Chapter 4 Jude
The first time I saw my best friend, Henry, he was passed out and upside down on a children’s slide with a dick drawn on the side of his face.
It was his nineteenth birthday, and his first time drinking.
You’d never guess it’s the same man I’m looking at right now, though.
Not with his horn-rimmed, numbers-are-fun!
glasses or his somber, this-is-going-to-hurt expression.
“Just tell me,” I intone as we walk into Larkwood’s warm and cluttered kitchen. When I was growing up, it used to be one of my hideouts, since it was one of the few rooms that didn’t feel like it should charge an admission fee.
Henry tosses the thick leather folio that contains my grandmother’s will onto the kitchen island with a slap. “I’ll make you a PB and J first,” he says, moving toward the walk-in pantry.
I repress a sigh. There’s no point trying to stop Henry when he wants to feed you. He’ll only tell you that you’re making his Indian and Italian genetics hurt until you eat.
He returns with ingredients before looping around the island to the refrigerator, which is still covered in a humiliating gallery of every buck-toothed, cow-licked, pimpled phase of my childhood.
I don’t have the heart to take it down, despite knowing I’ll be living at Larkwood every weekend for the foreseeable future.
The thought gives my stomach a sloshy spoiled milk feeling, but there’s no way out of it.
Nana named me as her executor, and there’s no one else I’d trust to manage her possessions and final wishes.
I close my eyes as the pain of losing her rises in me so fast that I feel vertigo.
Why didn’t you tell me you were dying, Nana? Why couldn’t I get over my bullshit and visit you more when I had the chance?
“See? You’re dead on your feet.” My friend tuts like a mother hen. “You need some nourishment.” He sticks four slices of bread into the toaster.
“You don’t need to toast the bread,” I grumble.
A patient smiles stretches over his features. “You’ll be thanking me in a minute, asshole.”
I flop onto a barstool. I’m too tired to argue.
Between finishing up my current cases, fighting with my mother over Nana’s wishes, having to be in the same fucking zip code as my father, and losing one of the painfully few people I truly love, it’s been two of the shittiest weeks in recent memory.
And that’s not even counting what happened with the wedding planner. Gracie.
Shame and anger needle the back of my neck at the memory, and I automatically glance at the nearest window.
She still lives here after all. But beyond the glass, the lush kitchen garden is empty.
What does it say about me if I’m disappointed?
That I wouldn’t mind getting glared at again by those dark eyes?
Probably that I need to get laid.
The sound of the toast popping up makes me jolt, and Henry makes a soft tsking sound. “Did you even hear what I just said?”
I jerk my eyes away from the window. “Sorry. It’s been a long two weeks.”
“Forgiven.” Henry lays the toast on the cutting board before digging into the jam with a knife. “I was saying that you have your work cut out for you. Your grandmother gave direction for the major things, but there’s a lot of antique sorting and last request management ahead of you.”
If I were more naive, I’d hope this was the worst news awaiting me. But when Henry starts making comfort food, it generally means I should schedule something with my therapist.
“She didn’t contract the estate out to Dancing with the Stars, did she?” I say darkly.
Henry chuckles, now layering the two sandwiches with potato chips. “Good guess, but no.”
“Who puts potato chips on a PB and J?” I ask him, distracted.
“Unappreciated saints,” he answers, before starting on the peanut butter. “How’s the Rocher case, by the way?”
I drop my forehead to the butcher-block counter, slowly rolling it back and forth. “I thought you were trying to make me feel better,” I say, voice muffled against the wood.
“That bad, huh?”
Yes, that bad. For a good portion of my job, I’m able to work with people who don’t suck.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, those people are my pro bono clients.
I can’t say the same for the ones who pay my bills.
Thankfully, my team was incredibly understanding when Nana passed, and this is the last billable case I have to finish before taking a six-week break to handle the estate.
But until then, I’ll be mediating disputes over who gets Hay Girl Hay—the thoroughbred neither my client nor her soon-to-be ex-husband ever sees, but are willing, apparently, to duel at dawn over.
Reluctantly, I sit up and look at him with dead eyes.
“Eat your sandwich,” he says, pushing the plate toward me. “You’ll feel better.”
