
I take his leash in my hand and lead him down the path that will take us home. The conversation with Paige still ringing in my ears and fueling the angry heat that's burning inside of me.