By this time, Chloe was out the door, on the walkway in front of the building. She’d finally stopped to wait for me.

“Hey.” I took her hand when I reached her, squeezed it. “Did somebody back there upset you?”

She frowned, averted her gaze, then shook her head. “It was an ingrained reaction. My bad.”

“To Anna and Olivia?”

“You know we were never friends.”

“You weren’t enemies either.”

Anna and Olivia had been two of the most popular girls in our class, but unlike some, to my knowledge, they’d never been mean girls.

“You’re right.” Chloe blew out a breath and a self-deprecating laugh. “This place makes me wrong in the head.”

“Henry’s?” I frowned, struggling not to be offended.

“This town,” she said, shaking her head again. “It puts me on defense. It’s illogical, I know. I saw Anna and I was instantly that girl, the janitor’s daughter.”

“I always liked the janitor’s daughter. I’m a sucker for good, clean fun.”

She nudged my side with her shoulder as if to push away my pun. “You’re the opposite and you know it.”

“You’re an executive vice president of a global business now, Chloe. You’re intelligent and successful, and you probably make more in a month than a lot of people in this town make in a year.”

She nodded halfheartedly, distracted. “Speaking of that…” She nodded to the old Bergman building on the adjacent lot. “I’d like to see inside. Your plan calls for keeping the building but gutting it, right?”

“Right.” It took half a second for me to catch up with the subject change and wonder where she was going with this. “The building is solid and would work perfectly for what we have in mind.” It didn’t take much to switch me into brewery mode.

The Bergman building had originally been a hardware store but had been empty for years. My grandmother had gotten it for a steal back in the seventies when the Bergmans moved their store to a bigger building two blocks away on the corner of Main and Hummingbird Road. She had never done anything except maintain it minimally. Like Seth had said, it was a waste to let it sit there, and our grandmother had held on to it, waiting for the “right” time to sell it or do something with it, but had never run into an opportunity she’d deemed worthy, in spite of multiple offers over the years. More recently, the value of the lot itself was so high, being lakefront, that the feasible offers had slowed down a lot, and any that had come in, I’d convinced my brothers to hold off on.