Patrick Stapleton isn’t your typical first-time author.
The 37-year-old is a banquet worker at the five-star Umstead Hotel in Cary, the youngest of five children in a big Irish family, a college English major who, by his own admission, hadn’t quite found his footing in his mid-20s.
But tucked under his arm on a recent afternoon in downtown Cary was something that tells a different story: a copy of his debut novel, The Last “I Love You.”…