“That’s easy. I don’t have anything tied to driving like a mad woman around a grocery store. Nothing’s riding on that. The school? That’s my future and hopefully the future of hundreds of women. I was lucky. I grew up in a family that didn’t care whether you had a vagina or a penis. You helped out in the family business. I had the opportunity and the expectation to learn.”

“Are your parents involved in the business?” Noah asked.

Cat shook her head and handed him a pint of mint chocolate chip. He handed it back. “No bowls. Try something handheld.”

She put the ice cream back and pushed him down another cooler. “My mom worked in the office off and on. But my dad’s the academic in the family. He taught high school history at a private school in Brooklyn—if you ever see a hammer in that man’s hand, run the opposite way. My mom stayed home with us and helped Nonni with the books occasionally. It was my pop and nonni who were eyeing Gannon and me up to be the heirs apparent.”

“How did you go from a family construction company to TV?”

Cat grinned, dumping a box of frozen Snickers into the cart. “That was my brilliant idea. When Pop died, the company was already barely scraping by. The economy sucked. No one was building or buying, and we were within months of closing the doors for good. It would have crushed Nonni. Everything they’d worked for, only to lose Pop and the business in the same year?” She shook her head.

“What did you do?”

“I got this crazy idea in the middle of the night—none of us were sleeping back then. The next morning, I took a video camera to the job site and shot some footage of Gannon arguing with me, some demo. And I sent it off to the network. Two months later we got a call, and here we are.”

“You seem like you’re cut out for the work.” Noah pointed at the popsicles, and Cat tossed him a box.

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”

“That’s how I meant it. You’re very comfortable in front of the camera and very competent behind it.”

“Well aren’t you just full of compliments today?” Cat mused.

“I feel like I may have misjudged you. Slightly,” Noah admitted.

“Oh, you mean when you accused me of kidnapping your daughter and called me an ambulance chaser?”

Noah grimaced. He’d been an ass. There was no excuse for it.

“Hey, can we get some donuts, too?” he asked, changing the subject.

--------

Loaded down with six bags of groceries and beer, they trudged across the parking lot. Noah looked down Peppermint Lane, the street that bisected Main. He shook his head.

“You know, by now we’d have already started decorating the street lights downtown,” he sighed.