Great Exploitations(5)

“Charming guy. Good friend?” I guessed.

Henry raised a shoulder. “Good friend and business partner.”

The not-quite-ancient “charming” man I’d just met couldn’t even get his buttons in the right holes—as I’d just noticed. How he could be anyone’s business partner—Henry’s especially—had to be some kind of joke. I did a mental calendar check. Nope, it wasn’t April first.

“Business partner? Your business partner?” My expression mirrored my doubtful tone. “Okay, what are you smoking and can I have some?”

Henry chuckled before taking a sip of his beer. He was drinking a Guinness too, which made me want one that much less. “I miss your sense of humor. The people I work with every day, you’d think they’d never heard of the concept. Certainly none have learned it, let alone mastered it like you have.”

That’s sweet, you’ve missed my sense of humor. Evidently not enough to stay out of another woman’s bed and go on to marry a gem of a woman. “I’m still waiting for the explanation of that business partner thing you just mentioned.”

Henry motioned at the room around us. “I decided to expand Callahan Industries into the service industry, and you’re looking at the first and sole restaurant under the C.I. umbrella.”

My mouth wanted to, but I didn’t let it fall open. Henry had good business sense, and he could pay experts for their invaluable business sense. Had the entire department been on vacation the day that pub slipped under the C.I. “umbrella”?

“That’s a joke, right?” That was the only reasonable explanation.

“No joke.”

My forehead creased in confusion, which was not an attractive look. I couldn’t afford unattractive looks—even one of them—when I was sitting across from the most difficult, high profile Errand of my career. “You own”—as I scanned the restaurant, I tried not to curl my nose because two unattractive looks in a row was like committing high treason in the Eve world—“this place?”

“I co-own it. Tom is the other co-owner, but he runs the place. All I do is come in and eat the food and drink the beer.” As proof, Henry lifted his beer and took a drink.

I knew Henry. As much as I hated to admit it, and hated even more that after his betrayal and our years of separation, I still felt like I knew him. It was easy to tell that he’d given me half of the story, but not the important half.

“Are you going to make me pry it out of you, or should I go ask single, lonely Tom, who’d probably sign his co-ownership of this place over to me if I batted my eyelashes at him?” To prove my point, I fluttered my eyelashes a few times at Henry.

He smiled. “You got something in your eyes?”

Could I cut a break with my Target? And no, Universe, that was not a rhetorical question. Give me a fucking break already.

I moved to slide out of the seat because it looked like I’d be getting my answers from Tom, but Henry grabbed my arm.

“I used to come to this place a lot when I moved up here after college, when I was in the process of putting my company together,” Henry said as I settled back into my seat. “I can’t count the number of nights he let me camp out at whatever booth I was in, scratching away pages of notes, cranking out code like a mad scientist, after he’d closed and gone to bed in his apartment upstairs. He just told me to help myself to whatever I wanted and to be sure to lock the door on my way out.” Henry smiled as his eyes went to some other time and place. “I conceptualized most of what Callahan Industries started out as in these booths with a few pints of this stuff.” He flicked his Guinness. “A couple years back, Tom had a stroke. Nothing that left him too permanently incapacitated, but he wasn’t able to work for a couple of months. Since he’s pretty much the only person who runs this place, day and night, he had to close it until he could come back.”

I already knew where his story was going. That’s how well I knew Henry. That’s how well I wished with whatever was left of my heart that I didn’t know Henry.

“Bills piled up, from the restaurant and the hospital, and no money was coming in. Tom was going to have to close the place. A business he’d opened forty years ago, all because of one terrible, unforeseeable curve life threw him. His whole life was going to be pulled out from beneath him all because of one moment, one instant.” Henry’s eyes were still in that far off place, but I couldn’t help wonder if the story had shifted from Tom to someone else whose life had changed in one moment from one accident.