The Change Up Read Free Page A

the back of his neck rose. “I thought all your projects were in Philly these days.”
    “They are. Technically this is …” She hesitated. “My father’s project.”
    The baseball team.
Sam slipped the tips of his fingers into his blue-jean pockets and nodded slowly, adopting the devil-may-care attitude he’d perfected since walking away from a Chicago Cubs affiliate team ten years ago. But his insides twisted. And that was before he noticed the Allen Tree Cutting logo on Wes’s truck.
    “How’s Luke?” Rachel asked.
    “Married.”
    A wicked little smile tipped her ruby lips. “Better him than me.”
    Absolutely. Sam’s older brother was working for the family landscaping business and expecting his third child with Mandy. It was a simple, happy life. The kind of life their mother had wanted for both of them. The kind of life Luke never would’ve had with Miss High-Achiever here, living in some sterile Philadelphia condo surrounded by smog and cement.
    Rachel had never been right for Luke. Sam’s thoughts flashed back to the summer before eighth grade, Luke’s senior year of high school. At the Sutter family’s Labor Day picnic, Luke had sat on a picnic table bench making goofy eyes at Rachel all day instead of playing Wiffle Ball with the rest of them. They’d been just as nauseating together that whole year, much to Sam’s chagrin, with his brother following Rachel around like a lapdog. Until the next Labor Day, when she’d dumped Luke the night before she left for college. Rachel Reed had made it clear she was heading places, and Luke was no longer good enough to bask in her shadow.
    Looking at her through the lens of twenty years, Sam found the woman to be just as beautiful and just as irritating as ever. Stomping all over his clearing, eyeing up his trees like she owned the place.
    “Well, I don’t want to keep you from your Sunday morning,” she said, her tone clearly dismissive. “It was nice seeing you. Tell Luke I said hello.” Again with that uppity smile.
    This was the part where Sam should have politely told Rachel it was nice to see her, too, then gone on his merry way. But a warbler sounded overhead and settled a few branches above the truck.
    Listen to the birds
, his mother used to say.
They know when something’s up.
Of course, she’d been talking about the weather, but still … it stuck with him. Sort of took on new meaning today.
    Sam glanced at that damn logo on the truck again, and he couldn’t stop himself. “You’re not planning on cutting down these trees are you?”
    “Just a little fact-finding mission,” she said. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
    He found it hard to believe anyone needed a bulldozer on a fact-finding mission. “Some of these trees are more than two hundred years old.”
    “Some of these trees are impeding a parking lot expansion.”
    He scoffed. Damn city people and their concrete jungle obsession. “Some of these trees are on my property.” But for the life of him he couldn’t remember exactly where the property line ended. He also couldn’t recall a damn thing about zoning ordinances and setbacks.
    The warbler squawked again.
    “I know exactly where your trees start and end,” she said confidently. He didn’t trust her, and that was before she tilted her head and regarded him through narrowed eyes. “You, of all people, must be excited about my father bringing professional baseball to Arlington.”
    Here we go.
Sam shrugged. “I don’t really follow baseball these days.”
    “That’s a shame. Sam used to play for the …” She looked from Wes back to Sam. “The Cubs, right?”
    Sam nodded once and added, “Never made it out of the minors.” Why sugarcoat it? Chasing “the bigs” in a rusty bus, believing he was the next big thing, had caused him to miss out on a lot of things. He was still trying to make up for some of them.
    Again he thought of his mother, and this time the guilt was almost too much to swallow.
    “What