What was actually there: a woman who was fine. Who was sad about earlier and clear-eyed about it and not going to pretend either thing away. Who was about to walk through the gates of Dominion Hall because her friend had invited her to dinner and because she was the kind of woman who walked through open doors.
Not because of him.
Not not because of him.
Both things true simultaneously, which was the kind of complexity that only bothered you if you needed the world to be simpler than it was.
I packed a change of clothes in my bag for after yoga. Grabbed my jacket from the hook by the door.
The Charleston evening was warm and gold when I stepped outside, the salt air doing what it always did—sitting on my tongue, thick and mineral and alive, the smell of a coast that had been doing this for longer than anyone could remember. I walked toward the harbor because the Palmetto Rose was between my apartment and Dominion Hall and the route took me past it, which I'd known when I chose the route and didn't examine too closely.
The hotel's brass nameplate caught the evening light as I passed. The gas lanterns were already lit, burning amber in the early dusk. I didn't stop. I kept walking, east along the waterfront, toward the gates I could already see in the distance—wrought iron, black against the pale harbor sky, the live oaks on either side of the drive draping their Spanish moss in the still evening air like something staged for effect.
It wasn't staged. It had looked like this for years. It would look like this long after whatever happened tonight had happened and settled into its permanent shape.
I reached the gate. It opened before I could announce myself—a smooth, automatic swing that said someone had been watching and had decided to let me in.
The drive curved through live oaks toward a massive building that rose at the end of it—stone and glass and the authority of a structure built by people who intended to stay. Not old money. Something newer and more deliberate than that.
I walked toward it.
My shoes made quiet sounds on the gravel.
The evening air smelled like jasmine and salt and something from somewhere inside the property that might have been a grill warming up for dinner.
Somewhere in that building, or on that lawn, or at that patio—Grant Dane was either there or he wasn't, and either way I was going to yoga and dinner and I was going to meet fourteen new women who were apparently a lot like me, and I was going to be fine.
I was already fine.
The door opened before I reached it.
Izzy stood in the frame, blue linen jacket swapped for a soft grey wrap, her dark hair loose, her face doing the thing it did—warm, unhurried, the welcome of a woman who'd been expecting you and was genuinely glad you'd arrived.
"You came," she said.
"I came," I said.
She stepped back and held the door wide.
I walked through.
22
GRANT
The room they'd given me was on the second floor, at the end of a hallway that smelled like fresh paint and old wood—the combination of a building that was being expanded without losing what it had been.
It was simple. Bed, dresser, a window that looked out over the rear grounds toward the water. Clean towels stacked on the chair. A set of clothes folded on the bed—jeans, a grey henley, socks—that were close enough to my size that someone had either guessed well or been told.
I showered. Stood under the water longer than I needed to, the way I'd been doing since Charleston, as if the city had taught my body that showers weren't tactical necessities but something a man was allowed to enjoy. The heat worked the last of the ride out of my shoulders. A good soreness. The kind that meant something had happened.
I dressed in Ethan's clothes—or whoever's they were—and looked at myself in the mirror above the dresser. The man looking back was cleaner than the one who'd arrived earlier but carried the same expression. The expression of a manwho'd promised to stay for dinner and was already constructing reasons to leave.
When was the last time I'd had a family dinner? Not a meal with my unit—that was different, that was camaraderie built on shared risk, the intimacy of men who'd seen each other at their worst and chosen to eat together, anyway. A family dinner. The kind with a table and plates and people who belonged to each other not because they'd chosen to but because the choice had been made for them by blood or love or both.
I couldn't remember. Years. Before Rachel. Before the service, maybe—one of those rare visits home when enough brothers happened to be in the same state, and Mom had still been Mom, and the kitchen had smelled like bread and butter and the warmth of a house that had been lived in hard and loved harder.
That memory ached. I let it.
