Page 153 of Levi

“If you run in those circles in Miami, why are you in a cheap two-bedroom apartment in Panama City Beach? I still can’t wrap my head around that. What is the deal with the apartment? You gotta admit it doesn’t fit you.”

“I came to the Panhandle for Benji,” he says simply. “He needed to move up here to be with Mickey. They went through a lot of hard times in the past year. My best friend was four hundred miles from everyone who’d ever stood by him. I was not going to let him do it alone.”

He turns his hand over on the counter, open, waiting for me to take it. “The market up here prints money right now. The commute pays for itself. I’ve been going back and forth from Miami for months. Living in both places, increasingly more here than there. I was renting short-term condos and houses here the same as the tourists do until it became too big of a hassle. I needed a permanent space to sleep. I didn’t come here for the atmosphere. I came here for a person.” He pulls his hand back, flips the folder open again. “I show up for the people who are mine. I’m willing to move the entire world to make it happen, and I don’t think twice about it.”

“That night I asked you to come get me,” I make myself say, because I have to hear him answer the worst one. “You picked me up from a drunk tank. You saw me at the bottom of myself. I was wondering—” I stop. “I wondered if maybe you saw a disaster and couldn’t walk away. That all this is you being decent. You’re a good guy. I know that. Maybe I mistook getting rescued for being wanted.”

His jaw tightens. He’s close to anger, and none of it’s at me.

“Trust me, when we met, I did not feel sorry for you,” he says. “At all. I drove home that night after bringing you back here and I couldn’t stop thinking about you. It made me crazy, because the timing was a disaster. You were a big problem, and I didn’t have time for this. I kept showing up here because I could not physically make myself stay away from you. Decency didn’t have one thing to do with it. I can’t tell you how many times I created excuses with the house to swing by to see you. Do you really think the humidity in this house needs to be checked as much as I checked it? You know how many times I check the humidity in other houses I list? Once a week.”

I reach my hand out and turn it over, open, same as he did. I’m praying he takes it after I didn’t take his. He takes it without hesitation and interlaces our fingers.

The folder looks exactly what it is now. Just paper. A bluff that only worked in the shadow it needed. It doesn’t fix the hole with my insecurities. The hole’s too old and deep. But it’s loosened its grip. I can breathe past it.

“One more thing,” I say. “Not about him. About me.”

“Anything. Ask. I’m listening.”

I have to wait a minute to get it out. “I signed with Freddie when I was seventeen. My dad did the signing. I was a minor, so he put his name where mine couldn’t go. The same man who—” I don’t finish.

He knows where that sentence ends. He heard it last night. The man who built the box handed me to Freddie. Two cages, the same hands on the blueprint, and I never saw it until right now, saying it out loud in a kitchen.

“I never read any of it. Not one page. I was a scared kid, they slid papers at me, I signed where the arrow pointed, and I’ve been signing where the arrow points ever since. I don’t actually know what I agreed to. I don’t know what Freddie can really do to me and what he just says he can.” My face is hot from embarrassment. “It’s all in my emails somewhere. The trail of it. Sitting in my pocket the entire time. I’ve just never had the nerve, or anybody to help—”

I run out of breath. The asking for his help is the hardest part.

“You read contracts for a living,” I finish. “You’re smart. I know it’s a lot to—”

“Levi.” He squeezes my hand tighter and leans forward. “Yes. Of course. I’ll help you anyway I can. Forward me everything and I’ll go through all of it. If it’s past me, I know people who do this for a living. Entertainment law is a specialty, but I’ll find the right one.” He says it simple. Like I asked him to grab milk at the store. “You don’t have to do everything alone anymore. I’m here.”

I grab my phone and forward the folder of contracts before I can talk myself back out of it.

He thumbs it open right there, just the top one, the original, the one my father’s name is on. I watch the realtor in him come up. His eyebrows pull down a fraction. He scrolls. Stops. Goes back.

“What?” I ask.

“Not yet. I need to go through all of it before I say a word. I’m not going to give you a vague answer.” There’s care in his words. He’s choosing not to promise what he can’t yet. “I’ll say this much. This isn’t exactly what he’s told you it is.” He sets the phone down. “Give me a couple days. Let me do it right.”

I nod. “Sure, whatever time it takes.”

I’ll wait as long as I need to for answers.

Nobody’s ever stood on my side of it before.

Chapter 60: Dante

The seller finally calls me. It’s the first time he’s dialed my number instead of ignoring me.

“Reyes.” His voice is Atlanta, unhurried, vowels sanded smooth by money. There’s a keyboard going under his hands. “Jonathan’s people sent the paperwork over. Offered full ask.”

“That is correct.”

“On a twenty-million-dollar house. In a soft quarter. Excellent work. Truly. I had that house on the books eighteen months and three agents before you, and every one of them told me my number was a fantasy.”

“It wasn’t a fantasy,” I say. “It only needed the right touch.”

He laughs, and moves on. He doesn’t ask anything. He has no idea any of it happened. Both calls I ever made to him went to voicemail.