GRANT
We went back to the patio.
The dinner had shifted in our absence—the communal energy loosening, the way gatherings did when the peak had passed and the evening was settling into its final, slower movement. The candles had burned lower. The food was mostly cleared, the chef's platters replaced by the debris of a meal well-eaten.
Louisa was where I'd left her. Not exactly—she'd moved to a different seat, one of the deep Adirondack chairs facing the harbor, a drink in her hand, her bare feet tucked underneath her. She was talking to Izzy and Sophie—the three of them in the configuration of women who'd found something in each other's company worth staying for.
When I came through the French doors, Louisa's eyes found me before I'd cleared the threshold.
She didn't get up. Didn't cross the patio. Didn't ask.
She just looked at me. The full, steady look I was learning to read the way I read terrain—for what was underneath it, for what it told me about the ground I was standing on.
I went to her. Pulled a chair close. Sat down.
She didn't ask what happened. Didn't push. Didn't fill the space with the questions I could see behind her eyes—I knew they were there, knew she was carrying curiosity the way she carried everything, precisely, with the awareness that timing mattered as much as content.
She'd tell me when to talk. Or I'd tell her. Either way, it would happen on a clock that belonged to us, not to the evening.
For now, she handed me her bourbon. I took a sip. Handed it back. The exchange was wordless and complete, the intimacy of sharing a glass without negotiating it.
Wyatt and Sophie had settled in together. He had his arm around her. She leaned into it. They looked—right. The rightness of two people who'd found each other in the middle of something complicated and had decided the complication was worth it.
I watched them and thought about everything my brother had told me. The brothers. The scale. The father I'd grieved who was breathing somewhere in this building, or close to it, alive and unvisited and waiting for a son who hadn't known there was a visit to make.
It sat on me. Heavy. Not the crushing kind—I'd carried crushing before, and this wasn't that. This was the weight of something that had to be processed, integrated, given a place in the architecture of a life that had been reorganized twice in one evening—first by Louisa on the walk to the water, then by Wyatt in the salon with the stolen tequila.
One by one, the couples began to leave.
Charlie and the tall blonde went first, his arm draped over her shoulders, her laugh carrying back across the lawn as they disappeared around the side of the building. Marcus and Claire followed—she was carrying a bottle of something she'd apparently claimed from the bar, and he was watching her carryit with the expression of a man who'd learned that some battles weren't worth fighting and this one might even be entertaining.
Ryker and Izzy left quietly. No announcement. Just a shared glance, a nod, and then they were gone—two people who communicated in a frequency that didn't require words. Izzy caught Louisa's eye on the way out and did something with her face that I missed but that made Louisa smile.
The others drifted in pairs and small groups—yawning, laughing, taking their time, the unhurried departure of people who'd be back at this table tomorrow and the night after that and the night after that. This was just another dinner. Another evening in a life that had room for evenings.
Ethan was one of the last to go. He stopped by my chair, put a hand on my shoulder—brief, firm, the kind of contact that said more than a conversation—and looked at me for a beat.
"You good?" he asked.
"Getting there," I said. Which was the truth, or close enough to it.
He nodded. Squeezed once. Then he walked toward the stables, because, of course, he did—Flapjack was in there, and Ethan Dane said goodnight to his horse before he said goodnight to anyone else. I understood that now.
The patio emptied. The candles guttered. The harbor stretched dark and patient beyond the marsh grass, the same harbor that had been there before any of this—before the dinner, before the brothers, before the truth—and would be there after, unchanged, indifferent, doing what water did.
Louisa and I sat in the quiet.
I was trying to hold the evening. All of it—the food and the laughter and the brothers I hadn't known were mine and the father who was alive and the woman beside me whose bare feet were tucked under her and whose bourbon glass was nearlyempty and whose presence was the only thing keeping the weight from becoming something I couldn't carry tonight.
Everything Wyatt had told me was pressing. Not debilitating. Not the collapse I might have expected a week ago, before Charleston. The foundation was stronger now. Louisa had helped build it. Ethan had helped build it. Valentine, the horse, had helped build it in his own four-legged, opinionated way.
But the questions. The questions were enormous. What would I say to a father I'd grieved? How did you greet a ghost who turned out to be a man? Did you shake his hand? Hug him? Hit him? Ask him why he'd left a wife and sons to build a shadow empire in other cities while the people who loved him learned to live without him?
What the hell is going to happen now?
I didn't know. Couldn't see far enough ahead to know. The only thing I could see was tonight—this patio, this chair, this woman.
"Time to go to bed," Louisa said.
