Chapter 20
GRANT
The minute a bank calls, a scandal stops being gossip and becomes mathematics.
Douglas Kemp from First Tennessee is explaining the eighteen-million-dollar credit facility when I glance at the time and realize I’ve been listening to him for almost ten minutes without touching the coffee beside my laptop.
He’s talking about representations regarding the validity of every revenue stream included in Mercer Publishing’s borrowing base, which is banker language for if your wife owns those songs and you pledged them anyway, we’d like to know how fucked we are.
Laurel is upstairs. I heard the guest-room shower earlier, then the soft hiss of the portable steamer she used to take on tour.
I know because I was standing outside her door with my ear pressed to the fucking thing, listening.
Sue me. My wife is upstairs behind a locked door and I’m supposed to pretend I don’t give a shit?
Now there’s something stranger coming through the wood—a low hum, barely there, followed by the repeated bubbling sound of her blowing through a straw into water.
Voice therapy.
I can’t mistake that shit anywhere. I sat through fucking appointments after her injury, learned the sounds she made when her throat was too tired to give her anything better. I know that exercise, and I know she hasn’t done it in years.
“Grant?”
“I heard you.”
“Then you understand why the lender has requested the original executed schedules, document metadata, and all board approvals surrounding the 2020 amendment.”
“Outside counsel is already reviewing that.”
“We will require our own review.”
“Fine.”
“Until then, no additional draws against the facility.”
My fingers tighten around the edge of the desk. We have an acquisition closing in nine days.
“That isn’t necessary.”
“Our credit committee disagrees.”
“Doug, I’ve banked with you for years.”
“Which is why I called rather than sending a default notice.”
There has to be some shit louder than a rich man hearing the exact limit of his importance.
I turn toward the windows, looking out at the pool Laurel wanted after swearing on her grandmother’s grave she’d swim every morning and used approximately fourteen times in the first year.
“You’re treating a disputed administration schedule like fraud.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“You’re implying it.”
“I’m telling you what we need to get comfortable with the facility. If Mercer can substantiate its rights to the receivables in the borrowing base, we can work through the rest. If it can’t, we have a collateral issue.”
The call ends.
I’m back in the living room when Laurel comes downstairs wearing fitted jeans, sneakers, and a loose cream sweater despite the August heat. Her brown hair is wet, her face bare, and she looks exhausted and more beautiful than I currently have the emotional capacity to handle.
Since when the fuck did she get this beautiful?
Not that she wasn’t beautiful when I met her. She was.
I just wasn’t looking at her.
I remember Savannah. April 2012. Forsyth Park.
The SCAD Sidewalk Arts Festival was packed, chalk covering the pavement in every direction, music bleeding through the trees, people drinking out of plastic cups before noon like nobody had anywhere to be.
I was twenty-something, in town with friends, and far more interested in the blonde standing beside Laurel than I was in whatever was happening under my feet.
The blonde had massive tits I wanted to bury my face between, a tiny white dress that did nothing to cover her ass, and absolutely no problem making sure I noticed her.
Every time I looked over, she was looking back, running her tongue over her lips and sucking her drink through her straw in a way that had my mind going straight to what that mouth could do to my cock.
I was hard in an instant. That was all the invitation I needed.
I walked over with a fucking hard-on in broad daylight, drink in my hand, already deciding how the day was going to go.
Thankfully, my friends had good sense to bring condoms along, and I wasn’t planning on letting her leave until I’d fucked her hard enough to scream my name.
But before I got to her, some frat kid wearing fucking glasses and looking like a walking trust fund stepped in front of me.
He said something to her, she laughed, and then the blonde disappeared into the crowd.
I was about to turn around when Laurel looked up.
And that was it.
She had chalk smeared across two fingers and a streak of blue on one knee, her sunglasses shoved into her hair, her mouth moving while she argued with her friend about whatever they were drawing.
She glanced at me, saw exactly where my attention had been a second earlier, and went right back to her chalk square.
I should’ve kept walking, but her blue eyes were mesmerizing, and with that much cleavage on display, losing the blonde wasn’t exactly much of a loss.
“You’re Laurel Bellamy.”
She looked up again, slower this time. “Do I know you?”
I laughed. She didn’t.
That was the first thing about her that got under my skin. The second was how quickly the blonde I’d been planning to rail disappeared from my head the moment Laurel looked at me like I was a mildly inconvenient piece of shit.
I stayed anyway, watching her work while pretending I gave a shit about what she was drawing. I asked questions I didn’t care about, kept finding reasons to hang around, and eventually learned she hated the overly sweet drink she’d ordered when she stole the lime from mine.
She was there because her friend had entered the competition, and I ended up listening to her explain the whole thing like I’d asked for a fucking briefing.
I asked for her number twice. She ignored me both times, which I took as a challenge because I wasn’t particularly accustomed to women telling me no.
The reason I knew her name in the first place was because Marcus had recognized her. Laurel Bellamy. SCAD student. Apparently she’d made enough of a name for herself around campus that he knew exactly who she was, and it saved me the trouble of pretending I hadn’t been listening when he said it.
I asked her for her number a third time.
She finally held out her hand. “Phone.”
I handed it over. She typed her number in, called herself, and gave it back.
“There. Happy?”
“Getting there.”
She rolled her eyes and went right back to her square.
After that, I spent the rest of the afternoon finding reasons to stay in Savannah.
“Your throat bothering you?”
She stops at the bottom of the stairs, her hand lifting to her neck before she catches herself. “Why?”
“I heard the straw exercise.”
“Oh, right.” She studies me for a second, and there’s something in her expression I can’t quite place. “I had another evaluation.”
My heart kicks. “When? Where?”
“Boston.”
“When were you in Boston?”
“Yesterday.”
While I was fighting to keep the board from taking authority away from me, my wife got on a plane for a medical appointment and came home without mentioning it.
“You flew to Massachusetts alone?”
“Yes.”
“Why the fuck would you do that alone?”
“Because I know how airports work.”
“Don’t do that shit.” My voice rises despite myself. “You’ve spent four years being told another procedure could make you worse, and now you’re flying to Boston for evaluations without telling me?”
Everything in my body knows where the conversation is going before she opens her mouth.
“When exactly was I supposed to tell you? Pick a call, Grant. The first, the second, the third, or the fourth one I made on our anniversary while you were busy fucking your newest artist. Remember?”
Does she have to rub it in every fucking chance she gets?
God, women can nag a man into the grave and act like they’re the ones being tortured.
So I cheated. Who hasn’t? Plenty of men fuck around and their wives don’t spend every waking second shoving it in their faces.
I’ve spent the last few days buying flowers, making dinner, asking how she’s feeling, doing all the shit a man does when he’s trying to make things right, and what the fuck else does she want from me?
Do I need to get down on my knees and carve my fucking apology into the floor?
Laurel picks up her keys and shoves them into her bag, and a feeling creeps over me, cold and immediate.
Where the fuck is she going?
“You told Beckett, didn’t you?” I ask, jealousy crawling out of me before I can stop it.
Ever since she told me that day she hadn’t slept with him yet but might, the possibility has been sitting in the back of my mind, getting under my fucking skin.
“Of course I did.” The faintest smile touches her lips. “He was there every step of the way, Grant.”
She slings the strap over her shoulder and walks past me without another word, the door clicking shut behind her.
My jaw locks, my mind already running through everything that could happen if that procedure works.
Laurel might sing again.
She could build something of her own, get back everything I watched her lose, and make it bigger than anything I ever did.
I can’t let that happen.