Forrest clicked his pen. "So. The summer rollout?—"
Something shifted in my chest.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. More like a lock turning over—the soft, final sound of a mechanism releasing after years of pressure. I looked at my brothers. At the report between us with my work and their names. At the banana bread cooling on the credenza next to the rubber-banded sympathy cards. At the glencairn in my hand, empty, catching pale spring light from the windows.
"I'm going to Charleston," I said.
Both of them looked up.
"For how long?" Wade asked.
"Few weeks. Maybe a month." I heard myself say it with the steadiness of someone who had been planning this for a long time. I hadn't. I'd known for approximately thirty seconds. But the words came out clean and certain because somewhere underneath the days of grief and the quarterly reports and thewe'll keep an eye on it, I'd already made this decision. I just hadn't told myself yet.
"I've been following some research on Atlantic aging. Coastal warehouse conditions, tidal humidity cycles, salt air penetration through barrel stave. There's real science there and nobody inKentucky is taking it seriously. Spring is the right time to go—before the festival season pulls everyone's attention."
Forrest's expression shifted—sharpening the way it did when something had commercial edges worth examining. That was the language that reached him. NotI have been invisible in this building for almost a decade. Notmy name belongs on that patent and you know it. But commercial potential opened a door in him every time.
"Atlantic aging," he said. "You think there's something to it?"
"I think it's worth getting ahead of before someone else does." I set the glencairn down. "I need to visit some coastal operations. Talk to some people. And I'm overdue for personal time."
That last part was true enough.
Wade was already nodding, attention drifting back to his phone. "Take the time, Lou. It's been a hard stretch on all of us."
A hard stretch.
"Keep us posted on what you find," Forrest said—meaning report back so we can decide what to do with it—and I said I would, because that was the easiest thing to say and the one I had the least intention of honoring.
I wrote Charleston on my notepad. Underlined it once.
Then I looked out through the tall windows at the distillery campus—the rick houses standing against the bright sky, the limestone water tower with FENTRESS & SONS in letters you could read from the county road. The barrel yards and the bottling line and every corner of this operation that had some piece of my work in it, unmarked, uncredited, aging quietly in the dark the way good bourbon did.
The way I had.
I didn't know exactly what I was going to build in Charleston. The shape of it was still loose, more feeling than plan. But I knew it the way I knew fermentation chemistry and barrel char levelsand every other truth I'd ever worked out alone in a lab at two in the morning—the kind of knowing that lived in your body before it ever made it to your brain.
Whatever it was, it was going to have my name on it.
2
GRANT
The bar smelled like spilled Lone Star and bad decisions, and I fit right in with both.
One in the morning. A Tuesday, if I was keeping track, and I wasn't sure I was. The flight from D.C. had landed in Dallas six hours ago—cheap enough that I'd bought it the way you buy a scratch-off. Not because you think you'll win, but because you've got nothing better to do with the money. A hundred and twelve dollars and a window seat next to a woman who smelled like vanilla and told me about her cat for the entire descent. I nodded at the right moments. I've been trained to survive worse.
Rented a truck at the counter. Drove south without a destination. Passed through three towns I half-recognized, their names landing the way old songs do—you know the melody but can't remember why it mattered. Kept driving. One town past the one I came from, because going home required something I didn't have in me tonight.
Maybe tomorrow.
Probably not.
The ranch was still there. I knew that. A family named Cuthbert had been running it for eight years now—good people, from what I'd heard. The kind who mended fences before they fell and didn't let the gate hinges rust.
I'd looked it up once, late at night in a plywood bunk in a country I'm not allowed to name, scrolling a satellite image on a phone I wasn't supposed to have. The roofline was the same. The barn wore a fresh coat of red. The paddock where I'd first climbed onto something that wanted to throw me—horses first, then bulls, then anything with a spine and a grudge—was still there, a brown rectangle punched into green.
I'd stared at that image for a long time. Then I'd closed the phone and gone back to work.
