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  What was next? She didn’t know how to answer that.

  She stood up and stretched, then began a slow jog back down to the cabin. This time she didn’t turn on her music.

  She was left alone with her thoughts and regrets. And she didn’t like what she heard.

  * * *

  As Amelia descended the gravel road she first made out the top of her own cabin, then Nate's. As she took the last turn she could see the other cabin too. The weeds in the driveway were still long and there had clearly been no visitors to the place, which was odd considering the prime location and popularity of the lake itself.

  Just as Amelia got to the driveway, something caught her eye. She stopped and turned toward the moving object, just in time to be hit in the leg with a car tire. She winced in pain. The tire had been moving fast and rolled up her running shoe before colliding with her shin. She was startled, but not really hurt. She followed the trajectory of the tire and could see it had come from the driveway of Nate's cabin.

  Did that little jerk try to hit me with a tire?

  She picked up the empty tire and began to march up the "little jerk's" driveway. When she got to the top of the hill she was surprised to find a large pile of lumber and dozens of bags of concrete mix. Nate was nowhere to be found. He was probably hiding and watching her right now, she thought.

  She walked around the long straight lengths of lumber. Whatever project the material was for must be significant.

  The screen on the side garage door slammed shut as Nate exited carrying a cup of coffee.

  "You trying to steal my tire?" he asked, taking a sip from his mug.

  "What? No. It attacked me!" she shouted.

  "Yeah, you know those tires. I've heard about them. Got a mind of their own," he said, without a hint of sarcasm.

  "No, it rolled down the hill and hit me," she said.

  "Of all the things that tire could have hit, it decided to go after you. Hmm. Do you believe in karma?" Nate asked.

  "I believe that you rolled this thing down that hill at me," Amelia said, her voice trembling as she continued to clutch the tire.

  "OK, let’s work your theory for a minute. I woke up this morning. Got dressed. Made my coffee and watched a little SportsCenter. All perfectly timed so I could walk out here and roll a tire 75 yards down my own driveway. Now, mind you from here, I can't see the bottom of the hill anyway. So I must have practiced it over and over. Then, just when I knew you'd be loitering there, I just let it go and hoped for the best. Then I went back inside and poured myself this coffee, only to return to the scene of the crime moments later. Is that about what happened?"

  Amelia turned and looked down the hill. She couldn’t see the bottom of it. But she wasn't going to let him off that easy.

  "Well, it still hit me," she said.

  "And for that I'm sorry. I will ground that tire immediately, but not before I give it a stern talking to. But I'll be honest, tires don't always listen. You're going to need to keep an eye out for this one. He might attack again."

  "Don't be a jerk," Amelia said.

  "Hey, I'm just trying to figure this thing out. But I'm not a detective."

  Amelia realized she still holding the tire. Her arms were beginning to shake.

  "Well, here's your tire back," Amelia said, slamming the tire down. It rolled and spun on gravel driveway before coming to a rest.

  "Thank you," he said. "Can I ask you something?"

  "I guess," she replied, cautiously.

  "Do you really think I tried to attack you with a tire?"

  She thought about it for a moment.

  "I guess not," she said, but with the same terse tone she used to accuse him moments earlier.

  "Good, because I have a confession to make," he said. "I rolled that tire down the hill."

  Chapter 8

  "You have got to be kidding me," Amelia said.

  Nate motioned for Amelia to come to the other side of the lumber pile. After rolling her eyes, she agreed.

  He stood looking at the pile as he spoke.

  "The lumber yard delivered all this decking material last Friday, which was great because I didn't have to haul it here all the way from town, but they put the support posts on the bottom of the pile and stacked all the rest of it on the top. I can't very well build the deck without the posts in the ground first, right?"

  "You're such a good storyteller," Amelia snapped at him. "I keep telling you that. What's your point?"

  He ignored her and continued.

