He kissed my temple. My cheek. The corner of my mouth.
"Okay," he said. "Soon."
"Soon," I agreed.
We sat on the bench above the harbor, the morning moving around us—the oaks and the Spanish moss and the salt air and the water doing its ancient, indifferent work below—and I thought about the warehouse on the Neck and the name I'd said twice last night with the same conviction.
Louisa Fentress Coastal Reserve.
My name. On the bottle. Real and coming and mine.
And this man. Also real. Also, incrementally, mine.
I was staying in Charleston.
Everything else—the brothers, the patent, the sourcing negotiation, the conversations Grant still needed to have and the things he hadn't told me yet—all of it was still there, patient and waiting, the way complicated things waited when you'd decided not to run from them.
But right now, on this bench, in this morning, I was just here.
That was enough.
That was everything.
28
GRANT
We went back to the main house because I was hungry again.
Louisa gave me the look—the one that was half amusement, half scientific curiosity, the expression of a woman who'd spent her career studying processes and had apparently decided my metabolism was worth observing.
"You just ate," she said.
"That was an hour ago."
"It was forty minutes."
"Forty minutes is a long time."
She shook her head but she was smiling, and the smile did the thing it always did, which was make me forget, briefly, that the world was complicated and full of things I hadn't figured out yet. In the presence of that smile, the only thing I needed to figure out was whether there was more bacon.
There was.
The kitchen at Dominion Hall in the mid-morning had the warm, settled energy of a place that expected to feed people in waves and had organized itself accordingly. The younger chef—I'd learned her name was Petra, a quiet woman with fast hands and an instinct for anticipating what people wanted before they asked—had a second round of eggs going before I'd fully sat down. Toast appeared. Coffee refilled itself. Bacon materialized as if summoned by the sheer force of want.
I ate with the efficiency that Louisa had stopped commenting on and started simply watching, the way you watched a natural phenomenon you'd accepted you couldn't change.
Then the brothers started arriving.
Ethan came first—freshly showered, smelling like soap and stable, which was apparently his permanent baseline. He nodded at me, nodded at Louisa, sat down, and began eating with the same mechanical thoroughness I'd been demonstrating. Two eggs became four. Toast became a stack. The bacon plate, which Petra had filled with apparent optimism, began to diminish at a rate that suggested she'd underestimated the situation.
Marcus appeared next. Then Charlie. Ryker. Then Noah, who was quieter than the others but ate with the same intensity, the silent commitment of a man fueling a machine that ran on a higher octane than civilian life required.
Louisa watched all of it from her stool at the island, her coffee in both hands, her eyes moving between the men with an expression that started as amusement and built toward something closer to disbelief.
"Is this—normal?" she asked, looking at Petra.
Petra didn't look up from the eggs she was already cracking for the next wave. "Every morning. I budget for twelve dozen."
