Hunter looked at him, confused, and his father continued. “You’re out of options, Hunter. If you want to stay under my roof, you’re going to have to do something. Look for a job, if you want, but I can tell you there aren’t going to be a lot of better offers for a kid who barely made it out of high school.”

Hunter looked at the ground, and his dad took a deep breath and started again. “This is a chance for you to learn the family business, from the ground up. You’ll start off working construction.”

“Dad, I don’t know anything about construction or real estate.”

“I bet you know more than you think, Hunter. You proved it to me when you brought me the idea of offering to buy the O’Connors’ orchard fields. You knew I was concerned about them selling to a developer and us losing the privacy behind the house.”

“I was just trying to help out Will,” Hunter mumbled. But Will hadn’t spoken a word to him since the day they fought. Hunter had talked to his dad about the O’Connors’ financial problems, and he’d kept his word to Trip, coming forward to the police to back up Trip’s version of events so that Will’s charges would get dropped. Hunter would be serving a week in county jail, scheduled during what would have been his Thanksgiving break from college, and he had been ordered to do three months of community service with Habitat for Humanity in the meantime. The Finch family was also taking over the rebuilding of the Jensens’ house. But he knew in his heart that his friendship with Will might be over. He hadn’t meant to hurt Maddie, but the fact was that he had, and he’d hurt Will too.

Will, whose friendship Hunter had finally understood was the one thing that he’d actually earned, unlike the many things that he’d been given as Dominic Finch’s son. And he’d blown it all up and lost one of the only real things that he had. “The O’Connors probably wouldn’t have sold out to a developer anyway,” Hunter said. “They’re not that kind of people.”

“It was a clever idea,” Dom said, ignoring Hunter’s dig at real estate developers. “Don’t undersell it. The biggest part of this business is knowing when to strike. My deal with the O’Connors benefits everyone. They get to keep the orchard business going on very generous lease terms, and they get the cash that they need from the sale. I keep the property behind ours intact, which is valuable to me. You saw an opportunity, and you brought it to me. I was impressed.”

Hunter hoped Will and his family saw it the same way. But he was pretty sure they didn’t.