  "My point is that this morning I decided I'd move the piles and separate out the material so I could begin the project. The ground was still wet from the sprinklers and I didn't want the lumber to get wet before I stained it, so I decided to place the lumber on these old tires."

  He pointed to a pile of tires by the side of the garage.

  "I rolled one over here and left it. I didn't realize it was so close to the slope and that it would go down the hill and I certainly didn't know you'd be going for a run at the exact same time. Heck, you are the reason I'm here at the cabin. I wouldn't do that."

  "What?" she asked, wondering what in the world he meant by that last comment.

  "I wouldn't intentionally hurt you—"

  "No, not that," she said. "Why would I be the reason you're here? I thought this was your grandparent's cabin."

  "Yes, it was their cabin," he said, flustered. "Never mind, just forget it."

  He turned back toward the house and began walking away.

  "No, tell me what you meant," she said, the ice melting from her voice.

  He turned back around and took a deep breath. His lips trembled ever so slightly like he was fighting off a strong emotion. He took a sip of his coffee. Stalling. Then the trembling was gone like it never existed in the first place.

  "Everything you said to me the day you left the company was true," he said. "You might not have thought it, the way you were screaming at me, but I was listening and I understood. I remember every word you said. Think about it, Amelia. You know why I'm here."

  Nate then set down his coffee, picked up a 10-foot long two-by-four, hoisted it on his shoulder and walked away, leaving Amelia standing in the driveway.

  Chapter 9

  Several Months Ago

  Dallas, Texas

  Amelia sat in a soft leather chair in the well-appointed waiting area outside Nate's office at Riddell Industries. Nate was already 30 minutes late for their appointment. The receptionist—a buxom blonde woman—sat behind a glass table staring blankly at a computer screen. The walls of the office were covered in marble and colored glass. A large floor vase to her right held tall leafy plants that cast a shadow across Amelia's lap. The Riddell headquarters took up eight floors of a skyscraper in downtown Dallas. The rest of the building was leased to other tenants, but it was Riddell's name adorning the outside of the building's top floors. Riddell was a big deal and they wanted everyone to know it.

  She'd been here before, but today it seemed much more gaudy and wasteful than usual. Men in suits and women in unbelievably short skirts bustled about the office area carrying files and tablet computers. They talked in hurried voices and were here one second and gone the next. Corporate life in overdrive. She wondered how often these people saw their families. How many of them got to the office at 6 a.m. and were still working at their desks when dinner was ready at home? Was this any sort of life at all? No doubt these people were making a mint working here, and Riddell wouldn't have them on staff if they weren't exceptional; but Amelia couldn't help but feel sorry for them for missing out on real life—the things that don't happen at a desk or in a conference room.

  She also felt oddly out of place. She wasn't dressed to the nines like everyone else. She made a deliberate decision to wear her red Mr. Z's Toys polo shirt and her faded blue jeans. It was the same down-home uniform that Riddell's market research team had said was best for making store employees "believable ambassadors of the Mr. Z's brand." Like putting a polo on so
me teenager in Toledo, Ohio, was going to make him a model employee. Employees also went through two weeks of training before being unleashed onto customers on the sales floor. Two of those 80 hours of training were spent on learning the Mr. Z's story, just in case customers asked about Edwin or Mary Klein. They were required to write a brief essay about the store's history and take a quiz at the end of the training, but Amelia knew that no one ever reviewed the results. It was just a formality.

  Amelia had begged for an alternative option for training employees and teaching them the spirit of Mr. Z's. She drafted an extensive curriculum for a day-long event that included activities, videos and a field trip where employees could visit homeless shelters, learning centers or other charities to learn why Edwin decided to give away his store's inventory to those in need.

  She had also demanded that employees not be required to have a sales quota each day after seeing how pushy and rude employees were as they tried to force customers to buy things they didn't need. The original store motto was clear: A simple gift is the best. Recipients appreciated the thought that went into the gift, not the expense. But those lessons were thrown into the trash in favor of higher sales rates and a ridiculously competitive system that rewarded the top salespeople with vacations and month-end bonuses.