I take a bite, and somehow, he’s right. The warm, gooey filling is balanced perfectly by the salty crunch of the chips. “Fuck.” I groan with my mouth full. When was the last time I ate?
“Dude, gross. If I wanted to hear your O noises, I would have brought you a Neiman Marcus catalog,” he says, throwing a cloth napkin at me before taking a bite of his own sandwich.
I shrug. Henry has been giving me shit for dressing well since I met him. But underneath it all, I know he’s grateful I helped him outgrow the tucked polos and khakis I’ve come to think of as his Golf Period.
He also knows it was Nana who taught me to appreciate companies that actually pay their workers a living wage and make clothes that last longer than six months.
At the realization that I’ll probably never get to nerd out over French seams with anyone else, my heart tumbles a little deeper into the hole that opened up when she passed.
And then I remember a little black dress, perfectly tailored to hug every gaze-demanding curve it accentuated.
Gracie. Gracie, who loved my nana. Gracie, who gave me breath enough to laugh when my grief was suffocating.
Gracie, who’d be thrilled to see me roll around butt-naked in poison ivy.
I push the now-empty plate away, disgusted with myself.
Did I actually give her my business card?
Yes, you did. Because she asked if you even cared about Nana’s wishes, and you just had to lash out.
Regret tightens my chest, but I’ve had to field the same goddamn question from my mother at every turn, and unfortunately for Gracie, I’d finally hit my breaking point.
Because Nana meant more to me than pretty much anyone, and while I’m 90 percent sure she would support my plans for the estate, the other 10 percent is riddled with doubt.
But I can’t ask her about it. Because she’s gone now, and all that’s left is this fucking house that has only ever felt like a monument to secrets and lies.
“Christ, Judy. What did those crumbs ever do to you?”
I glance up from my plate, which I’ve been glaring at. I let out a slow breath. “Sorry. It’s been—”
“A long two weeks,” Henry finishes for me, putting our plates in the sink. “Well, I hate to say it, but it’s about to get longer.”
“Let’s have it,” I say, sitting up straighter.
He unzips his folio to reveal a hefty stack of paper, fringed with color-coded tabs.
“So, the good news,” he begins, leafing through some pages, “is that Agatha left you the main estate and its grounds outright. Because it was privately owned and she declined having it listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Larkwood isn’t subject to preservation laws, in the traditional sense. ”
I nod. Thank fuck.
“However.”
Never mind.
“She did set up her own preservation clause. It’s quite detailed and stipulates a number of specific contractors who specialize in historic restoration, and one carpenter who is, and I quote, ‘finer than a thirty-two-year-old Patrick Swayze.’ ”
I pinch the bridge of my nose as the headache that’s been my constant companion for the last two weeks pulses in friendly greeting.
Christ, Nana. I think of the person interested in the estate.
It won’t be news to them that ownership will mean putting up with certain maintenance burdens, but with a preservation clause…
I chew my lip. It’ll be another hurdle to cross, but not impossible.
Not when I’m prepared to donate any organ they may need if it means ridding myself of this place.
“Okay. That’s fine,” I say, waving a hand for him to continue.
“Are you sure you’re not still hungry?” he hedges.
“Come on. It can’t be that bad.”
He sighs and pulls off his glasses, carefully folding them.
Shit.
“Okay. The bad news is that while the majority of the estate was left to you, there’s a small piece of it that wasn’t. I know you had plans on selling to a buyer whose privacy is of the utmost importance, and this development… complicates things.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I ask calmly, despite my slowly rising panic. Privacy isn’t just important to the person considering the acquisition—their interest hinges on it.
Henry clears his throat, shuffling the pages of the folio until he finds the right one, marked with a red tab.
Fitting. The color of emergencies and Satan’s ass.
“It says here that the guest cottage has been bequeathed outright to one Gracie Holland.” Henry looks up. “No idea who that might be, do you?”
All at once, I feel like I need to sit down. But I am fucking sitting down. Head swimming, I struggle to form words. To form thoughts.
“Jude. Hey, man, are you okay?”
When I don’t answer, I hear him quickly walk off somewhere and then the sound of running water. Moments later, I’m being nudged. “Drink.”