Chapter 18 #2
That was what I'd told her. That I was in Charleston exploring a job opportunity.
Doing due diligence. It was true enough—true in the way that the best covers were true, which was to say it contained no lies and omitted most of the story.
She hadn't pushed for details and I hadn't offered them, and the arrangement had held for four days with the unspoken agreement that some things would be shared when they were ready and not before.
"Good," I said. "Better than good, actually. The mission is—" I paused, choosing words the way I chose footholds on uncertain ground. "It's the kind of work I've been looking for without knowing I was looking for it. The people are serious. The resources are real. And Charleston is—"
"Growing on you," she finished.
"Yeah." I looked at the river. "Growing on me."
We talked about that for a while. What living in Charleston might look like—not together, neither of us had said that word, but in the same city, which was its own kind of conversation.
She described the neighborhoods she'd walked.
I described the waterfront near Dominion Hall, the view from the bluff, the harbor at different hours.
We talked about it the way two people talked about a place they were both starting to imagine themselves in, circling the idea of permanence without landing on it directly.
Then I cut in.
"What is this to you?"
The words came out sharper than I'd planned. Almost blurted—the kind of thing that happens when something's been sitting in your chest for days and the pressure finally exceeds the container's capacity.
Louisa looked at me. The brightness from the warehouse tour was still in her eyes, but something else had entered—a caution, subtle, the kind that appeared in intelligent people when they sensed the ground shifting beneath a conversation.
"Do you mean the two of us?" she asked.
"Yes."
She reached across the table and took my hand. Her grip was warm, firm, deliberate—the grip of a woman who didn't do things accidentally.
"It's the best thing that's happened to me in recent memory," she said. Simply. Without decoration. The way the truest things got said.
I should have let it land. Should have sat with it the way I'd sat with the bourbon in the lounge and the silence in the car and all the other good things this woman had given me. Should have let the words be enough.
I pressed.
"I need to know," I said.
Something shifted in her eyes. The caution deepening—not into alarm, not yet, but into the focused attention of someone who'd just realized this conversation was going somewhere she hadn't mapped.
"What are you really asking, Grant?"
It was time to tell her. Not everything—not the full architecture of the damage, not the forensic detail. But something. Enough for her to understand why the question wasn't casual, why the need behind it had edges.
"I've been burned," I said. "Bad." I looked at the table.
At our hands. At the way her fingers laced through mine like they belonged there, which was the whole problem—they felt like they belonged there, and the last time something had felt like it belonged, it had been ripped away so completely that the phantom pain still woke me at night.
"I was married," I said. "I thought I had it.
The real thing—the kind that lasts." The words came out stripped.
"She put on a good front. Was sweet as cherry pie.
Then the sex went away. She said she wasn't wired for it anymore.
I believed her—because I loved her, and you believe the people you love, even when believing them means swallowing something that tastes wrong.
" I paused. "Then I found out about the affair.
A guy from her high school. Three blocks from where she grew up.
The whole time she was telling me she didn't want it anymore, she was giving it to someone else. "
I said it out loud. All of it. And I half-expected her to laugh.
She didn't laugh.
She held my hand. Held my gaze. And the expression on her face wasn't pity—I'd have pulled away from pity. It was recognition. The look of someone who understood that damage had a structure, and she was seeing the blueprint.
"Right now," she said, "in this moment, the only person I want to be with is you."
"What if that changes?"
"I can't see the future, Grant. Things happen. People change. I can't promise you that—"
"That's not good enough."
The words landed between us like something dropped from height.
I heard them and knew immediately that they were too heavy for the space they'd fallen into—too much weight, too much need, the sound of a man trying to nail down something that couldn't be nailed because living things didn't survive being pinned.
Louisa's hand was still in mine. But something in her grip shifted.
"What do you want from me?" she asked. Her voice was steady, but I could hear the edge beneath it—the sharp, clean edge of a woman who'd spent her life being told what she was and what she wasn't and had come to Charleston specifically to stop accepting other people's definitions.
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
What did I want? I wanted her. Wanted her the way I'd wanted the buckle at Pendleton—completely, possessively, with the absolute certainty that this thing was mine and I would hold on to it with everything I had.
I wanted to know she wasn't going anywhere.
Wanted to know that the woman sitting across from me—this brilliant, fierce, bourbon-eyed woman who'd built something in her head that was going to change an industry—wanted me the way I wanted her.
Not temporarily. Not provisionally. Not until something better or easier or less damaged came along.
But the words wouldn't form. The thing I wanted to say was tangled up in the thing I was afraid to say, and both of them were wrapped around the thing I didn't know how to say, which was that I wanted to claim her, own her, make her mine.
And I knew—somewhere beneath the tangle, in the part of me that was smarter than my fear—that the wanting itself was the problem.
Not because wanting was wrong. Because the way I wanted—the white-knuckle, death-grip, eight-second way—was the thing that had strangled my marriage and driven Rachel into someone else's arms and left me standing in an empty apartment in Minneapolis wondering what I'd done wrong.
Or was it? Had the grip been the problem, or had Rachel simply been the wrong thing to hold? Was the instinct broken, or had I just been aiming it at someone who was never going to hold me back?
I didn't know. I didn't fucking know.
I stood up from the table.
Louisa looked up at me. The expression on her face—I'd remember it for a long time. Not anger. Not hurt. Something worse. The look of a woman who'd been watching something beautiful take shape and had just seen a crack appear in the foundation.
"I have to go," I said. "Work stuff. They need me at—" I didn't finish the sentence because there was nowhere to finish it to. The lie was transparent and we both knew it.
"Grant—"
"I'll call you," I said. Which was what cowards said. Which was what men said when they were running and didn't have the courage to call it what it was.
I left money on the table for the lunch neither of us had finished. Picked up my phone. Walked toward the street with the stride of a man who was covering ground for the purpose of putting distance between himself and a conversation he'd detonated.
Behind me, I could feel her watching. The weight of her attention on my back, the same attention she'd given the warehouse and the rafters and the floor drains—thorough, precise, missing nothing.
I didn't turn around.
The sun was still out. The river was still there. The perfect day was still technically in progress, the blue sky and the salt air and the warm light all doing their jobs as if nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
I walked. Faster now. Not toward Dominion Hall. Not toward the hotel. Just—away. The direction of a man who'd opened something he couldn't close and now needed space to figure out what the hell he'd done.
Fucking Rachel.
No. Not this time. This wasn't Rachel's fault. Rachel was three years and a thousand miles away, and whatever she'd broken in me, I was the one who kept picking at the fracture instead of letting it heal.
This was my fault. My fear. My grip—too tight, always too tight, the same white-knuckle hold my father had watched me fight with in the corral, the one he'd told me would cost me the ride if I didn't learn to loosen it.
I hadn't learned.
And now I'd walked away from a woman who'd told me I was the best thing that had happened to her in recent memory, because the best thing wasn't enough. Because I needed certainty. Because I needed a guarantee that the world didn't offer and no honest person could give.
What did I want from her?
I wanted everything. And I didn't know how to ask for it without crushing it.
The city moved around me—indifferent, ancient, unhurried. People on the sidewalk. Cars on the street. A church bell somewhere, marking an hour I didn't check.
I had no fucking clue how to be the man she deserved without being the man who destroyed it by holding on too hard.
No fucking clue what to do next.
The only thing I knew—the only clean, certain thing in the wreckage of this perfect afternoon—was that I'd had something rare in my hands, and I'd squeezed, and I'd felt it start to give.
And I didn't know if letting go now would save it or lose it forever.