31. Grant
THIRTY-ONE
GRANT
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” I ask.
Lila squeezes my fingers. “I’m always up for shopping.”
The stomach bug kept her home for three days. I cooked for her when she could handle solid food, read to her when she got tired, and made myself scarce when she drew herself a bath to refresh.
But now, she seems to have her energy back. Her color’s better, too, and her eyes have lost the dark circles that marred them when the fever raged. I suggested she get some fresh air, and she opted for this outing—walking down to her sister’s store to help me buy gifts for my mom and Eliza.
I’m not an avid shopper, but I don’t think there’s much she could suggest we do that I would turn down.
“Tell me about your mom,” she says. “What kinds of things does she like? What’s her style?”
I’ve never given my mom’s style a second’s thought. Does that make me a bad son or an average one? “Pretty relaxed. She mostly wears clothes she gets from our vendors. Outdoorsy chic is a thing. ”
Lila snorts, but it’s true. Our bigger stores carry some pretty nice dresses, all designed to be lightweight and breathable.
“She likes an expensive perfume Dad buys her every year. She’s well organized.”
I’m a little embarrassed I can’t be more articulate about what she likes.
“So…some nice things, but mostly casual?”
“Sounds about right.”
“And Eliza?”
I laugh. “Eliza rotates through bright hair colors, and she tends to match her outfit to the color of the month. She runs her own handmade soap business, so she likes to do things her way. She’s surprisingly pushy for a tiny woman, and Dean is absolutely gone for her.”
“As he should be. She sounds awesome.”
We stop in front of a red storefront with a bright yellow door. Lila puts her hand on the knob and raises her eyebrows at me.
“Prepare yourself for the razzle-dazzle.”
She pulls the door open, and I step inside. And…okay, she’s not wrong.
The small store is a riot of color and texture, filled with everything from tiny jewelry pieces, to bulky ceramic mugs, to huge paintings. It’s a lot to take in, but it feels cozy, too. Maybe that’s just the size, but it’s more likely the people in it.
“Hey, you guys.” Hope rounds the back counter to greet us. “All better?”
Lila lifts a fist into the air. “Unstoppable.”
“Perfect timing. We’re trying to pull together a lake day. Maybe Thursday? Your town council thing is Friday, right?”
“Yeah. I could do Thursday.” She looks up at me. “What do you think? You said you wanted to do something on a lake. ”
“I thought you weren’t outdoorsy,” I tease. “Now I find out you do lake days ?”
“For me, lake day means sitting in the sand getting a tan. Don’t get your hopes up.”
Watching Lila suntanning is the very thing I would hope for.
“Whatever the plan is, Thursday works,” I tell her.
“Great.” Hope beams. “Griffin’s in, and so are Wren, Tess, and August.”
“Is Ian joining the fun, too?” Lila asks. “We saw them together at the festival.”
Being looped into Lila’s we makes my chest go warm.
Hope grimaces and shoots a glance over her shoulder. “Tess decided she’s not ready to try for something more with him,” she says softly. “Wren wants to throw this together as a fun distraction for her and August.”
I’m missing pieces here, but it isn’t hard to connect the dots.
“So,” Hope says in her regular voice, throwing off the air of gossip, “we’re going to go have a great afternoon. The more, the merrier, if you guys want to come.”
“We’re in,” I tell her. Even if all Lila does is lay around in her swimsuit. Which I’m not going to think about while we’re standing with her sister.
“But right now, I’m here to be Grant’s personal shopper.” She slips away from me to inspect a nearby jewelry rack.
“Ooh, exciting.” Hope straightens a bag that was out of place and returns to her seat behind the counter. “Let me know if you have any questions.”
Lila makes a slow pass through the store, touching everything. I can’t stop staring at her hands. She picks things up and carefully maneuvers them one by one. I knew she was tactile, but this slow and methodical assessment does something to me.
It’s not just her delicate hands caressing practically everything in the store. It’s the confidence behind it—she knows quality when she sees it.