  Despite these sales practices, the chain of Mr. Z's stores wasn't wildly successful. The company had opened a store in nearly every state, except Alaska and Hawaii. The early stores in San Francisco, Seattle and Portland were close replicas of the original Mr. Z's in Spokane, all the way down to the rough wood floors and dark oak shelves that gave the store a regal, nostalgic look. Those stores did well, but were in high traffic, downtown locations with upscale clientele.

  The stores had plenty of window space for a Christmas display too. Amelia had cried when she first saw the stores. They were a beautiful surprise that honored the legacy of the original location in Spokane. Employees were friendly and relaxed. They wanted to talk to Amelia and learn about Edwin. She spent days at each store trying to get all the details right. She felt great when she left them.

  But the feeling didn't last.

  Amelia cried again when she saw the chain stores, but this time they were not tears of joy or appreciation. She was horrified. The large green vintage Z on the marquee was replaced with a neon blue Z that flashed and pointed toward the store's entrance. Inside the store were video screens hanging from the ceiling by cables, blasting dance music over product images and sales prices. Tall metal shelves, all painted a uniform white color, towered over customers. Cardboard boxes of unwrapped products were stacked to the ceiling above the display shelves giving the impression that there was an endless supply of something else you could be buying.

  The price tags made Amelia sick to her stomach. Mr. Z's had always printed each tag by hand, hanging them by a string or taping it to the underside of the box. She had known that this might be a problem for a large organization to handle, but she had expected some effort too. But no. There was no personal care put into the pricing of items at all. A printed cost and product name was attached to a plastic tag under the corresponding display shelf. The store items were run through the register with a bar code scanner. Beep after beep, after beep.

  The chain stores were a carbon copy of every run-of-the-mill mall toy-and-puzzle retailer. These stores were not the Mr. Z's that Amelia knew. It was embarrassing; yet nobody at Riddell seemed to care about her thoughts on the subject.

  * * *

  Over the years, Nate had taken an oddly specific interest in Amelia's day-to-day work at Mr. Z's. Each month she'd submit a report to him, chronicling her time. He wanted to know the daily sales volume and how many customers visited the store each day, which were reasonable requests, of course. Yet he also wanted to know the exact hours that she was in the store and how many customers she interacted with each day. Since Amelia steadfastly refused to implement the sales quota policy on the flagship Spokane store, Amelia thought the additional reporting requirements were Nate's way of punishing her.

  He would always reply to the report with an email, often commenting on how little time she spent in the store although she was working 10-12 hours each day. These comments would routinely send Amelia into an internal rage. She had to travel so often for company business there were times when she didn't know what day of the week it was. Twice she had gone to the store for work, only to discover that it was Sunday, the one day of the week the store was closed.

  Traveling out of Spokane meant making flight connections in Seattle, Denver or Salt Lake City to get pretty much anywhere in the country, which added hours and sometimes a full day to her travel plans. Nate didn't mind this. As long as she made an appearance at each new store when it opened.

  "We have to give our customers that warm, mom-and-pop store feeling," he had told her. "So I need you standing next to the store manager each time we open a new location. The people just eat that stuff up."

  So she was gone out of town and miserable for it. Then she was back in town and she was miserable there too. It didn't matter where she was, she was not happy. She missed nearly every school event for Marcus and Susanna. She never had the time or energy to help them with homework. She was cranky and, more often than she'd like, she would snap at the kids if they did something that bothered her. It wasn't fair to them. They didn't ask for this.

  Sure, they had the nicest clothes and didn’t want for anything. Their home was big and they had a pool, but it didn't matter. The kids were at Josh's house most of the time anyway, so her big house sat empty.

