Page 195 of The Havenport Collection

Luke

I ran my hands through my hair. This meeting was endless.

“I think if we review the budget projections next week we’ll be in a good position to start making decisions on some of these plans.

” Astrid sounded totally calm, but I knew that look.

She was teetering on the edge, and I assumed she would be logging out of this meeting sooner rather than later.

Things were challenging right now for the Havenport Family Crisis Center.

Loss of some federal grant money plus rising costs and delayed maintenance on some facilities meant the organization was scrambling for solutions.

As the board of directors, it was our job to find a way to make things work.

“Agreed. But we need the subcommittees to report their recommendations first,” Erica, the CEO argued.

She was gearing up for another one of her epic rants about process; I could feel it.

Erica was an alpha wolf in a pink flannel shirt.

A tiny woman in her forties, she had a PhD in social work and had been running the crisis center for almost a decade.

She was fiercely protective of her community and her clients and constantly demanded the best of the board.

She was a close friend and I adored her, but it was late, and around hour two, this meeting had morphed from productive to painful.

The other board members looked equally spent in the tiny zoom windows on my laptop. Barry, our finance director, was slumped over in his chair. I needed to wrap this up and fast.

“I think we need to regroup,” I offered, watching the faces of my colleagues perk up on the screen, “and come back next week fresh. We all know what we have to do, and this way the facilities committee can get their numbers together.”

After logging off, I threw my headset on the desk and started to pace. I knew I only had a few seconds before my phone started ringing again.

“Astrid,” I said, picking up on the first ring.

“That was painful.” She exhaled. I could hear Declan grumbling in the background.

“Let me guess, Declan made you an amazing dinner and you’re talking to me instead of eating it?

” Astrid had moved to town last year and fallen madly in love with Declan Quinn, a local fisherman.

They had the kind of intense connection that I had previously believed existed only in movies or on the pages of the romance novels my mom loved to read.

It was nights like this I felt lonely and unmoored.

Although I had resigned myself to being alone, sometimes the hope snuck up on me when my defenses were down.

What would it be like to have someone to come home to?

To eat dinner with and snuggle up on the couch with?

If I had to attend a charity event or high-profile awards ceremony, I could procure a date in minutes.

All I had to do was ask my assistant, Jude, to call one of the women I routinely dated when I had the time and inclination.

But while these women were more than thrilled to be seen on my arm and photographed in New York, they were not interested in couch cuddles in Havenport.

“Something like that,” Astrid replied. “Anyway. I don’t want to postmortem that meeting. It sucked. I just wanted to remind you that we have the meeting with EdStart tomorrow at noon. Did you review the contracts I sent over?”

I had not. Astrid had a habit of sending me lots and lots of documents, some of which I forgot to read. “I have them right here,” I lied. “I plan to read through everything tonight.”

“Okay, good. I am really excited about this. But don’t worry, I intend to hammer them on some of the details tomorrow.”

I smiled. I had no doubt. In addition to serving with me on the board of the crisis center, Astrid was my attorney slash attack dog.

She helped me manage all my personal business, and I didn’t sign so much as a birthday card without her approval.

I was in the process of investing in EdStart, a gaming startup that was developing apps to help kids with learning disabilities.

It was one of the newest ventures I was backing, and we were still working out the details.

“Go eat dinner with your loving boyfriend,” I said, my stomach grumbling.

“Fine. Fine. But read those documents. And for Christ’s sake, please shave and put on a decent shirt for the meeting tomorrow.”

In theory, I should have moved back to the West Coast by now.

All of my business was in Silicon Valley, and I had a great place in Palo Alto.

I used to travel around all year between my homes with a few work trips sprinkled in.

But since I lost my mom two years ago, every time I even entertained the idea of leaving Havenport, I felt sick to my stomach.

For better or worse, this place was my home, and the community here had become my family.

I checked my phone again, scrolling through texts from my friend, James. We met in college and went to Silicon Valley together. He was my roommate, business partner, and best friend for a decade, but I hadn’t seen him in a while.

He was happily married, living in New York doing all kinds of important things. Mostly we just texted each other funny memes. My finger hovered over the button to call him. I missed him, and he was always the friend to give me tough love when I needed it.

And I definitely needed it right now.

I had been pulling away from everyone and everything since my mom died. I was becoming more and more of a hermit every day, living in the brownstone, spending all my time in Havenport, and pulling away from my old friends.

I was lonely. And restless. A terrible combination.

But I pushed those thoughts from my mind.

There was no use thinking about what I didn’t have when I had been blessed with so much.

I just needed a meal and a good night’s sleep and everything would be fine.

It was moments like these when my mind started to wander to a certain brunette.

I shook my head. I couldn’t fall down the Nora rabbit hole tonight.

I had wasted way too much time and energy thinking about her.

But there was just so much to contemplate.

From her full, pouty lips to her barbed-wire tongue, Nora was complex and exhilarating.

As much as I knew it was healthy to stay far away from her, I couldn’t help seeking her out.

When I was around her I felt alive and awake, and it had been so long since I felt that way.

Between her beauty and her insults, spending time with her was an extreme sport, and I was fast becoming a junkie.

And of course, I couldn’t even think about Nora without reliving our hot and heavy make-out session a few months back.

Even months later, I got hard every time I thought about her taste, her smell, and the way she melted into me.

I had always known there was some serious chemistry behind our mutual dislike, but I had not anticipated the volcanic heat that lay just below the surface.

My stomach grumbled, bringing me out of my Nora-induced stupor and back to reality.

I grabbed a Binnacle IPA from the fridge before settling on a frozen pizza.

Not the best option, but I was starving and still had work to do.

My mother would be appalled. She raised me to value and cherish good food and the work that went into preparing it.

I could hear her now, scolding me to get out the rice cooker and make a proper meal.

I glanced at the shelf above the sink; it held many cookbooks from the world’s greatest chefs and one small yellow notebook.

That was where my mother wrote down all her recipes, if you could call them that.

She didn’t much care for precision or measurements, so it was more an ingredient list for all my favorite traditional Korean dishes.

Since she died, I had been feeling the loss of my Korean identity every day.

Without her, I had no tether to the culture that was such an essential part of my childhood.

I had barely kept in touch with our family in Boston, and had not been back to visit the extended family in Seoul.

Over time, I had lost touch with my AAPI friends from college as well.

While my language skills remained decent due to my love of K-dramas on Netflix, I was far from fluent anymore.

I was adrift, not quite American and not quite Korean.

I was rummaging around for an oven mitt—I knew there was one somewhere—when I pulled out a faded yellow one with butterflies on it and smiled.

Classic mom. She went through a butterfly phase and bought a ton of butterfly stuff for our apartment when I was little.

I remember protesting that the butterfly shower curtain wasn’t manly enough and her chiding me that I was only nine, and real men didn’t talk back to their mothers.

We had lived in a series of shitty apartments, but my mother always managed to make our homes cheery and inviting.

Min- Ji Kim was a tough woman, but she had this superhuman ability to make things better, brighter, and more fun.

It was one of her superpowers. Self-pity was never allowed in our house.

If there was a problem, we solved it and then ate a good meal when we were finished.

No matter how bad things got for us, no matter how much we struggled, she remained grateful and never let me forget just how lucky we were.

I squeezed the oven mitt to my chest; she had been gone for almost two years and I still missed her so much.

It was one of the reasons I stayed here, in her house.

Because there were so many memories of her floating around, and I couldn’t let them go.

At some point I would have to deal with the fact that I was living here instead of the estate I had bought and renovated across town, but tonight I was just going to zone out and eat my pizza.