A very small, very stupid, very insistent voice in my head says she’s seen quality in me, too. That whisper cracks something open in my chest. Fear, doubt, and insecurities I’ve held onto for too many years spill out—but so does an overwhelming hope. Hope for her. Myself. Us . Hope I’ve avoided touching as though it would scald, I now want to grab with both hands and cling to.
“How about this for your mom?” Lila offers me a leather planner embossed with pine trees on the front, unaware of the chaos ricocheting inside me.
“Perfect.” I would have walked through this entire store and settled on a scented candle.
She crosses to the back of the shop. “I’m thinking one of these for Eliza. I’m biased, but my sister’s art sounds like her whole vibe.”
She gestures at a small painting of abstract flowers. It’s a tumult of joyful color and will suit Eliza to a tee.
I lift it off the wall. “You’re good at this.”
“Yup. And I was thinking this—” She moves to a small wooden jewelry rack and carefully removes something. She holds it up to me, revealing three green stones on a delicate gold chain. “For your grandma. Kind of representing you and your brothers.”
She thought about my grandma? I don’t deserve this generous woman.
“I don’t know if she likes jewelry though…”
“She’ll love it, princess.” I swoop in to give her a brief, heated kiss on the mouth, then kiss my way over to her ear. “Thank you.”
“Aw, PDA.” Wren leans in the pass-through archway wearing a purple apron like she wore when she barged into the bike shop last week. “Are you guys coming to the lake with us?”
“They’re in,” Hope confirms.
“It’s been a long time since I had an ex worth getting mad at, but my new life’s goal is to pull a Lila.” She gazes up at the ceiling with a dreamy expression. “Maybe I’ll save it for Callahan.”
Lila ticks her head to the side, swaying a touch so her shoulder presses against mine. “What does ‘pull a Lila’ mean?”
“You know.” Wren’s enormous grin reminds me of Rhett’s. “Throw up on some jerk’s shoes.”
Groaning, Lila spins to press her forehead against my chest. “Does everybody know about that?”
Hope meets my eyes. “Uh, there might be some talk about it.”
That’s small-town speak for everybody knows .
I run my free hand up and down Lila’s back. I wouldn’t expect the witnesses to keep quiet about her run-in with her ex, but I didn’t think it would come back to haunt her so quickly.
“This has been fun.” She tilts her head to look up at me. “Can I stow away in your luggage and go home with you?”
Yes, please!
“You’re my new role model,” Wren says. “We’re proud of you.”
Lila turns. “It wasn’t premeditated.”
“When I tell the story it was.” A bell rings somewhere on the bakery side of the building. Wren points at us as she backs away. “I’ll text you the details for the lake day.”
“Do I move?” Lila asks. “Do I change my name? What’s the protocol here?”
“You own it,” Hope says. “I saw Ada and Isabel in Delish yesterday, and they said you’re their new hero. Amy and Jodi can’t get enough of the story. ”
“It’s not really how I wanted to be recognized in this town. ‘Hey, aren’t you that girl who puked on a guy?’”
“You can always explain that you told him off first,” I tell her. “It was impressive in context.”
“Not helping.”
“That’s something to be proud of,” Hope says. “He needed telling off.”
Lila takes the things she picked out for my family and sets them on the counter. “When I give my presentation, everyone on the town council will be thinking about how I threw up on a tourist on Maple Street.”
“It was for the greater good.”
“So satisfying to watch,” I add. Hope high fives me.
Lila glares. “That’s deeply disgusting.”
“It’s true, though. That dumb—” I bite my tongue on what I really want to call her ex. “The most valuable thing he ever had to lose was standing right in front of him, and he couldn’t think past his shoes. Yeah. It was satisfying to see.”
“Aw,” Hope says, turning away from us. “Let me just send a waffle emoji to my man real quick.”
Lila stares up at me, her eyes soft and hazy. “I didn’t know mountain men were so romantic.”
“I’ve been reading up.”
I stretch out on the Adirondack chair on my porch, listening to the river while I whittle. Lila lost a lot of time while she was sick, so now she’s making some of it up, putting the final touches on her presentation for the town council. Ever since she discovered that her puking on Josh’s shoes has become the hottest gossip in town, she’s stepped up her efforts.
