This was my fault. My fear. My grip—too tight, always too tight, the same white-knuckle hold my father had watched me fight with in the corral, the one he'd told me would cost me the ride if I didn't learn to loosen it.
I hadn't learned.
And now I'd walked away from a woman who'd told me I was the best thing that had happened to her in recent memory, because the best thing wasn't enough. Because I needed certainty. Because I needed a guarantee that the world didn't offer and no honest person could give.
What did I want from her?
I wanted everything. And I didn't know how to ask for it without crushing it.
The city moved around me—indifferent, ancient, unhurried. People on the sidewalk. Cars on the street. A church bell somewhere, marking an hour I didn't check.
I had no fucking clue how to be the man she deserved without being the man who destroyed it by holding on too hard.
No fucking clue what to do next.
The only thing I knew—the only clean, certain thing in the wreckage of this perfect afternoon—was that I'd had something rare in my hands, and I'd squeezed, and I'd felt it start to give.
And I didn't know if letting go now would save it or lose it forever.
19
LOUISA
He left money on the table.
I watched him put it down—precise, deliberate, the same care he gave the buckle every night—and then I watched him walk away down the river road with the stride of a man who'd made a decision and was executing it before he could change his mind.
I didn't call after him.
I looked at the money on the table. Two twenties, enough to cover both lunches with change left over, which told me he'd calculated it ahead of the gesture, which told me the walking away had been decided before he stood up. He'd known he was leaving before he said the words. The money was the only honest thing in that last sixty seconds.
I sat with that for a moment.
Then I picked up my sandwich and finished it, because I was hungry and the sandwich was good and letting food go to waste wasn't something I did.
Dennis came back from his calls while I was eating, read the table with the instincts of a man who'd closed enough dealsto know when something had shifted, and said nothing about Grant's absence except to ask if I needed anything. I told him I'd like to see the property one more time before making a decision. He nodded. We went back.
I walked the warehouse alone the second time.
It was the same building. Same ceiling height, same floor drains, same tidal humidity, same northeast-facing loading dock with its views of the service road and the river beyond. Nothing had changed about the building. I walked every inch of it anyway, my notebook open, my pen moving, my boots on the concrete floor making the same sound they always made.
The building was still the one. That hadn't changed either.
I wrote:Proceed with LOI. Engage maritime attorney re: DSP application. Call TTB re: timeline.
Then I wrote:Call Dennis to confirm. Don't wait.
Underneath that, in the slightly different handwriting that arrived when my hand moved faster than my editing brain, I wrote nothing. I held the pen above the page for a moment and then I capped it and closed the notebook.
Dennis dropped me at the Palmetto Rose in the early afternoon. The lobby was cool and quiet, the chandelier doing its low-light work, the marble floors the same pale gleam they always were. Sasha was at the front desk. She gave me the warm, uncomplicated smile of a woman who'd watched me come and go for four days and had decided I was worth smiling at.
I smiled back. Meant it.
Upstairs, I went to Grant's room by reflex—three days of muscle memory pointing me there—and then stopped in the hallway with my hand not quite raised to knock.
I lowered it.
Stood there for a moment.
