God, no tears, please! Susanne never knew how to handle those, especially not in situations that were supposed to be unemotional and professional, so she charged ahead. “So you really want me to believe you had no clue? Come on. You’re not stupid. You must have noticed that people aren’t exactly beating down your door to buy stationery.”

“Of course I noticed! But it’s not that we don’t have enough customers. The store can get busy at certain times of the day. I knew we weren’t getting rich, but with Nobby owning the place so we don’t have to pay rent, I thought we must at least be getting by.”

“It’s not the number of customers; it’s that you have the wrong customers buying the wrong stuff. You can’t survive on the two cents you make off a greeting card and a cheap ballpoint pen. Didn’t you ever see the numbers?”

Frau Lamm shook her head. “Nobby doesn’t like putting the store’s numbers into a computer. He’s pretty old-school in that regard.”

“Yeah, I noticed. I’ve seen that thing he calls a cell phone.”

A weak smile tugged on Frau Lamm’s lips. “I nicknamed it the brick.”

Susanne laughed and was glad to hear her chuckle a bit too. “Yeah, that’s what it looks like. So you never saw his business ledgers either?”

“No. Nobby always told me he wanted me to focus on the customers and the stationery, and he would take care of everything else. He didn’t even tell me you’d be coming, probably because he knew I’d start asking questions that he wasn’t ready to answer.” She sniffed.

Did she see it as a betrayal that he had kept her out of the loop?

Frau Lamm stared up at the saints and apostles decorating the cathedral as if hoping for the patron saint of nearly bankrupt stationery stores to intervene. Finally, she directed her attention back to Susanne. “So that’s why you’re really here, isn’t it? Because we’re in trouble.”

“Yeah. That’s what I do for a living—I help companies in trouble…or advise them to close down, if need be.”

Frau Lamm gave a decisive shake of her head. “Not Paper Love. There has to be another solution. What can we do to save the store?”

“Well, there’s two sides of the equation,” Susanne said, glad that they were back to discussing business strategies instead of dealing with emotions. “Either you have to cut back costs, or you have to increase revenue.”

“We.”

“Pardon me?”

“We,” Frau Lamm repeated. “You keep saying you.”

Susanne wasn’t sure she understood. “Yeah. Something wrong with that?”

“Paper Love isn’t just any store. It’s your uncle’s lifework—and your grandfather’s before him. Shouldn’t it mean more to you than the other businesses you’ve worked for?”