When the silence was finally solid, he turned from the window, set his glass down on the desk and looked at his hands.
She'd taken it.
God-fucking-dammit.
He'd watched it happen from across the room and hadn't been able to get to her in time without making a scene that would have cost him more than the alternative. And so he'd stood there with a conversation happening around him that he'd answered on reflex, muscle memory of thirteen years of being the man in the room who didn't react, and he'd watched Hargrove close her fingers around that gold piece of shit and smile.
Hargrove. Seventy-one years old, three houses and an island — money so old it had stopped having a number attached to it.
He had been coming to these things for fifteen years. Had acquired — that was the word they used,acquired— two women through this particular arrangement in that time, both of them young, both of them gone from public record within six months of leaving Louisiana.
Judah picked up his bourbon. Set it back down without drinking.
The bidding had opened the moment she pinned it to her dress. That was the custom — theater, all of it, a performance of civility draped over something that had no civility in it anywhere. Three men had expressed interest before Judah had made his way to Hargrove and said, very quietly, what he needed to say. Hargrove had smiled the smile of a man who understood leverage and said that the girl seemed to have made her own choice, hadn't she. The charm was hers, freely given.
Judah had looked at him for a moment, and with complete seriousness, had contemplated killing him.
Then he'd named a number.
Not because it was the right thing. Not because it made him something other than what he was — a man paying into the same system he maintained, using the same currency, sitting at the same table. He knew what it made him. He'd known since he was nineteen years old what the family business made him and he'd made his peace with a heavy ledger.
But she didn't know the room she'd walked into. That was on him. He'd brought her here — into this house, into this company, into a room full of men who looked at young women the way his grandfather had looked at cargo — and he hadn't told her the rules because telling her the rules meant telling her everything, and he wasn't ready for that yet.
Wasn't ready.
He almost laughed at himself.
He should’ve told her not to accept any gifts.
Should’ve.
He went to the window again. The drive was empty. The oaks were dark shapes against a darker sky, the moss hanging dead-still in the airless heat.
Somewhere across town, in a small apartment above the food bank, she was looking at a gold cherry in the palm of her fragile little hand and trying to figure out what it meant.
He hoped she didn't figure it out tonight.
He needed one more night of her not knowing.
The bakery was called Sucré, which was either charming or pretentious depending on your mood, and my mood on Monday morning was somewhere in the middle.
I'd been up since five. Not insomnia exactly, more like my body had decided sleep was not a serious requirement for the human condition. I'd lain in the dark for an hour listening to theceiling fan and thinking about a room full of people I didn't know and a gold charm I couldn't throw away. Minutes had passed, then turned into hours, and at one point I had given up.
I got up, got dressed and told myself that if God decided I had to be awake, then it meant I must be productive. So, I decided to run errands. Only when that decision came to me, it was still 05:47 in the morning.
Errands weren’t awake at 05:47 in the morning.
So I waited. Made coffee, opened the fridge, saw nothing that could be swallowed without preparation, and closed it.
Sat down. Watched the Spanish moss behind the window.
At 07:25 I left the apartment because I couldn’t take it anymore.
The charm was in my pocket. I'd put it there, not really knowingwhereto put it.
Main Street was quiet at seven-thirty. Thibodaux Senior was yawning while unlocking his front door. Two women I recognized from the congregation were walking with an active pep in their step past us all — waving their hiking poles with enthusiasm I couldn’t understand. And the heat — theheat— turned out was an early riser — already there, sitting on everything like a cheap voyeur.
I had a list. Coffee (because the first one hadn’t been enough), drop off the August volunteer schedule at the printer, pick up the donation envelopes Darlene had ordered three weeks ago and forgotten about. Ordinary Monday things.
