9. Rafael #2
I’d never said: I watch you dance when you think I’m working.
I’d never said: your laugh makes me forget what I was doing.
And I’d never said: I think about you constantly, and I don’t know how to make that into words, so I just keep watching, keep collecting moments, keep building a library of you that I only visit alone.
I could’ve told her. Other men told their wives these things. It wasn’t, as far as I could tell, a rare or difficult skill.
But no one had ever taught me how, and my father had spent twenty years teaching me the opposite.
He wasn’t cruel. My parents were good parents, in every way that could be measured.
They fed me and schooled me and loved me in the careful, guarded manner of people who had learned the hard way what the world did with a soft thing.
Warren Grant built an empire in an industry that ate men alive, and the first real lesson he ever gave me, earlier than calculus or contracts, was this: never let them see what you feel.
Emotion is a lever. Show a man where yours is, and he’ll pull it.
Everyone is looking for your soft place, so don’t have one.
Or if you must have one, bury it so deep that nobody, yourself included, can ever find it.
I’d been very, very good at that lesson. I’d buried everything so well that when a woman with green eyes and dirt under her fingernails finally asked me, point blank, what was down there, I stood in a hallway and gave her the only honest answer I had. Which was no answer at all.
Because I hadn’t known. I’d never loved a woman before Bree.
I’d never had the chance to learn the shape of it, to fumble through a clumsy first version with someone, to find out that love was a thing you said out loud and not a spreadsheet you kept in secret.
I loved my parents, and I’d assumed that was the entire range of what the word could hold.
I’d had no idea it came in another form altogether, one that could level a grown man, one I’d have thrown the whole company into the sea to feel one more time.
And the worst part, the part I couldn’t forgive myself for, was that I’d thought I was giving it to her.
I’d put a roof over her head and a deed in her name she never even knew about.
I’d watched her sleep and memorized the exact sound of her laugh, and I’d genuinely believed a marriage could run on that.
She’d needed me to say it. Once. Out loud, with my eyes open, in a language that couldn’t be filed under Work Backup.
I hadn’t known how. And now she was gone.
Do you love me?
Her voice echoed in my head. The question she’d asked in the hallway, suitcase in hand, tears on her face.
I don’t know what I feel about you. I’ve never known.
The worst lie I’d ever told, and I hadn’t even known it was a lie when I said it.
I’d panicked. That was the truth. She’d asked the question, and I’d panicked, and my mouth had produced words that had nothing to do with reality. I don’t know, and I never have. The coward’s answer. I’d been too afraid to say the truth out loud.
I knew now.
Knew it the way I knew structural loads and profit margins and every other piece of data I’d ever committed to memory. I knew it with the same certainty, the same precision, the same absolute conviction.
I loved her.
Loved her, and I’d been too scared and too frozen to say it when it mattered. I’d stood in that hallway with the woman I’d married, the woman I’d watched dance and read and laugh across all those years, and I’d told her I didn’t know.
I didn’t know.
Of all the failures. Of all the mistakes. Of all the ways I’d hurt her without meaning to, without realizing, without paying enough attention to see the damage I was causing.
That, I couldn’t forgive.
I set the phone down. Stared at the ceiling. The ceiling stared back, blank and white and offering nothing.
Then I picked up the phone again and dialed.
“Grant residence.” The voice was formal. The family butler, Harding, who’d worked for my parents since before I was born.
“Harding. It’s Rafael. I need to speak with my father.”
A pause. “Mr. Grant Senior is in a meeting, sir. Shall I have him return your call?”
“No. This can’t wait.”
Another pause. Then: “One moment, please.”
The line clicked. Hold music played, classical and inoffensive. Vivaldi, maybe. My mother’s choice.
I waited.
“Rafael.” My father’s voice, cautious. He’d heard about the divorce. Everyone had heard about the divorce. The press had been circling for weeks, and I’d given them nothing, which only made them hungrier.
“I need Gus Salazar’s address.”
A long silence.
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to Texas. And I need to know where to find him.”
“Rafael, if this is about the divorce-”
His voice had gone careful, the tone people save for men they suspect are coming apart. Maybe I was. I found I didn’t care.
“It’s about my wife. My ex-wife. The woman I drove away because I was too focused on the company you handed me to notice what I had at home.”
My father exhaled. I could picture him, sitting in his study, rubbing the bridge of his nose the way he always did when his children disappointed him.