“But back to the question at hand,” Aunt Liz insisted.
Norah felt a prickle of annoyance. They meant well, all of them. But this wasn’t a topic of conversation she really wanted to deal with right now. It was ruining her lovely high from the day’s success. Wanting to stay and being able to stay were two entirely different things, and she lived in the real world. “I am a marketing executive. And Wishful doesn’t have much need of that.” God knew, she didn’t have the energy to contemplate a total career change, even if she wanted one.
“How big a geographic area does metro Chicago cover?” Mitch asked.
“I don’t have a clue. Why?”
Mitch googled it from his phone. “Nearly 5500 square kilometers. That’s something like 3400 square miles.”
“Okay.” If there was a point, she was missing it.
“It’s got a relative population density of about nine and a half million people,” Reed added.
“And if I were half awake, I could probably give you an arm-long list of entertaining factoids about it. I still don’t see where you’re going with this.”
“My point is that’s a lot of physical territory, and it includes a lot of communities. And I know for a fact your firm did work outside the city.”
“So?” Still baffled, Norah wondered what she was missing with her sleep deprived brain.
Cam slid a hand beneath the fall of her hair to rub at the knots left by the hours of painting and hauling. “I think the point he’s making is that just because Wishful is only five thousand people, there are a lot more towns in the area. It isn’t the sort of population density of Chicago, but—well, to use the same argument GrandGoods is using to base a store here, you’ve got a few hundred thousand people in an hour and a half radius. A whole lot of them are business owners. If you opened your own firm here as a home base, there’s nothing stopping you from reaching out to them.”
“Or from reaching out further than that online,” Miranda added. “You’re good with web work. I’m sure there are all sorts of potential clients you wouldn’t necessarily need to meet with in person. For stuff like that, it wouldn’t matter where you were based. And there’s no rule that says you can’t travel to meet somebody if you needed to. You did that with Helios all the time.”
Feeling hemmed in, Norah struggled to find patience and a rational argument that they’d accept. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the capital to start her own firm. But money wasn’t the only consideration. She had the will-power and the know-how but absolutely no reputation to speak of outside world she’d walked away from. There was no way to do what she’d done before. There wouldn’t be the epic corporate accounts, the fast-paced, high-powered everything without the glowing recommendation of Philip Vargas.
But had she missed any of that since she came to Wishful? Had she once given thought to her corner office or the intra-office politics that had been so much a part of the game that kind of career demanded? She certainly didn’t miss Chicago itself. For all that most of her life had been spent in big cities, she appreciated the slower pace of small towns. And she appreciated the people, the personal, the messy community ties she’d found in Wishful. All the things her colleagues would’ve been scrambling to esca
pe, she actually liked. She loved that people here knew her name and gave a damn about her personal life—even if that was mostly as a source of good-natured gossip—because they wouldn’t ask if they didn’t care, if they didn’t feel that in some small way, she was one of theirs.
Norah had wanted that all her life.
But the question of whether she’d be happy in Wishful wasn’t actually at issue. No, the question was whether she could be successful in Wishful. They’d made strides, begun to implement changes that would, over time, help keep the town afloat. But afloat was a long way from financially viable as a business location. It wasn’t that she was looking to replicate her six figure salary. The cost of living in Mississippi was the lowest in the country. But she had serious doubts about whether there was sufficient business, even in that hour and a half radius, to make a marketing firm, even one with a payroll of just her, sustainable. They needed to make the town sustainable first.
Don’t you want a piece of that? Don’t you want to save this place every bit as much as Cam? Who better to spearhead that movement than you?
So maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea. It would be hard work. Harder even than she’d put in on this anti-GrandGoods campaign. But if she could pull it off…
“I couldn’t even begin to think about something that risky without conducting a market analysis, assessing what competition there is in the area, what the best means of reaching people here would be. Then there’d be the issue of the legalities of starting my own company—”
“That’s easy enough,” Uncle Pete said. “Got all the information on that right here.” He tapped a manila envelope on the end table.
Before she could even ask why he had all that pulled together, Mitch jumped in. “You’d need office space. I’ve been giving some thought to that, actually.” Pulling out his digital tablet, he opened some files and handed it over.
The image on the screen was dark, dusty, and loaded with boxes.
“What am I looking at?”
“Is that the old train depot?” Cam asked.
“Yep. It hasn’t been used for anything but storage for…man, I don’t know. Twenty years. But—” Mitch leaned over and swiped to the next image. “—it has potential.”
The concept was fabulous. It retained the historic character of the exposed brick, the struts and beams. But he’d opened the walls, replaced some of the windows to let in the light. There were offices, three of them, divided by glass walls, so as not to block the light, and a small conference room, in addition to a comfortable waiting area for greeting clients. Another swipe revealed the interior of the largest office. Of all of them, Mitch was the only one who’d seen that corner office she’d left behind. He knew how she liked to work and had taken that into account, adding a massive corkboard wall on one side and a giant freestanding glass board on the other for brainstorming. The third wall opened up into a huge picture window overlooking the town green.
Her stomach tied itself in knots of slippery, professional lust. She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry, Mitch.”
“Sorry?”
“I’m not going to change my mind and marry you just because you designed my dream office. It was a valiant effort, though.”