But I also wasn't going to close the door.
That was the second thing, softer and more complicated. He'd told me about his wife. He'd saidI've been burned, badwith the stripped honesty of a man who didn't say things easily and had said this one, anyway. That cost something. You didn't pay that cost if you were done. You paid it when you were trying, imperfectly, to show someone enough of yourself that they could decide whether to stay.
He was trying.
Badly. Clumsily. With a grip that was too tight and a need that was too large and a pattern of walking away that was going to have to change if this was going to be anything. But trying.
I opened my notebook. Found a fresh page.
At the top I wrote:What I know.
Underneath:
The warehouse is the one. Proceed.
The TTB application takes four to six months minimum. Start now.
I need to call Forrest. This week.
The sourcing arrangement with Fentress & Sons has to be negotiated as a buyer, not a daughter. Get a lawyer.
I looked at the list. All of it true. All of it actionable. All of it mine.
Then I wrote, smaller, at the bottom of the page:
He's going to have to figure out his own grip.
I looked at that for a moment. Then I wrote underneath it:
But I hope he does.
I closed the notebook.
Outside the window, the courtyard gardenia moved in the breeze—the same slow, unconcerned movement it had been making since I arrived, indifferent to everything that had happened above it. The salt air came through the gap in thewindow and sat on my tongue the way it always did—thick, mineral, alive.
I picked up my phone. Found Dennis in my contacts.
I'd like to move forward with a letter of intent on the warehouse property, I typed. I'll be in touch to discuss terms.
I set the phone down.
Sat in the quiet of the apartment that was mine, in the city I'd chosen, doing the work that had my name on it.
The sadness was still there. It sat in the corner of the room and didn't pretend to be something else, and I didn't ask it to leave. It was honest sadness, the kind that came from wanting something real and watching it complicate itself, and it deserved its space.
But it wasn't the whole room.
Not even close.
20
GRANT
Iwent to Dominion Hall because I didn't know where else to go.
Not the hotel—the hotel was where Louisa's absence would be loudest, the empty side of the bed, the bourbon glass she'd left on the nightstand. Not the city—the city was her now, every street a reminder.
Dominion Hall was the only place in Charleston that didn't have her fingerprints on it. The only place where the conversation was about mission, about structure, about the things I understood instead of the things I didn't.
