2. Grant
GRANT
Late morning, the great room bright with gulf light and loud with four voices talking over each other, and Mia’s arguing with Jax about a third-round receiver, and she’s winning.
“He dropped four touchdowns last year,” she says. “Four. That’s not bad luck, that’s a pattern.” “That’s a small sample size.”
“That’s you not wanting to admit a twenty-one-year-old out-drafted you.”
Jax laughs — the loud, delighted laugh of a man who likes losing to her more than he likes winning against anyone else — and Brooks doesn’t look up from his laptop, but the corner of his mouth moves.
Tate’s already agreeing with her from the kitchen, shouting something about target share with a beer in his hand.
“See, Brooks agrees with me.”
“I said nothing,” Brooks says, without looking up. “Your face agreed with me.”
“My face does that sometimes. It’s not always reliable.
” He finally glances up, adjusting his glasses, something dry in his expression that passes for amusement on a man who rations his reactions the way other people ration money.
“Don’t quote my face in a draft-day argument. It has no legal standing.”
Mia laughs — bright, easy, the kind of laugh that fills a room without trying to — and Brooks’s mouth twitches at the corner, satisfied with himself in the understated way he’s satisfied with most things.
She fits at this table. Elbows on the glass, hair coming loose from whatever knot she tied it in that morning, calling out sleeper picks like she’s been in this league for years instead of two days. Like the chair was always hers, waiting on her to finally sit down in it.
I don’t like how much I like that thought. I like it anyway.
“Grant.” She doesn’t look up from the laptop. “Back me up. Four touchdowns dropped is a pattern, right?”
“Small sample size,” I say, and she throws a balled-up napkin at me without breaking eye contact with the screen.
Jax whoops. I catch it out of the air one-handed — some reflexes never leave — and for one second the whole table is noise and bourbon and a woman who argues like she means it, and I forget, briefly, that I have any reason not to enjoy this as much as I do.
Brooks picks that moment to make his third-round selection, unhurried as always, and Mia leans over his shoulder to read the name off his screen before he’s finished typing it.
“That’s a reach,” she says.
“It’s a calculated reach.” He doesn’t look up. “There’s a difference, and you’ll understand it by round eight.”
“I understood it in round two. You’re just risk-averse.”
“I’m disciplined.” He finally glances up at her, and something in his expression softens half a degree, the closest thing to open affection I’ve seen out of him in a decade of knowing the man. “You’d know the difference if you managed money for a living instead of arguing about wide receivers.”
“Give me five years.” “I’ll hold you to that.”
It’s a small exchange. Thirty seconds, maybe less.
But I catch the way Brooks watches her walk back to her seat after, the same even attention he gives a balance sheet before he decides whether to trust it, and something tightens low in my chest, and it isn’t about fantasy football. I need a drink. I go make one.
The kitchen is narrow. Galley-style, one of the trade-offs for the water view — I designed it that way myself, back when the only thing I was thinking about was counter space and morning light. I didn’t think about how it would feel with someone else standing in it.
Mia follows me in. “I’ll help.” “I’ve got it.”
“You always say that.” She’s already got the ice bucket, already reaching past me for the bourbon on the shelf over the stove, and the kitchen isn’t built for two people who aren’t paying attention to the six inches between them.
My arm crosses hers going for the same bottle.
Her hip finds the counter edge when she turns.
Her hair — down now, loose, salt-smelling, and under that, the shampoo I keep in the guest bath because she likes it better than whatever’s in the master — brushes my forearm when she reaches up for the glasses.
I step back. Give her the counter. She doesn’t move.
She stays where she is, glass in one hand, my eyes on hers, and for a second neither of us pours anything.
The ice in the bucket melts a little louder than it should. Somewhere behind us the TV runs highlights nobody’s watching.
“You’re staring,” she says. “I’m pouring.”
“You stopped pouring four seconds ago.”
I look down. She’s right. I set the bottle down before I say something I can’t walk back in a kitchen with three of my closest friends twenty feet away, close enough to hear a raised voice, not close enough — yet — to hear whatever this silence is.
She’s not my blood. I remind myself of that more than a man my age should have to.
Married her mother when Mia was young enough that “stepdad” was a word that meant the man who’s here now.
I was steady. Present. That’s what I told myself for years, and it was mostly true — right up until it wasn’t anymore, and I can name the night it stopped.
Eight months ago.
Her aunt’s birthday, a backyard in Tampa strung with string lights, a folding table of sheet cake nobody had cut yet.
