12. Rafael
— ? —
Rafael
The meeting had been going on for forty-seven minutes, and I hadn’t heard a single word.
Someone was talking about farms and numbers. Davidson, maybe. One of the men who’d been here since my father’s day and still looked at me like I hadn’t earned the chair. “We’ve found a handful of small growers who could give us what we need.”
I nodded. I’d been nodding for the past hour. My body was in a glass conference room high above Manhattan. My mind was somewhere else entirely.
The conference room was all glass and steel, designed to impress. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked Manhattan. The table could seat twenty. Each chair had cost as much as a used car. Everything about this room was meant to communicate power, success, dominance.
I felt none of it.
Four years.
Four years of searching. Four years of private investigators who came back empty-handed. Four years of dead ends and false leads and the slow, grinding acceptance that Brianna Salazar had disappeared, and she’d done it well enough that even my resources couldn’t find her.
I’d almost given up. Almost. The word tasted bitter, because giving up wasn’t a thing I did, or knew how to do. But four years of nothing had worn me down close to resignation.
Then this morning, the report had landed on my desk.
“Mr. Grant?”
I looked up. Camille was watching me from across the table, her brow slightly furrowed. She’d been talking. Probably for several minutes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Could you repeat that?”
“I was asking about the timeline for the Zurich expansion. The board wants an update by Friday.”
“Right, yes. Friday.”
Camille’s frown deepened. She’d been watching me more closely lately, ever since the divorce had become public knowledge. I couldn’t tell if her concern was professional or personal, and I didn’t particularly care.
The report was in my briefcase. I’d read it seventeen times since it arrived, and I could recite every word from memory. A scout’s assessment of small farms in central Texas. Market analysis, yield projections, photographs.
One photograph in particular.
A farm stand in a town called Marigold. Tomatoes arranged with obvious care. A hand-painted sign that read SALAZAR FARM. And in the far background, slightly out of focus but unmistakable, a woman with brown hair braided back, frowning at the camera.
Bree.
My chest had tightened when I’d seen it, and my hands had started shaking. I’d stared at that photograph for so long that Katherine had knocked on my door to ask if I was all right.
I hadn’t been all right in four years.
“The little farms down in Texas are outperforming everything else we’ve got,” Davidson was saying. “One of them caught our scout’s eye. Small place, but the quality is off the charts. He wants to go back for a closer look.”
“Which farm?” The edge in my own voice surprised me.
Davidson consulted his notes. “Salazar Farm. Town called Marigold. The owner is apparently quite-”
I stood up.
The room went silent. A tableful of executives, frozen mid-thought, staring at me with expressions ranging from confusion to alarm.
“Mr. Grant?” Camille’s voice had an edge to it now. “Is everything all right?”
“I have to go.”
“We’re in the middle of a quarterly review.”
“I know.” I was already moving toward the door. “Reschedule it.”
“Rafael, the board expects-”
“I don’t care what the board expects.”
I was out of the room before she could respond. The elevator took too long. I took the stairs instead, thirty-eight floors down, my heart pounding in a way that had nothing to do with the exercise.
My footsteps echoed in the stairwell. Thirty-eight, thirty-seven, thirty-six. Each floor bringing me closer to the ground, closer to the exit, closer to her.
Marigold, Texas.
I had my assistant book the plane while I was still in the stairwell. No packing. No plan. Just a destination and a desperate, irrational need to see for myself that the woman in the photograph was real.
“Sir, should I arrange for a car at the destination?” Katherine’s voice was calm, professional. She’d learned not to ask questions when I made sudden decisions.
“Yes. Whatever’s available.”
“And luggage?”
“I won’t need any.”
A pause. “You’re flying to Texas without luggage?”
“Just book the plane, Katherine.”
The flight took three hours. I spent them staring at the report, at the photograph, at the face I’d been carrying in my memory for four years. She looked different. Older. Her face had lost some of the softness I remembered, replaced by harder lines. Weathered.
Happy.
That was what struck me most. In every memory I had of Bree, she’d been beautiful but contained. Holding part of herself back. The woman in this photograph was laughing, her whole face transformed by it, and I’d never seen her look that way.
I’d never made her look that way.
The realization sat in my chest, heavy and sharp. In all our marriage, I’d never once made my wife laugh with her whole face. I’d never given her a reason to look the way she looked in this photograph, free and joyful and completely herself.
What had I given her? A penthouse she didn’t want. A life she didn’t choose. A husband who forgot her birthday and looked at his phone when she was trying to talk to him.
No wonder she’d run.
The plane landed at a regional airport fifty miles from Marigold. The car Katherine had arranged was waiting on the tarmac. The driver said it would take an hour. He made it in forty-three minutes, because I asked him to.
The landscape changed as we drove. The suburbs gave way to farmland, flat and golden, stretching to the horizon in every direction. The sky was enormous here, bigger than any sky I’d seen in Manhattan, pressing down on the earth with a weight that felt almost physical.
This was her world. This was where she’d come from, where she’d returned, where she’d built whatever life she had now.
Marigold was smaller than I’d imagined. A town square with a gazebo. A main street with maybe a dozen businesses. A place out of movies about simple living, and nowhere else.
