“Architecture.”
“Well, I guess converting the space goes with that, then, right?”
“Yeah. My dad was the business side of things. I just saw the potential in the old buildings. It was something we were doing together.” He pushed around the sand with his foot and grew quiet.
“It must’ve been a lot to step into everything after your parents…”
He nodded. “My parents were smart about contingency planning, though. They had a trust in place so if anything happened to them, the stock in their corporation went to me and my sister, but their CFO became the president until I graduated college and turned twenty-one. Once I did those things, I had the option of becoming co-president, which I did. Then at twenty-five, I became the sole president.”
“So you’ve had help the last few years, but now you’re on your own?”
“Technically, yeah. But Devin, the CFO, is still there for me whenever I need him. We have a few more commercial storage buildings with leases coming due, so I’m struggling to decide whether to convert them into more temporary office space. Now would be the time. That’s the stress you read on my face while I was on my laptop.”
“I take it that’s not an easy decision.”
“It is and it isn’t. The storage business still makes a profit, but the office space is a much higher return on investment. One of the buildings that could be available to convert soon is the first one my parents bought twenty-five years ago. It was special to them, so it feels wrong to change things… They worked so hard to build what they had.”
I might not be a business mogul, but I knew adding emotion to any business decision made it so much harder. “Let me ask you something. If your father was still here, and he saw the numbers for the office space compared to the storage business, what would he do?”
Ford smiled. “He’d convert them all except for the building they started with. He’d keep that one for my mom.”
I shrugged. “Well, maybe that’s your answer, then.”
He thought about that for a minute and then nodded. “You know what? You’re right. I’m looking at it wrong. I should be honoring my father by doing what I think he would do, not by freezing his business in time.”
I bumped my shoulder to his playfully. “Boy, that was easy. Your job seems like a piece of cake.”
Ford chuckled and finished off his beer. He stood and offered his hand to help me up. “Come on. It’s your turn. We’ll solve all your problems during our walk.”
“What if I don’t have any problems?”
He smirked. “Oh, but you do. Your head and your body are at odds on a certain issue. That’s one we should discuss in detail.”
***
“So when do you get your results from the test you took?”
Ford and I had walked about forty-five minutes down the beach. Behind us, the sun was beginning to go down, and the sky lit up with gorgeous shades of orange and purple, so we turned around to head back and enjoy the view.
“Seventeen days.”
“That’s not too bad.”
“No, not at all. I did my student teaching with an older woman who said it took two months to get her results years ago.”
Ford smirked.
“What?”
“I was just thinking how you’re going to be that teacher—the one who gives all the high school boys wet dreams.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Ugh. Don’t even say that.”
“What? I totally would have been fantasizing about you if you were my teacher.” Ford chuckled. “In all seriousness, I think it’s cool you went back to school and got your degree—decided to become a teacher. Did you always want to be one?”
“Yeah. Ever since third grade, when I had Mrs. Moynihan. I loved to read, but I had a weird obsession with outer space at the time. Every Monday and Friday, we would go to the school library and pick out books to read during quiet time. All the other kids picked out books like Harold and the Purple Crayon, while I wanted to read books about Pluto and space asteroids. Some of my classmates had begun to make fun of me—calling me Valentina from Venus, so I switched to books similar to the other kids’, even though I didn’t really enjoy them. Anyway, Mrs. Moynihan noticed, and one day at the library she handed me a book she said she thought I’d like. The outside was a regular, popular kids book, but inside was a book about the solar