“Terrible. I know.” He was almost smiling. Almost. “Shane says my eggs are a crime against protein. Destry once tried to stage an intervention.”
“They’re not terrible.”
“You don’t have to be polite. You’re grieving, not delusional.”
I laughed. It came out broken and surprised and wrong—too soon, too much, a sound that didn’t match the weight in my chest—and I immediately felt guilty for it. For laughing in a kitchen twenty hours after Sarah died. For sitting on a stool eating mediocre eggs and thinking, against every rational impulse, that there was something painfully sweet about a billionaire who couldn’t cook making me breakfast anyway.
Asher watched me laugh and then watched me catch myself and then turned back to the stove and poured more coffee like he understood exactly what had just happened and was choosing not to make it bigger than it needed to be.
He didn’t ask about Sarah. He talked about the mountains.
“Destry tried to ski Aspen Highlands his first time out here,” he said, leaning against the counter with his own coffee. “He’d never been on skis. Showed up from New York in jeans and boat shoes and announced he was going to do a black diamond because—and I’m quoting—‘I have excellent proprioception.’”
“Did he?”
“He made it approximately forty feet before taking out a seven-year-old, a ski instructor, and a trash can. The trash can was the most dignified part. They had to bring him down on a sled. He sprained both wrists and spent the rest of the trip dictating emails to Shane, who charged him fifty dollars per email and donated it all to a ski patrol charity.”
I was eating my mediocre eggs and watching snow drift past those enormous windows and listening to Asher Pierce tell a story about his brother with the kind of reluctant affection that only siblings could pull off. And something in me exhaled. Notthe grief—that was still there, a permanent resident now, taking up space. But the tightness around it loosened just enough to let me breathe.
He was doing it on purpose. I realized that halfway through the eggs. Talking about mountains and brothers and Shane’s entrepreneurial instincts because he understood that grief needed air around it—that you couldn’t sit in the center of it every second or it would eat you alive. He was making space for me to be something other than destroyed, even if just for the length of a breakfast.
That was when he said it. Casual. Like he’d been thinking about it and had only now found the opening.
“Do you prefer Charlotte?”
I set my fork down.
“I’ve heard Richard use it,” he said. “In the lab. On the project calls.”
Richard. My project manager. The one who called me Charlotte with the careful enunciation of a man who wanted you to know he’d read your full file. I’d never corrected him. Not once in ten years.
“No,” I said. “I don’t prefer Charlotte.”
He waited. Not pushing. Just holding the space open the way he’d been doing all morning—offering room without demanding I fill it.
“Charlotte is ...” I turned my coffee mug on the counter. Traced the rim with my thumb. “It’s what my mother called me when she was serious. When I was in trouble, or when she needed me to listen. ‘Charlotte Grace, you get up.’” The words caught in my throat. I’d heard her voice say them last night, on the floor, in the dark. “It’s personal. It belongs to her. I don’t let people use it because?—”
I stopped. Took a breath.
“Because he doesn’t get to have that,” I said. “Richard doesn’t get to use the name my mother used. He hasn’t earned it.”
Asher nodded. Once. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
He’d been calling me Charlie since the bar in San Diego. The first night, before the project, before Roatan, before any of this. He’d said what’s your name, and I’d said Charlie and he’d never once used anything else—not in the boardroom, not in the Ms. Winters weeks, not once. Unlike Richard, who’d called me Charlotte for ten years no matter how many times I’d corrected him. Asher had called me the name I chose before he knew anything else about me.
He hadn’t needed to be told.
I picked up my fork and went back to the eggs and didn’t say any of that out loud because some things were better left where they were—quiet, observed, stored in the part of your brain that was building a case for something your rational mind wasn’t ready to hear.
After breakfast, he showed me the house. Not formally—not the way a realtor would, pointing out crown molding and square footage. He just moved through the space and let me follow, and I saw it through the lens of the person who lived in it.
The living room with its stone fireplace and leather chairs and the kind of silence that said no one had ever played music here. A study off the main hall with a desk facing the mountains and a laptop and a stack of reports and nothing on the walls except one framed photograph that I could see from the doorway was Asher with two other men—Destry and Shane, probably, though I couldn’t tell from here. The only photograph in the house.
A library. An actual library, with built-in shelves and a reading chair and a window seat that looked out onto a stand of aspens, their bare winter branches scratching the glass like theywanted in. The books were real—not the decorative kind, not chosen by a designer. Engineering texts, biographies, a shelf of paperback thrillers with cracked spines. I ran my fingers along them as I passed.
The kitchen I’d already seen. A dining room that was technically part of the same space, with that long table and twelve chairs and a sense of emptiness that was less about absence and more about waiting. Like the room had been designed for a life that hadn’t happened yet.
I could picture a lot of things in this house—the Christmas with Destry, the years of solitary evenings by the fire—and every picture made me ache.
