"I was married," I said. "I thought I had it. The real thing—the kind that lasts." The words came out stripped. "She put on a good front. Was sweet as cherry pie. Then the sex went away. She said she wasn't wired for it anymore. I believed her—because I loved her, and you believe the people you love, even when believing them means swallowing something that tastes wrong." I paused. "Then I found out about the affair. A guy from her high school. Three blocks from where she grew up. The whole time she was telling me she didn't want it anymore, she was giving it to someone else."
I said it out loud. All of it. And I half-expected her to laugh.
She didn't laugh.
She held my hand. Held my gaze. And the expression on her face wasn't pity—I'd have pulled away from pity. It wasrecognition. The look of someone who understood that damage had a structure, and she was seeing the blueprint.
"Right now," she said, "in this moment, the only person I want to be with is you."
"What if that changes?"
"I can't see the future, Grant. Things happen. People change. I can't promise you that?—"
"That's not good enough."
The words landed between us like something dropped from height. I heard them and knew immediately that they were too heavy for the space they'd fallen into—too much weight, too much need, the sound of a man trying to nail down something that couldn't be nailed because living things didn't survive being pinned.
Louisa's hand was still in mine. But something in her grip shifted.
"What do you want from me?" she asked. Her voice was steady, but I could hear the edge beneath it—the sharp, clean edge of a woman who'd spent her life being told what she was and what she wasn't and had come to Charleston specifically to stop accepting other people's definitions.
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
What did I want? I wanted her. Wanted her the way I'd wanted the buckle at Pendleton—completely, possessively, with the absolute certainty that this thing was mine and I would hold on to it with everything I had. I wanted to know she wasn't going anywhere. Wanted to know that the woman sitting across from me—this brilliant, fierce, bourbon-eyed woman who'd built something in her head that was going to change an industry—wanted me the way I wanted her. Not temporarily. Not provisionally. Not until something better or easier or less damaged came along.
But the words wouldn't form. The thing I wanted to say was tangled up in the thing I was afraid to say, and both of them were wrapped around the thing I didn't know how to say, which was that I wanted to claim her, own her, make her mine.
And I knew—somewhere beneath the tangle, in the part of me that was smarter than my fear—that the wanting itself was the problem. Not because wanting was wrong. Because the way I wanted—the white-knuckle, death-grip, eight-second way—was the thing that had strangled my marriage and driven Rachel into someone else's arms and left me standing in an empty apartment in Minneapolis wondering what I'd done wrong.
Or was it? Had the grip been the problem, or had Rachel simply been the wrong thing to hold? Was the instinct broken, or had I just been aiming it at someone who was never going to hold me back?
I didn't know. I didn't fucking know.
I stood up from the table.
Louisa looked up at me. The expression on her face—I'd remember it for a long time. Not anger. Not hurt. Something worse. The look of a woman who'd been watching something beautiful take shape and had just seen a crack appear in the foundation.
"I have to go," I said. "Work stuff. They need me at—" I didn't finish the sentence because there was nowhere to finish it to. The lie was transparent and we both knew it.
"Grant—"
"I'll call you," I said. Which was what cowards said. Which was what men said when they were running and didn't have the courage to call it what it was.
I left money on the table for the lunch neither of us had finished. Picked up my phone. Walked toward the street with the stride of a man who was covering ground for the purposeof putting distance between himself and a conversation he'd detonated.
Behind me, I could feel her watching. The weight of her attention on my back, the same attention she'd given the warehouse and the rafters and the floor drains—thorough, precise, missing nothing.
I didn't turn around.
The sun was still out. The river was still there. The perfect day was still technically in progress, the blue sky and the salt air and the warm light all doing their jobs as if nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
I walked. Faster now. Not toward Dominion Hall. Not toward the hotel. Just—away. The direction of a man who'd opened something he couldn't close and now needed space to figure out what the hell he'd done.
Fucking Rachel.
No. Not this time. This wasn't Rachel's fault. Rachel was three years and a thousand miles away, and whatever she'd broken in me, I was the one who kept picking at the fracture instead of letting it heal.