I walked in expecting the person I remembered — someone I’d only ever thought of as family — and found a woman in a green dress standing near the drink table, laughing at something, talking to someone else’s husband like she owned the conversation. I said her name. She turned.
Something in my chest did a controlled demolition — quiet, contained, structural integrity coming down in under a second, walls I’d spent years assuming were load-bearing turning out to be nothing but drywall.
I left early. Told my ex-wife’s sister I had an early flight.
I didn’t have an early flight. I drove two hours with the windows down so the wind would give me something else to think about besides the fact that Mia had grown into someone I couldn’t stop looking at, and I hadn’t earned the right to look.
I’ve spent eight months not calling her. I called her back the one time she needed a place to stay, because saying no to that would’ve required an explanation I wasn’t ready to give either of us.
“You okay?” she asks. Still not moving. “Fine.”
“You get this look sometimes.” She tilts her head, studying me the way she studies a draft board — like there’s a pattern in it she’s about to name out loud. “Like you’re solving something you don’t like the answer to.”
“Get the tonic,” I tell her. “Table’s thirsty.”
She goes. I stand in my own kitchen for another ten seconds before I trust myself to walk back out, and even then I take the long way, past the window, past the view of the water I built this whole house around, and none of it holds my attention for more than a second.
Jax finds his opening during a commercial break, half a bourbon in, feet up on the ottoman like he owns the place.
“So,” he says, low enough that it’s aimed at me and not the room. “You gonna tell me you brought her here for the Wi-Fi, or are we all pretending?”
“She needed a place to stay.”
“Sure she did.” He grins around the rim of his glass. “Ever since the divorce, apparently. And you happened to pick this weekend. This house. The one with the good bourbon and the one bed she’s definitely not sleeping in.”
“Careful.”
“I’m not saying anything everybody at this table hasn’t already noticed, Grant.
” He drops his voice further, and for once there’s no performance in it.
“I’ve known you twenty years. I’ve watched you build a company out of nothing, watched you go through the divorce without saying ten words about it to any of us.
I’ve never seen you like this. Not with anyone. ”
“Like what.”
“Like a man trying real hard to look bored.” He nods toward the kitchen doorway, where Mia’s laughing at something Tate said, head tipped back, unguarded. “You’re not bored, brother. You’re rationed. There’s a difference.”
I don’t answer that. There isn’t an answer that doesn’t confirm it.
Mia laughs again — bright, easy, that same unguarded sound — and I watch it happen without meaning to.
Everything in me organizes around it, the way a compass organizes around north whether or not you asked it to.
Jax watches me watch her and doesn’t say another word.
He doesn’t have to. His eyebrows do the talking, and he goes back to his draft board grinning like a man who won a bet he never placed out loud.
Midnight, and the draft’s paused until morning.
Tate and Brooks are out on the deck with cigars and the last of the bourbon, arguing about a trade that hasn’t happened yet and probably never will, their voices carrying low and easy through the screen door like men who’ve had this exact argument a dozen times before and enjoy it more each time.
Jax went up an hour ago. Mia said goodnight around eleven — stood, stretched, said something about the pool tomorrow, and disappeared down the hallway toward the guest wing — and I made myself watch the draft board instead of the doorway she went through.
I’m failing at it now. Standing at the sliding door with a glass I’m not drinking, looking at a dark hallway like it owes me something.
Her phone went off six times at dinner. She never touched it.
Every time it buzzed against the counter she got a little quieter, a little more present in the conversation in front of her — like she was building a wall out of fantasy football stats and Tate’s terrible jokes, brick by brick, between herself and whoever was calling.
I know who it is. I know because I know her mother, and I know what her silence sounds like right before it finally decides to call.
The wind’s picked up outside, pushing the palms against the side of the house in a steady, restless rhythm, and I stand there long enough that the sound of it starts to feel like a countdown of its own.
I’m not the one who should be standing here wondering who she’s avoiding.
I don’t have the standing for that. I gave it up — or never had it, depending on which version of this story I tell myself on a given night— the day I let her walk in wearing my old jersey and didn’t say a word about it.
The day I picked this house for the draft instead of the condo in town, telling myself it was the better kitchen.
The day I answered her call in the first place and heard I need somewhere to stay and didn’t hesitate for even a second before I said come here.
Tate’s laugh carries in from the deck, loud, easy, nothing on his mind heavier than tomorrow’s picks.
I envy that more than I’d admit to any of them.
I finish the bourbon I said I wasn’t drinking.
Down the hall, a door closes soft. I go to bed alone, and I lie there listening to the house settle around four other people who all, in their own ways, already know something I haven’t said out loud yet.