Chapter 31 #2
Jax's weight shifts a half inch against the wall.
I keep my face flat and my voice flatter. "What did you tell him."
"I told him my brother and I weren't close.
" Landry doesn't look at me when he says it.
"And I told him that if LeBlanc Holdings wanted to restructure anything, he could put it in writing through counsel.
Then I left through the lobby and three men I didn't know walked me to the parking garage and one of them broke my ribs to make sure I understood that the second answer was the one they came for. "
The silence holds.
I do not say I did this. I do not say my investigation walked into your meeting. The words sit behind my teeth and I let them stay there because Landry doesn't need an apology, he needs a brother who can keep his mouth shut when the wrong sentence would cost both of them.
"Where did they go after."
"They got in a black SUV. No plates I could see. They left."
"And you came here."
"I came here because Mama is sitting on Maw Maw's porch right now believing her firstborn is having a productive afternoon at the office, and I would rather be dead in a ditch than walk into her house with a split lip."
It is the closest thing to humor I have heard from Landry in ten years.
It is also the only honest thing he has said to me since I walked in.
He looks up. His green eyes find mine and they hold and the propriety thins enough that I can see the man underneath, the one I left in the kitchen the morning I drove out of Louisiana with everything I owned in a duffel bag.
"Remington." Quieter. "You are going to tell me what's happening."
"No."
He doesn't blink. "Excuse me."
"You're going to take the night here. Tomorrow morning you're going to call your office, you're going to say you've come down with something, you're going to spend the next two days at the family home eating Mama's red beans and not answering your phone. You're going to let me handle the rest."
"Remington—"
"Landry."
He looks at me. I let him see what lives underneath every version of me he thinks he knows, the same way I let Evie see it three weeks ago across a kitchen island while she sliced peppers.
The accent sits there between us, unhidden, uncorrected, and Landry hears it.
His brother sounds like home for the first time in almost a decade and nothing about that fits inside what is happening in this room.
He doesn't sit back down. He's already sitting. He looks at his hands.
"Are you in trouble."
"No."
"Is the family in trouble."
"Not after tonight."
He absorbs that. The lawyer's son under the propriety doing the math on what not after tonight requires from me, and the math arrives at an answer he will not ask me to confirm.
"All right." Landry's voice flattens back into the way he talks in courtrooms. "I will take the night here. I will go home tomorrow. I will not call my office until I can sit through a phone call without sounding like a man with broken ribs."
"Contused."
"I'm sorry?"
"They're not broken. Cracked at worst. Ice on the side every two hours, don't lie down flat, take the ibuprofen the Patek Philippe man's friend didn't manage to dislocate out of you."
The look he gives me is a look I have not seen on his face in ten years of distance. It is not anger. It is grief disguised as something quieter.
"When did you learn to do that with your hands."
I do not answer.
"You were disowned in your second year of medical school."
"I finished my training elsewhere."
"Where."
"Elsewhere."
He looks down for a beat. The bruising along the mandible has darkened another shade in the last twenty minutes.
His hand has dropped from his ribs. When he lifts his head, he looks at me with a fracture I have not seen on his face since the funeral, a crack that runs straight through the composure like a fault line finally giving.
"Who are you, Remington."
My face does nothing. That is the answer and he can see it.
The silence holds long enough that Jax shifts at the door. Long enough that I hear the air handler kick in two floors below. Long enough that Landry, my older brother, the heir who stayed, takes one breath that stops short of where the pain lives and lets it out in what is not quite a laugh.
"All right." He looks down at his hands. "All right. I don't need to know."
"Landry—"
"I don't need to know." He looks up and his eyes are clear. "But you tell me when you can. Whatever it is. Whoever you've become. You tell me when you can."
The line lands somewhere I did not know was open.
"Yeah," I say. The drawl is in it. "I'll tell you."
Jax clears his throat softly from the door. "Okay so I'm gonna go find some bad lobby coffee, because this conversation needs about three minutes without a witness, and I am very much a witness."
He pulls the door open and steps into the corridor and the soft click of the latch is the only sound in the room for a long moment after.
