I turned the radio on and cranked up a rock music station, as if that could drown out the world outside my windows. When I was almost to the lake itself, its grayness blending in with the colorless sky, I took a right turn on Honeysuckle Road and forced my mind to the mission at hand.

My boss, Angelica Marks, had summoned me to a construction site meeting with no concern for my Monday schedule or my to-do list that never seemed to get any shorter. I was fine with the to-do list and the schedule and was used to doing whatever Angelica required. It was part of my job as the executive vice president of development for Marks International Hotels, a job I mostly loved.

My relationship with Angelica was not so clear-cut. On the one hand, she was a difficult person. Demanding, a perfectionist, with a cold edge to her personality that didn’t encourage close personal ties. She expected the utmost from her employees, but I couldn’t fault her for that. Those expectations were why she led a billion-dollar boutique hotel development company with sixty-two exclusive properties around the globe. She’d built up Marks International from nothing, and despite her less-than-warm personality, she inspired loyalty and hard work from her minions. My assistant, Bethany, was holding down the fort for me in the Nashville office, as curious as I was about why Angelica needed to talk in person.

All that aside, I owed Angelica for everything I had. Which was why, when she’d texted me at six forty-nine a.m., asking me to make the hour-plus drive to the jobsite at Dragonfly Lake, I’d told her I’d be there by eight thirty.

The clock on the dash read 8:23, but the hotel site, just a mile or so down the road from the town I’d grown up in, was only three minutes away. Closer than I liked to cut it, but traffic in Nashville had been particularly shit show-ish.

I hung a left onto the construction site and couldn’t deny the little spark of excitement at laying my eyes on Marks International’s latest endeavor. It wasn’t quite finished, but the exterior was getting there, and it was impressive. It made my blood pump to see it in person, something I didn’t normally get to do until a property was finished.

As the VP of development, I was involved in demographic analysis, site selection, and the preliminary details for each new property. Scouting was a big part of my job. With this particular property, though, Angelica had seen the real estate listing on the shore of Dragonfly Lake and decided she wanted a property close to home. That had essentially taken me out of the equation, which was ideal, since I’d been avoiding going back for so long.