I didn’t mind it.
Fox suits me better than Archibald ever did, which was my grandfather’s name—may he rest in peace—which is the only reason I have it.
Grandpa believed that legacy was the highest form of love—that giving a child your name, your blood, your history—was worth more than affection, which, according to him, was both imprecise and unreliable.
“Fox?”
I look at Percy as he draws me back from my meandering thoughts.
I have taken to ruminating about the meaning of life—my life, to be more precise—these past few months, and Percy, who knows me better sometimes than I know myself, is aware of the reason and not happy about the direction I intend to take.
Percy and I co-own an event management company, which we started right after we graduated from university.
“What?” I ask patiently.
He shakes his head. “You know what?”
We’ve been friends forever, which means he has seen most versions of me, has formed opinions about all of them, and is not particularly shy about sharing them, which is either his most valuable quality or his most exhausting one, depending on the day.
“Can we not discuss this?”
I know that’s a failing battle because when Percy Hale is involved—he arrives early, stays late, and treats certain conversations like they might become important later, which they do. This is one of them.
“No.” He leans back in his chair, watching me the way he watches everything—like he’s cataloguing it, filing it away. Percy is the only person I know who takes handwritten notes in the margins of his own memories.
“She came by my place last week.” He steeples his hands. “Because you told her I wasn’t well.”
I rub a hand over my face. He’s talking about my wife,again. He has been doing that a lot since I told him I believed we were headed for a divorce.
“I know.”
“She brought me soup. The one she makes at Dina’s. The one I like. Leeks and potatoes.”
My molars grind together. “Percy.”
“I’m just noting?—”
“I know what you’re noting.”
I turn toward the window.
We’re on the fourteenth floor, facing west, and on a clear day like today, you can see the river and the stadium and the low sprawl of the city, going soft in the afternoon light.
Nashville is beautiful in a way it hasn’t always been—it reinvented itself while nobody was looking, shed its skin somewhere around 2010, and grew something shinier underneath.
“I’m just saying she made an effort,” Percy continues. “She makes a lot of effort.”
I tuck my hands in the pockets of my pants and keep my back to him. “She does.”
“And you?—”
“I know,” I repeat through gritted teeth. “I know how it looks.”
Percy genuinely likes Lucy, has from the beginning, from that first night at Dina’s when I called him at five in the morning and told him I’d met someone, and he asked what kind of someone, and I said the real kind, which was both the truest and the most useless thing I’d ever said.
I was drunk…on her, or maybe she put something in thatcassouletshe served me.
Later, I told him it was just casual. I mean, she’s a cook at a small-time diner that pretends to be French—even though Dina is from Iran and Lucy was born and raised in Nashville.
