4. The Number I Didnt Save #2
I used the metric scale instead of the imperial. I didn't even notice. Ten minutes of work is completely useless because my brain is running on a totally different track.
"Damn."
The sound of my phone ringing on the wooden plank behind me draws my attention. For several seconds, my muscles lock, and my stomach turns to ice as the thought of the number with the Houston area code rises in my mind.
I turn around slowly, holding my breath as I reach for the phone.
The screen flashes. Gran Iris and a massive, ragged sigh of relief leave my mouth, my shoulders drop three inches as the tension drains from my spine. I swipe the screen and press the glass to my ear, my voice shaking slightly as I greet her.
"Gran?"
"Nora, darling," her voice comes through the line, rich and warm. "I was just sitting on the porch thinking about you and your father. How is Arthur doing today, sweetheart?"
I sit back down on the stool, pulling my knees up against my chest to fight the chill of the marsh wind. "He's resting, Gran. The stroke… It's taken a lot out of him. He's sleeping most of the day now. I'm just trying to keep the wheels turning."
The line goes quiet for a beat, the subtle hiss of long-distance static the only sound between us.
"Nora," Iris says, her tone shifting into a sharp, maternal register that means she's looking right through my defenses. "You sound upset. What's wrong? And don't tell me it's just the house foundation."
I let out a weak, dry chuckle, my forehead coming down against my knees.
Gran Iris is the only person left alive who can read my blueprints without a legend.
After my mother died, she stayed in Moonrise for two years, keeping our family from completely dissolving into the salt earth. She knows me better than anyone.
"I found a deed, Gran," I confess, the truth slipping out because I'm too tired to hold it back. "In Daddy's bottom desk drawer. It's for the fifteen acres behind the house. The land where Clara is."
"Oh," Iris breathes, the word small and loaded with thirty years of memory. "Arthur never did clear that up, did he? I knew Margaret Rowe had given him a lease back in the seventies, but I always wondered what happened after she passed."
"The lease expired twelve months ago," I say, my hand tightening around the phone.
"We don't own it. And the new owner… her son, Jackson…
he won't sell. I went over to his salvage yard yesterday morning to offer him a buyout, and he basically told me to go to hell.
He said the land isn't for sale for any price. "
Gran hums slowly. "Jackson. Yes, everyone called him Jax as far as I can remember. He was broody, one, Nora. Always on those loud dirt bikes, covered in mud, grease up to his elbows. But he loved his mother. Lord, he loved her to death."
"Tell me about her, Gran," I plead. "If I'm going to change his mind, I need to know what I'm building against. Why is he so stubborn about the land?"
Gran sighs. "Margaret Rowe died when Jax was twenty-five, Nora. It was a terrible business. They ruled it a suicide, said she took a bottle of sleeping pills in that old house by the water. But let me tell you something, sweetheart: I never believed that ruling. Not for a single goddamn second."
I freeze, my pen hovering over the vellum. "Why?"
"Because Margaret was careful," Iris says, her voice dropping into a guarded whisper. "She was a woman who measured the wood before she cut it, just like you do. And she loved that boy too much to leave him with that kind of mess."
She pauses briefly. "It just didn't make sense to anyone who actually knew her.
But the county wanted it closed, and they closed it.
After she died, the land got tied up in probate, the taxes went unpaid, and the bank took most of it.
Jax joined up with some rough crowd, those motorcycle people from the highway, and nobody saw him for years. "
"But he came back," I tell her.
"He did," Iris agrees. "I heard he worked his butt off to buy back every single square inch of his mother's original survey. He cleared the scrap, built that salvage yard with his own hands, and didn't ask this town for a single favor."
"Oh, Gran."
"That land isn't just dirt to him, honey. It's the only thing he has left of his mother. It's his monument to her. If he thinks you're trying to take a piece of it, he's going to fight you like a dog."
I stare out over the gray water of the creek, understanding a little bit more. He isn't being an asshole. He's being a son.
"Nora?" Iris calls out, breaking my thoughts. "Are you still there?"
"I'm here, Gran," I say softly. "I'm just… I'm realizing that this isn't a business negotiation. It means a lot to him, too. But he doesn't know what the land represents for me. He doesn't know about Clara."
He doesn't know that I carried her for eight months and then I fell.
One careless moment on a wet staircase.
One second of not being careful enough.
I've been careful about everything ever since.
It hasn't helped.
I think about the way his voice changed when I mentioned my father. The way his eyes never stopped watching the exits. The way he stood in that salvage yard like a man guarding something nobody else could see.
Maybe grief leaves fingerprints.