4. The Man Who Drove Away #2
I go back to reading the room until two in the morning, when the last town car swallows the last guest, and I do the thing I always do, which is leave while the staff is still stacking chairs.
I used to tell myself that was professionalism, the fixer vanishing with the magic.
The truth is uglier and smaller. If you leave before cleanup, you never have to see what a beautiful night looks like with the lights on.
The rental in Los Feliz is month-to-month, furnished in a style I'd call landlord beige, and I've been in it since March.
Two suitcases in the bedroom, one still zipped.
A closet I never filled. The kitchen has nothing in it except, and I'm aware of how this sounds, forty-one pieces of genuinely beautiful glassware, coupes and rocks glasses and Nick and Noras I've carried between eleven cities in custom foam, because a man has to have one thing he unpacks, and mine is the thing you toast with.
No art on the walls. No plants, plants require you to come home.
I've told a decade of dinner parties that I live like this because I love the freedom, the lightness, the next city, and it's a great bit, it kills every time, and standing in the beige at three in the morning I can finally afford the honest accounting, which is that freedom is just the word I use for never staying anywhere long enough to be left.
The keys are in the drawer under the coffee maker.
They're always in the drawer under whatever coffee maker, that's the one piece of continuity in my entire luggage-tag life.
An old fob, two keys, a leather tab gone soft at the edges from being worried by a thumb on nights like this one.
They don't open anything anymore. The car they belonged to I sold years ago, a 1970 coupe I'd rebuilt with Beckett across two summers, the car we all three climbed into at half past three on a June afternoon while a string quartet tuned up in a ballroom eight blocks away.
I drove. That detail never softens.
August couldn't have worked the clutch with his hands shaking like that, and Beckett was made of stone in the back seat, and somebody had to drive.
It was me, grinning at the valet on the way out like we were late for a tee time, and I have kept the keys to that car through eleven cities, and I have never once asked myself why in a voice that would make me answer.
Tonight I'm too tired to duck it.
A healthier man throws them away. A braver one drives back. I've spent five years doing neither, keeping them in a drawer like a stone in a shoe, because guilt, if you feed it regularly, will sit quietly and never once ask you to change.
I pour one finger of the good stuff into a beautiful glass and make the call I've been not-making since eleven o'clock, and it says everything about the three of us that a group call at three a.m. my time connects in two rings flat.
Nobody was sleeping tonight.
I'd have bet the glassware on it.
"Cade," Beckett answers like a man taking delivery of lumber. Steady, square, please state your business. Behind him, there's a gull and wind, which means he's outside on that cliff at six in the morning his time, which means he already knows.
"Tell me you didn't get the same email I did," I say, which is a joke, because I already told him that once tonight, hours ago, before I had the whole picture, and August's line clicks in on the tail of it, quiet greenhouse air behind him, water running off among the flowers.
"Is she involved?" August says.
No hello.
Five years of careful nothing, and the first three words out of the gentlest man I know are about her, which tells you where all three of us actually live.
"The inquiry that came to the shop last night was routed through a publicist. Two hundred arrangements, equinox, confidentiality rider. Cade. Is Amber attached to this?"
"Golden Hour Vows is the planner of record," I say it plain and let it sit, and the line holds the specific silence of three men in three time zones staring at the same cliff.
"There's more, and you're getting it straight, no varnish.
The groom is my client. Nolan Reeve. Tonight he asked me to run hospitality and protection for the wedding, personally, and before either of you says anything, yes, I know how it looks, and no, I didn't build this.
But I'm not clean either." One finger of good whiskey, gone.
"Months back, his people asked me for planner recommendations for an east-coast wedding, no venue chosen, no town chosen, and I gave them one name.
Hers. Because she's the best on that coast and she's spent five years being the best without the platform she deserves, and it cost me nothing to say so from four thousand miles away.
I figured I'd stay a rumor she never had to see. "
Silence, the working kind.
I can hear Beckett turning it over like a board, he's checking for warp.
"Facts," he says finally. "What's confirmed, what's pending?"
"Confirmed, she's the planner and the couple's firm on your house.
Pending, everything with my name on it. I told Nolan tonight I don't touch this without her written approval of my involvement, her call, no pressure applied, and if she says no, I stay in California and you two never have to mention I was asked. "
"That matches what I sent Crane's office," Beckett says. "The estate doesn't move without her authorization. Nothing gets confirmed around her."
"The flowers, either," August says. "I replied this morning.
Bellamy Blooms is available if, and only if, the planner approves the vendor.
I won't be delivered to her like a line item.
" A pause, and then, softer, worse, "She's ordered from my shop for five years through a nineteen-year-old, Cade.
Five years of invoices with her company's name and never her handwriting.
Whatever gets decided, we are not taking away the distance.
It's the only thing we ever actually gave her. "
There it is, said out loud, the whole shape of us.
I reach for the joke, because that's my job in this pack; it has been since we were nine, somebody has to keep the room from noticing the room. "So what I'm hearing is, three RSVPs, all marked pending the bride we already lost—"
Nothing.
Not a breath of a laugh, not even the courtesy grunt Beckett issues at funerals, just the wind on his cliff and the water in August's greenhouse, two silences with my name on them.
I set the glass down and let the bit die on the table, which people who only know me at parties would not believe I can do.
"Yeah," I say. "Okay. Straight version. I want to come home, and I'm terrified to, and I don't know which of those is the selfish one anymore. That's where I am."
"Come home," August says, gently, immediately.
"Bring boots," Beckett says, which from him is the same sentence.
We sort logistics like it hasn't been five years, because the terrible sweet truth about a pack is that the machinery outlives the wreck, and after they ring off, I sit with the phone warm in my hand and make the other call, the one I owe, to the only person who's known me since before I learned to be delightful.