Landry doesn't speak. I don't either. I cross to the desk and pick up the dress shirt with the three small spots on the collar and I lay it flat across the chair back the way I used to lay out his uniform shirts when we shared a bedroom and Mama hadn't gotten to the ironing yet.
"Get dressed," I say. "I'll wait."
The corridor is empty when I step out of the room.
Jax is two paces down, leaning against the opposite wall, holding one of those small lobby coffees in a paper cup that he is making a great show of not drinking.
He doesn't say anything for long enough that the silence becomes its own kind of noise.
His thumb taps the rim of the cup, a rhythm I've heard a thousand times, but slower now. Weighted.
"You know what I kept thinking in there.
" Jax doesn't look at me when he says it.
He's watching the cup. "That house we drove past. The columns and the oaks and the whole, like, generational wealth situation.
And the woman on the porch. And then your brother in there, who looks like a cologne ad and talks like a contract, and he's got the name and the money and the whole inheritance just sitting there waiting for you. "
He pauses. The cup turns in his hand.
"And you walked away from all of it." Jax's voice drops the performance, the patter, the golden retriever energy that fills every room he enters, and what's underneath is quieter and steadier than most people would expect.
"You walked away and you came and found us.
And I gave you shit about the lying, and I meant it, but I didn't get what you were lying about. What it cost."
The hallway hums. The air handler cycles. My throat works once before I can speak and when the words come they are Louisiana all the way through, no correction.
"Didn't walk away, Jax. Got thrown out. There's a difference."
"Yeah." A beat. "But you stayed out. That was the choice."
He drinks the lobby coffee. He does not complain about it.
I look at the carpet. I look at the door of room 1108 where my brother is buttoning a clean shirt over ribs that match my scar. I look at nothing for a beat.
"Darcy's in town."
"Yeah. She called me from the kitchen last night, told me to bring her crawfish boil seasoning from the place on Magazine because everything she can get in San Francisco tastes like sand."
"You should go see her."
"After we get you sorted." He looks at me sideways. "I'm not leaving you in this hotel alone, Saint."
"After."
"After."
The elevator chimes at the end of the corridor.
The wrought-iron gate opens easy. It always did.
My mother is on the porch before the Lincoln finishes the curve of the drive and she is barefoot and she is in a yellow housedress with her hair half up and her hands are already over her mouth and I am out of the passenger seat before Jax has the car in park.
I have a script. I rehearsed it on the plane. The script does not survive contact with her.
"Remington Beau LeBlanc."
She comes off the porch and the porch swing keeps swinging behind her and she is fifty-eight years old and she moves like she is twenty, and when she hits me she hits me at full speed with both arms and her whole body weight, and the smell of her hair is jasmine and Pond's cold cream and a kitchen I have not stood in for eight years.
"Hi, Mama."
She is crying. She has been crying for the last sixteen hours probably, since whichever phone call set her off.
She is talking into my collarbone in a mix that is half Cajun and half English and full Mama, and I am holding her with both arms and my eyes are over her shoulder on the porch where my grandmother is sitting in the swing watching me with the same flat assessing look she used to give the praline pot to determine when the sugar would crack.
Odette is fine. Odette is fine. She is in pearls and a navy blouse and a houndstooth skirt and she has the Times-Picayune folded on her lap and she lifts one hand and waves at me with the small flat wave of a woman who has been waiting for me to come home for eight years and is not about to be the one to admit it.
The relief that goes through me is the medical kind, vagus nerve firing, blood pressure dropping. Whatever Mama heard. Whatever Mama told me on the phone yesterday about Maw Maw's heart. None of it was true. Mama in distress translates everything around her into worse distress. Odette is fine.
Mama pulls back. Holds my face in both her hands. Looks at me the way she used to look at me before a piano recital, checking my collar, checking my hair.
"You came home."
"I came home."
She does not ask why. She does not ask what is wrong.
She has been a LeBlanc by marriage and a financier's widow and the mother of the heir long enough to know that some questions you do not ask the men in your life unless they offer first, and she is also old enough now to have figured out that not asking is one of the few gifts she has left to give me.
"Your brother."