Once Upon A Friendship

“Dad...”

“Get out.”

The man sitting calmly in Liam’s chair didn’t blink. His hands weren’t trembling. His mouth didn’t twitch.

Liam looked at him and saw a stranger.

“You are no longer welcome here, Liam,” Walter said as though he was ordering a glass of water with the coffee he’d just been served. “Either you go quietly or I will call security.”

Liam didn’t remember getting back to his car. He knew he’d done so on his own. Without escort. He climbed behind the wheel, starting the car with a calm he’d probably feel if he felt anything at all.

What did you do when you realized that what you’d counted on to never change didn’t even exist?

All these years he’d put up with the man’s abuse because he’d thought he understood him. Thought that, ultimately, he and his father would be a team.

The old man was really capable of disowning him? What honorable man did that? Threaten, yes. Make life hell, maybe, if he thought his son needed toughening up.

But denounce him completely, as though he didn’t exist?

He had someplace to be. So he drove.

He turned away from the showpiece building that housed Connelly Investments, heading toward historic downtown, and then found a moving and storage company with his satellite phone service. Placed an order for the following morning.

And only faltered once—when the friendly female voice on the other end of the line asked him the final delivery address for his packed-up life.

He told them he’d have to get back to them.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_dc7b231c-efc6-5e31-86d1-8bc2cd05e793)

MARIE AND GABRIELLE took each other out to a quick lunch at their favorite salad shop—not the fine dining Liam would have preferred. The building’s purchase was a big deal—more for Gabrielle than any of them, as no one in her immediate family had ever owned anything more than a car.

“I might not be able to eat out again for a while.” Gabrielle chuckled as she slid her arm through her friend’s, hugging Marie’s elbow to her side as they left the self-serve restaurant and headed toward her car. “I’ll just have to take scraps from our business tenant’s kitchen.”

“I have a feeling our new business tenant, the owner of that famous coffee shop downstairs, will give both of us anything we want,” Marie said laconically. They were heading back to the coffee shop. Marie had good, dependable employees, a few of whom were qualified to run the shop in her absence. She just didn’t enjoy being absent.

“Yeah, and if history serves, the owner will work us both to the bone for it, too.” Gabrielle had been with Marie from the very beginning, traipsing around Denver looking for just the right space to lease. Spending eighteen-hour days cleaning the place. Choosing a logo. Ordering. And working until they dropped when business picked up before Marie had had a chance, or enough profit, to hire employees.

“Can you believe it?” Marie skipped as she glanced at Gabrielle, yanking a bit on her arm. “We actually did it. We own an entire historic apartment building!”

Gabrielle smiled. And worried, too. About Liam. The future. The mammoth undertaking they’d agreed to. The fifty or more senior citizens who were counting on them to keep a roof over their heads.

The empty apartments they had yet to rent. Hopefully to a young family or two. Starting a new generation of traditions.

She wanted to tell Marie about Liam’s despondency regarding his father that morning. But why put a damper on her friend’s joy? Especially since the only evidence she had that anything was wrong was her own sense of foreboding...

Still, she couldn’t help but ponder the practical ramifications of their new responsibility while she drove the two of them home. Parking in her reserved spot in the small lot behind the building—parking was going to be a problem if, in the future, they rented to too many young, two-car families—she put a smile on her face as she followed Marie out of the car.

“Let’s go in the front door,” Marie said, her grin bubbling over as Gabrielle pulled out her key and turned toward the private back entrance off the parking lot. “Let’s be like landlords checking up on our business tenant...”

Even at thirty, Marie had a playful, girly streak. It was one of the things Gabrielle loved about her. “You are the business tenant,” she reminded her on a laugh.

They were in partnership, she and Marie and Liam. A legally binding arrangement that kept the three of them together. Solidifying their odd little family into the future. More than the building, the investment, the asset, it was that fact that put the smile on Gabrielle’s face.

* * *

“WHAT’S TAKING THEM so long?”

“They’re coming around the front.”

“Janice, watch your mother, she’s at it again.”

Standing behind the counter of Marie’s quickly decorated coffee shop, Liam turned when he heard Grace speaking to Janice in the cacophony of voices around him.

Janice’s mother Clara, a ninety-five-year-old woman who lived with her seventy-three-year-old daughter in apartment 491, was picking up the chocolate Hershey’s Kisses that Grace had had a couple of women spreading around the tables. Clara was stashing them away in the covered compartment beneath the seat of her walker. The old woman was known for her stealing. Most often involving chocolate.

Marie was known for buying chocolate and purposely leaving it lying around just to watch the elderly woman’s joy as she found it. Grace, an eighty-year-old resident who baked every morning for Marie and was the organizer of all functions among the residents of the building, was still tying balloons to chairs. Knowing everyone well from his years of visiting the girls, Liam had known just whom to seek out in planning the homecoming that was to have been in lieu of dessert after the fancy lunch that was supposed to have happened that day.

The lunch, of course, hadn’t happened. And the party would have gone on, with or without him, too. That’s how it usually was with him and the girls. He came and went at his pleasure. If he was there, great. If not, no big deal. Was that why it worked so well?

The realization, on this day of standing up as a man, didn’t sit well with him. At all. He loved Marie and Gabrielle more than anyone else on earth. They were his sisters in his heart. He looked out for them. Felt protective of them.

And, he supposed, he used them, too. Like a brother used sisters.

To whine to.

To have them always be there.

And to know they’d always be happy to see him when he bothered to show up.

Like now, as he stood there, hands in his pockets, watching as the residents got ready for the big moment. He’d paid for the party.

And here he was thinking it was a bonus that he’d been able to show up.

Liam didn’t like the man he was seeing.

At all.

Was the old man right then? Was he worthless?

“Shh, quiet, everyone, they’re rounding the corner! They’re coming in the front!” Susan Gruber, wife to Dale, said, with a sideways smile to her husband. Liam had never seen one without the other.

The front door opened. He pasted a huge smile on his face, glad that he’d made it back in time.

“Surprise!” More than fifty voices chorused at once. His was among them. And the shocked happiness on both of the girls’ faces was worth the effort it was costing him to hang around, to pretend that all was well. That he was going to be fine.

He was a good man. Maybe he’d taken advantage of the girls all these years. Maybe he hadn’t seen that. And maybe, now that he did see it, it was up to him to do what he could to rectify the situation. Maybe, very soon, he’d be in a position to be around more, to tend to them for a change.

Because he was decent. His father be damned.