As if they had anywhere higher to go in the first place.
When I took her home, it was on the tip of my tongue to ask if I could hang out with her while she worked, but she’d been eager to go through her website mock-up again. The promotion is too important for me to risk being a distraction, so I left her to focus.
The restless itch just beneath my skin is no longer nameless. Its name is Lila . I want to talk to her, touch her—just being near her would be enough. I try to console myself I’ll see her soon, but soon has never felt so uncertain.
My phone rings on the little all-weather table, and I check the face that fills the screen. Interesting.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Grant, I’m glad we caught you. Your dad’s here, too.”
Dad says his own hello on speakerphone. “How are you enjoying Oregon?”
“It’s a scenic little town. I’m having a great time.”
That’s a terrible description for my time here— great . But I don’t know how to explain the invisible string tying me tighter to this place. More specifically, to one particular woman in it. So I’ll stick with an easy answer. I can grapple with the trickier parts later.
“Your photos are just gorgeous.” Mom has a soft spot for landscape photography.
Hey—one more item I can add to the list of things she likes.
I’ve texted them pics when I think to. Mostly scenery or a few of the shops. Nothing of Lila. Now that feels like it’s been a mistake all along.
“I looked up that hike you did on AllTrails,” Dad booms. “Didn’t seem up to your usual style.”
“He means it was a molehill instead of a mountain,” Mom adds.
“I wanted to relax this time around.”
“And have you? Have you relaxed and enjoyed yourself? ”
She sounds so eager, I regret telling Lila my parents don’t check in with us much. They have their own ways of showing affection, but that doesn’t mean they don’t care.
“I have.” My emotions are more tangled than when I first arrived, but I’ve never enjoyed myself more.
“We’re glad to hear it. We were going to wait until you got back to talk to you in person, but we decided it would be the perfect cap to your time off.”
I still, the hoot of an owl in the distance strangely ominous. “What would be?”
“We’re ready to make you CEO.” Dad’s voice takes on the serious tone reserved for Irwin family business meetings, as though this is their official job offer. “Effective immediately.”
I register it…and I don’t. I knew this day was coming—they made Dean the Chief Financial Officer almost two years ago, and they’ve dropped plenty of hints they wanted more for me, too. But here? Now? I feel like I’ve lost a handhold and am scrambling down a cliffside.
“We want you to lead the company, son.”
I’m glad they’ve never caught on to video calls so they can’t see the look on my face.
“We’re thinking we’ll hire on a new store manager and a new General Manager so you can dedicate yourself fully to being the CEO.”
It sounds like Dad’s shuffling papers. Does he already have a contract written up? A five-year plan for the business? A five-year plan for me ?
“You can focus solely on the company’s future rather than worry about the day-to-day tasks in the flagship store.”
Interacting with coworkers, helping customers—almost everything I told Lila I enjoy about my job involves the day-to-day tasks in the flagship store. As much as I want the CEO position, I never thought about giving up my current job to get it .
“You’ve wanted this for years.”
I can’t tell if Mom is congratulating me or reminding me.
I finally find my words. “Yeah. I have. Thank you. I’m just…surprised.”
“Go out and celebrate.” Even this feels like a command from Dad. “Then, when you come back Sunday, we’ll talk about moving you up to the executive suite.”
Mom laughs. “He already has an office.”
“Now he’ll actually use it. Maybe a new desk is in order?”
The line goes silent, and I realize he’s actually asking. “I’ll think about it.”
“Enjoy the rest of your vacation,” Mom says. “You’ve earned it.”
We hang up, and I slump against the chair back. I thought my emotions were a mess before, but my parents just set off a grenade inside me. Everything’s raw and exposed.
I shouldn’t be this stunned. The promotion was always somewhere on the horizon. I would take up my mantle and become the new head of Irwin Outdoors. Everyone knew it, nobody doubted it. I’ve expected it and even looked forward to it.
So why does the news I finally have it make me want to bolt?