She set down her sandwich. Not because the question required formality—because the answer did. She shifted into that mode I'd come to recognize, the one where her eyes went slightly distant and her voice took on the cadence of someone building something in her head and describing it in real time.
"The main floor is a good size. The ceiling height is adequate for racking—I'd want twelve-foot ceilings minimum for a three-high barrel rick, and those joists give me fourteen. The loading dock is oriented northeast, which means the afternoon sun hits the west wall, and that thermal differential is useful—it creates a natural convection cycle inside the building that I can augment with controlled ventilation." She paused, took a breath. "The floor drains are positioned correctly for a wet operation. The electrical panel is undersized, but that's a straightforward upgrade. The proximity to the river gives me the tidal humidity variation I need, and the fact that it's bonded-warehouse eligible under South Carolina's DSP geography means I can file the TTB application using this address."
She looked at me. Her eyes were bright—not with excitement, exactly. With certainty. The glow of a person who'dbeen carrying something hypothetical for a long time and had just found the place where it became real.
"I can see it," she said. "The barrel ricks along the east wall. The lab space in the back, where the light is consistent. The tasting room near the loading dock—you'd open it up, let the river air in, let people taste what this coast does to bourbon while they're standing in the place where it happens." She paused. "It's the one, Grant. This is the building."
I looked at her across the picnic table—this woman who'd driven here from Kentucky with two suitcases and a notebook and a wound she was turning into a weapon—and felt something I hadn't felt in a very long time.
Admiration. The real kind. Not the distant appreciation of competence, but the personal marveling at someone who saw what they wanted and moved toward it with the kind of clarity most people spent their whole lives looking for.
"It's a good building," I said.
She smiled. "It's a great building."
Then she turned the topic the way she turned everything—cleanly, without warning, like someone who didn't believe in transitions because transitions wasted time.
"How's the job hunting going?"
That was what I'd told her. That I was in Charleston exploring a job opportunity. Doing due diligence. It was true enough—true in the way that the best covers were true, which was to say it contained no lies and omitted most of the story. She hadn't pushed for details and I hadn't offered them, and the arrangement had held for four days with the unspoken agreement that some things would be shared when they were ready and not before.
"Good," I said. "Better than good, actually. The mission is—" I paused, choosing words the way I chose footholds on uncertain ground. "It's the kind of work I've been looking forwithout knowing I was looking for it. The people are serious. The resources are real. And Charleston is?—"
"Growing on you," she finished.
"Yeah." I looked at the river. "Growing on me."
We talked about that for a while. What living in Charleston might look like—not together, neither of us had said that word, but in the same city, which was its own kind of conversation. She described the neighborhoods she'd walked. I described the waterfront near Dominion Hall, the view from the bluff, the harbor at different hours. We talked about it the way two people talked about a place they were both starting to imagine themselves in, circling the idea of permanence without landing on it directly.
Then I cut in.
"What is this to you?"
The words came out sharper than I'd planned. Almost blurted—the kind of thing that happens when something's been sitting in your chest for days and the pressure finally exceeds the container's capacity.
Louisa looked at me. The brightness from the warehouse tour was still in her eyes, but something else had entered—a caution, subtle, the kind that appeared in intelligent people when they sensed the ground shifting beneath a conversation.
"Do you mean the two of us?" she asked.
"Yes."
She reached across the table and took my hand. Her grip was warm, firm, deliberate—the grip of a woman who didn't do things accidentally.
"It's the best thing that's happened to me in recent memory," she said. Simply. Without decoration. The way the truest things got said.
I should have let it land. Should have sat with it the way I'd sat with the bourbon in the lounge and the silence in the car andall the other good things this woman had given me. Should have let the words be enough.
I pressed.
"I need to know," I said.
Something shifted in her eyes. The caution deepening—not into alarm, not yet, but into the focused attention of someone who'd just realized this conversation was going somewhere she hadn't mapped.
"What are you really asking, Grant?"
It was time to tell her. Not everything—not the full architecture of the damage, not the forensic detail. But something. Enough for her to understand why the question wasn't casual, why the need behind it had edges.
"I've been burned," I said. "Bad." I looked at the table. At our hands. At the way her fingers laced through mine like they belonged there, which was the whole problem—they felt like they belonged there, and the last time something had felt like it belonged, it had been ripped away so completely that the phantom pain still woke me at night.
