Epilogue
Sawyer
***
One year later.
The Tokyo call connects at nine, which means it is eleven at night on their end, a courtesy I extended without being asked because it is the kind of thing I do now, considering the hour on someone else's side of the world before I consider my own convenience.
Five faces appear on the screen in a neat grid, all of them in the crisp formality of people who have dressed for a meeting they could have taken in their pajamas, and Grace appears in a small window to my left on the screen, laptop open in her own office down the hall, taking minutes with the quiet efficiency of a woman who has sat through several hundred meetings exactly like this one and has never once needed to ask a question twice.
We are forty minutes into a conversation about a mixed-use development in the Shibuya district, a project with real potential, the kind of deal I would have closed without hesitation a year and a half ago, when the study door opens.
I don't look up immediately. I am mid-sentence, something about phased construction timelines, and I assume it is Mrs. Alderton with tea or Grace's assistant with a folder, and then I do look up, because the room has gone slightly brighter, and Maya is standing in the doorway in a yellow sundress, looking faintly apologetic.
"I'm sorry," she says, quiet enough that the microphone shouldn't catch it. "I didn't realize you were in a meeting."
"Gentlemen," I say, "would you excuse me for just a moment."
I mute myself.
"It's all right," I tell her. "Come in. Make yourself at home."
"I just need to find a book. I'll be quick."
"Take your time," I say, and unmute, and return to phased construction timelines with what I would like to believe is my full attention.
It is not my full attention.
There is nothing, I think, somewhere in the part of my brain not currently occupied with Shibuya zoning regulations, quite like a beautiful woman in a yellow sundress wandering into your study on a Tuesday morning and rising onto her toes to search your bookshelves, entirely unaware that she has rendered roughly forty percent of your cognitive function temporarily inoperable.
I answer a question about contractor bids. I answer it competently, I think, though I could not tell you afterward what I said.
Maya moves along the lower shelves first, then the middle ones, her finger trailing the spines the way she has done in this room since the very first time she stood in it and found something I had been hoping she wouldn't, and one of the investors is asking something about timeline contingencies, and I am watching Maya's hand pause, watching her go very still, watching her reach up toward the third shelf from the top.
I know exactly which shelf that is.
"Gentlemen," I say, "would you excuse me for a moment."
I mute myself again. I click the camera off this time, a small mercy to everyone involved.
"That's my French poetry," I say.
Maya turns, the slim volume already in her hand, entirely unbothered by having been caught. "I know. Fitzgerald wanted me to read to him."
"Fitzgerald."
"Yes. Outside, of course." She tilts her head, the tilt that means she is enjoying herself. "Don't you know that about your own cat?"
"He's not my cat." A pause. "Also, he doesn't go outside."
"He does today."
She turns toward the door. "Come on, Fitz."
There is a soft, indignant thump from the direction of the armchair, where I now notice Fitzgerald, who has apparently acquired a nickname I was not consulted about, has been the entire time.
This should not bother me. He is not my cat.
He stands, stretches with the elaborate unhurried dignity of a creature who has never once in his life been told what to do, and follows her out of the room as though it were the most natural thing in the world, which, I am forced to admit, for the two of them, it has become.
I sit there for a moment, looking at the empty doorway.
I unmute. I turn the camera back on.
"My apologies," I say, and make it three more minutes through a discussion of permit timelines before I understand, with the clarity that has only ever arrived for me in this house, in this study, regarding this woman, that I am done pretending I am present in this meeting.
"Gentlemen," I say. "I'm sorry. Something important has come up that requires my attention. My sincere apologies. Could we reschedule?"
They say yes, of course, the way people say yes to me, though I notice, not for the first time, that it no longer feels like deference. It simply feels like courtesy, the ordinary kind, exchanged between people who respect each other's time.
"Grace, are you there?"
"Yes sir."
"Could you wrap this up and reschedule for me? Thank you. Gentlemen, thank you. We'll speak soon."
I end the call with a single click.
I pull the earpiece out and set it on the desk, and for a moment the study is entirely silent in the way it is only silent when something has just stopped being necessary.
***
From the terrace I can see them.
Maya is on a quilt spread in the shade of the old oak at the edge of the lawn, the same oak I used to look at from this exact terrace during the first months I lived here, back when the grounds were simply something I owned rather than somewhere I belonged.
Fitzgerald is curled up against side, already half asleep.
Beyond them, near the rose beds, Ellie and Lily are walking the perimeter of what will eventually be the wedding arbor, Ellie gesturing with both hands at something in the middle distance, Lily nodding and writing in a small notebook she has not put down in three weeks.
Grace has set up at the far end of the terrace with her laptop, rescheduling the morning I just dismantled, sending the kind of efficient, gracious emails that will leave five businessmen in Tokyo with the distinct impression that they were the ones who suggested postponing.
The whole garden is moving, quietly, in its own directions, the way life does when there are enough people in it who care about it.
I cross the lawn.
Maya looks up before I reach her. "Is the meeting over already?"
"No," I say, sitting down beside her on the quilt. "I postponed it. Something more important came up. Spending time with my beautiful bride."
"Oh?"
I take her hand, turn it over and kiss the center of her palm, the way I have wanted to since I watched her, in a yellow sundress, rise onto her toes and reach for a third shelf I know better than I know most of my own portfolio, and then I lean in and kiss her slowly, letting it linger, the kind of kiss that has nowhere else to be but right here.
"Would you read to me?" she asks, when I finally pull back.
"I thought you would never ask."
She lifts Fitzgerald, who makes a sound of profound and theatrical inconvenience, and settles him on the quilt beside her before lying back herself, her head finding my lap as though it has always belonged there, which, by now, I suppose it has.
Fitzgerald resettles against her side, and she rests one hand on his head, scratching slowly behind his ears, and he leans into it with his eyes closed, utterly undone.
I look down at him.
"You're still not my cat," I tell him.
He does not open his eyes.
I open the book.
The poem I choose is one I have read perhaps a hundred times alone, late at night, in a life that felt, until very recently, like something I was simply enduring rather than living.
For years it was the one thing that was only mine, read in the dark when sleep wouldn't come, in a study no one else entered, in a language I never explained to anyone.
I never imagined reading it in daylight.
I certainly never imagined reading it out loud, to someone, in the middle of an ordinary morning, with a cat who has very clearly made his own choice listening as closely as she is.
I read it slowly, in French, the words familiar enough now that I barely need the page, and somewhere in the middle of the second stanza Maya's hand finds mine where it rests against the edge of the quilt, and her breathing slows into the rhythm of someone who is not asleep but entirely, completely at peace.
The morning light moves through the leaves above us.
Somewhere across the lawn, Ellie laughs at something Lily has said. Grace's laptop closes with a soft click. Fitzgerald sighs the long, contented sigh of a creature with absolutely nowhere else he would rather be.
I keep reading.
Maya's thumb moves once, slow, against the back of my hand. Fitzgerald's ear twitches at the sound of my voice and goes still again.
The thing I kept only for myself for fifteen years, I am giving away freely now, in plain daylight, to the two of them, and I find I do not miss the keeping of it at all.
Maya's eyes are still closed. Her hand is still in mine. Fitz is still sleeping.
I keep reading…
The End
Thank you for reading The Grumpiest Billionaire Next Door!