  There was no work-life balance at Mr. Z's. With store openings, Board meetings, Nate's silly reports and her general disdain for everything the chain stores represented, it wasn't a question of her quitting when her contract expired. It was a question of why she’d waited until now.

  So today, as she sat outside Nate's office, she was quitting. Nate didn't know that. He thought she set up the meeting to discuss some mundane store matter and he even tried to cancel it. She had every intention of letting him have it. She would hold nothing back.

  She wondered what he would look like, which was a strange feeling. She rarely saw him. In the past four years, she'd seen him a grand total of four times and his appearance seemed to change each time. When she first met him in Spokane, he was big and strong, well-kept with thick hair. His only quirk was how he scratched at his right arm to the point it was a distraction.

  The next year he was sickly looking and pale, which she attributed to him working too much and never getting outside. He'd cut his hair, too. This instantly made him look older. He’d stopped itching his arm though. He'd moved to itching his chest below his collarbone. It was an odd thing to notice that he repeatedly touched the area.

  This frail look stayed with him for the next visit a few months later. She never asked about his appearance. He maintained the same condescending drill sergeant attitude and she didn't feel comfortable asking. It's not that she didn't care, she just didn't know how to bring it up. It's not like she really knew him anyway, she thought.

  Then about a year ago, he made an unexpected visit to the Mr. Z's Annual Board Meeting held in Chicago. His tan skin, toothy smile and thick hair had returned. No itching occurred. He looked well, but just like before, she didn't say anything. And neither did anyone else. The two of them had gone back and forth enough via email to know that Nate wasn't fond of idle chitchat, so she avoided him at all costs during the two-day meeting. He did the same. She also feared she would say something unprofessional or rude. She had a hard time containing her ill-feelings toward him and what he’d allowed to happen to Mr. Z's. He was greedy and misunderstood what the stores should really stand for: giving. But she knew she needed to wait out her contract. It was now expired and she would finally say her peace.

  * * *

  The buxom blonde behind the glass table waved her hand at Amelia.

  "Mr. Rosen will see you now," she said in her Texas twang.

  Amelia st
ood up, took a deep breath and stepped into Nate's office for the first and, she hoped, last time ever.

  Nate sat at his large desk, a wall of windows behind him.

  “Amelia. Have a seat,” he said. Amelia couldn’t read his expression. Was he glad to see her? That couldn’t be. And why didn’t he call her Ms. Cook as he always had? He must want to demand something else of her. Figures.

  “I’ll stand,” she said. “This won’t take long.”

  “I’m not sure I understand, but all right. Lady's choice."

  "I quit," she said and then proceeded to give him the tongue-lashing of his lifetime. It went on for the next 20 minutes before she threw her letter of resignation at him and stormed out of the office with a victorious smile on her face.

  Chapter 10

  Present Day, three days after the “tire incident"

  The Cabins

  Nate raised his safety glasses from the bridge of his nose to the top of his head and then used his tee-shirt to wipe away the sweat that was collecting on his face. The cloud of sawdust from cutting the decking boards was stuck to his skin. He could taste it in the air he breathed too. He stepped back from the temporary workbench he had set up below the big green cabin’s rotting red deck and surveyed his progress.

  In the three days since the “tire incident” he had managed to remove half of the support posts from the deck and prepped the remaining sections for demolition. Nate was no carpenter. The biggest project he had built previously was a cedar fence in the backyard of his home in Texas. This was the same fence that had to be torn down and rebuilt the next year by a professional contractor after a mild wind storm took it down. Rebuilding the deck was a massive project due to its complexity, height and the mere fact that he was tackling it alone.

  There were a few things he had on his side though—the first was history. The winters in North Idaho could be brutal on decks and uncovered spaces, so this wasn’t the first time this particular deck needed to be rebuilt. It was the third. Nate had been involved—as a helper—each time. His earliest experience was in high school. His grandfather and dad directed the effort, while he was a gopher fetching tools and materials. They didn't let him do much of the actual work, but he watched and learned.