22. Chapter 22
Maya
***
I stop by the shop briefly after I leave the site office.
I don't know why, exactly. Habit, maybe. Or the need to be somewhere familiar before I figure out what comes next. Lily looks up when I walk in and takes one look at my face and doesn't ask. I tell her I'll see her tomorrow. She nods. That's all.
Then I go home, which is not something I do in the middle of a Thursday, and the fact that I am doing it now tells me more about my state of mind than I am prepared to examine directly.
I make tea I don't drink. I sit at the kitchen table with the landlord notice smoothed flat in front of me and I read it again, not because there is anything new in it, but because sometimes you need to read a thing several times before it stops feeling like something that is happening to someone else.
Ransome Group.
His name. On my lease.
I think about every word he said at the site office.
To protect it. To protect you. Then the envelope he tried to give me, and how it would have felt if he had come to me first. If he had said: Maya, I want to do this.
I know the numbers don't work, but what if we figured something out together? Even just a conversation.
That's all I wanted. To be included. To have him want to include me.
He doesn't need my permission. I know that. It's his money, his decision, his right. But we have shared the most meaningful weeks of my life. We have fallen in love. And all I needed was for him to open a door and say: come in, I want you here for this.
He didn't. And now he is my landlord. And I don't know what to do with that, or with him, or with the fact that I love him and I am furious with him and both of those things are completely, exhaustingly true at the same time.
I pick up my phone.
I text Lily: I need a lawyer. Not his.
She responds in four minutes: I know one. I'll send the details.
Then: Maya, is everything okay? Are you at home? Do you want me to come over?
I smile at my phone in the way you smile at someone who knows you well enough to ask the right questions and loves you enough not to push when you say no.
I'm fine, Lily, really. I'm just making sure I'm ready for when the time comes. But thank you. I'll see you tomorrow.
I set the phone face down on the kitchen table and sit with the silence of my apartment, which is different from the silence of the shop, smaller and more personal, the silence of a space that holds only me and everything I think when nobody is watching.
The kiss comes back to me.His fingers sliding along my cheek to my jaw, the lightest possible pressure, and the way my eyes closed before I could decide whether to let them. I love you, said in my shop with the morning light coming through the front glass and flowers all around us.
For one impossible moment, I wonder if any of it was real.
I know it was real. It has to have been.
At least for me it was. Still is. And I am not so wounded or so stubborn that I cannot see the difference between a man who performed feelings to manage a situation and a man who fell in love with a woman he didn't plan to fall in love with and handled it imperfectly because handling things imperfectly is what people do when they are learning to be something other than alone.
No one is perfect.
I go to bed at ten.
I don't sleep until well past midnight.
***
The certified letter arrives at dawn.
I hear the mail slot as I'm sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee I have been nursing since five-thirty. I walk down the hallway and pick it up. The return address makes something cold move through my chest.
Lowell's law firm.
I open it standing in the hallway in my bathrobe, with the early morning light coming through the transom window and I read it once, slowly, the way you read things you need to be certain you have understood correctly.
The building at fourteen Linden Rise is the subject of a formal forced auction proceeding.
In light of the disputed ownership status arising from the Ransome Group's acquisition and the subsequent deed transfer challenge filed with the county clerk, the property will be subject to a forced auction to resolve the ownership dispute.
The hearing is scheduled in seventy-two hours.
Seventy-two hours.
I read it again.
Then I fold it carefully along its original crease and I set it on the kitchen table beside my coffee and I sit down and I look at it and I breathe, slowly and carefully, the way I have been breathing through hard things my whole life, and I think about what seventy-two hours means.
It means Lowell has been watching. It means he filed his county clerk complaint knowing exactly what it would trigger, knowing that a disputed ownership creates the conditions for exactly this kind of forced proceeding, knowing that seventy-two hours is not enough time for a woman running a flower shop on Main Street to mount a proper legal response.
It means he planned this.
It means this was always where he was heading, from the municipal room to the planning committee leak to the threat note to this certified letter on my kitchen table at dawn, and every step of it has been designed to get to this moment, to this letter, to this seventy-two hours.
My phone lights up on the table.
Sawyer's name on the screen.
I look at it for a long time.
I don't answer.
I am not ready to answer. I am not ready to hear his voice and feel the complicated mixture of things I feel when I hear it. I cannot make a decision about the next seventy-two hours from inside that mixture.
I need to think clearly first. I need to do that thinking alone, the way I have always done the hardest thinking, before I let anyone else into the room with it.
The call goes to voicemail.
***
I sit at the kitchen table for a long time.
The certified letter is in front of me. The coffee is cold. The morning light is fully in the room now, ordinary and indifferent, the kind of light that doesn't care what is happening in the lives of the people it falls on.
Seventy-two hours.
I think about the shop.
My mother's folding table. My grandmother's books. My father's oak counter. All of it could be gone in the next seventy-two hours.
And then I think about the fact that the bravest thing I have ever done might be the thing I am most afraid of doing. Let someone in.
I pick up my phone. I see Sawyer's name. But I don't call him. Not just yet.
I call my lawyer.