I had him drop me at the square and sent him back to the airport. I didn’t want an easy way out.
The silence was immediate. Not actual silence, but conversational silence. The three people on the sidewalk had been talking. Now they weren’t. They were looking at me.
A woman with a shopping bag. A man in overalls. A teenager with a bicycle. All of them staring at me with expressions that ranged from curious to hostile.
I was still wearing my suit. Still wearing my watch. Still carrying myself with the posture I carried into board rooms and billion-dollar negotiations.
In Manhattan, that posture opened doors.
Here, it closed them.
I walked to the nearest establishment, a diner with a hand-painted sign that read DOT’S. The bell jingled when I entered.
The interior was small, maybe ten tables, with a counter along one wall and a kitchen visible through a pass-through window. The smell of coffee and bacon hung in the air. A radio was playing country, the volume low.
A woman behind the counter looked up. She was maybe sixty, with gray hair pinned back and an apron that had seen better decades. Her face was weathered, her hands capable, her expression immediately guarded.
“Help you?”
“I’m looking for someone. A woman named Brianna. Brianna Salazar.”
The woman’s expression didn’t change, but the look behind her eyes went flat. The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees.
“Don’t know anyone by that name.”
“I was told she has a farm here. Salazar Farm. I saw photographs.”
“Photographs can be misleading.” She wiped the counter that didn’t need wiping.
“Is there a table available? I’ve been traveling all day.”
The woman looked around the diner. I followed her gaze. At least six tables were empty. Clean. Ready for customers. A coffee pot sat on the warmer, steam rising from the spout.
“We’re full up,” she said.
“I can see that you’re not.”
“I said we’re full.” Her voice had gone hard. “Maybe try somewhere else.”
I stared at her. She didn’t blink. Her jaw was set, her arms crossed, her entire body radiating the particular hostility of someone protecting their own.
I left.
The feed store was my next attempt. An older man with a weathered face and a cap that read MARIGOLD CO-OP was arranging bags of fertilizer near the entrance. His hands were large and calloused, the hands of someone who’d spent a lifetime working the land.
“Excuse me. I’m looking for directions to a farm. Salazar Farm.”
The man squinted at me. Took in the suit. The watch. The shoes that were already collecting dust from the unpaved lot.
“Salazar, you said?”
“Yes. Salazar Farm.”
“Well, let me think.” He scratched his chin, his expression thoughtful.
“You want to head down Main here, take a left at the water tower, go about two miles, then take another left at the old Miller place. That’ll put you on County Road 7.
Follow that for a bit, then take a right when you see the red barn. ”
“Thank you.”
I followed his directions exactly.
Forty minutes later, on foot and sweating through my shirt, I passed the same water tower for the third time.
I stopped. Stared at the water tower with the word MARIGOLD painted on its side in letters that were slowly fading.
The road stretched in both directions, empty and dusty, leading nowhere I needed to be. The sun was getting lower, and the shadows stretched long across the fields. Somewhere in the distance, a cow lowed.
A teenager on a bicycle coasted to a stop beside me. The same one from the town square. The one who’d been watching when I’d climbed out of the car.
“You lost, mister?”
“I’m looking for Salazar Farm.”
The kid’s face went through a complicated series of expressions. Surprise, recognition, and then a look that seemed almost rehearsed. His mouth twitched, fighting a smile.
“Salazar? Ain’t no Salazars here. There was a Salazar place, I think, but it burned down back in ‘09. Real tragedy. Nothing left.”
“The farm burned down.”
“Total loss. Shame, really.”
The story came out too smooth, too rehearsed. I’d spent fifteen years across tables from men who lied for a living, and this one wasn’t even good at it.
“In 2009.”
“That’s right.”
“And you remember this. A fire that happened when you were, what, five years old?”
The kid shrugged, his face carefully blank. “Family talks about it.”
The kid pedaled away, glancing back once with an expression that might’ve been amusement.
I walked back to the town square and tried a different direction.
Marigold was protecting her.
The realization settled over me with what felt almost like admiration.
These people, this town, they’d closed ranks around Bree in a way that money couldn’t buy and influence couldn’t penetrate.
They were lying to my face, all of them, with the cheerful certainty of people who’d agreed on a story and would stick to it until death.
I’d commanded four thousand employees across three continents. I’d negotiated with world leaders and industry titans and regulatory bodies that existed specifically to make my life difficult.
I couldn’t get a table at a diner in a town with one stoplight.
It was almost funny.
I walked the square. Past the hardware store, where a man in the window watched me without pretending not to.
Past the church, white clapboard with a steeple that needed painting.
Past a community center with a bulletin board advertising a women’s self-defense class taught by someone whose name had been covered with a strip of paper.
I stopped. Looked at that strip of paper. The edges were fresh, recently applied. Someone had covered that name in the past few hours.
Since I’d arrived.
Past the gazebo, where two old women sat on a bench and tracked my movement with sharp, knowing eyes.
Past the oak tree, ancient and spreading, its branches providing shade for a tire swing that swayed gently in the breeze.
And then I saw her.
She was at a farm stand near the edge of the square, arranging produce with the focus of someone who cared about the details.
Her hair was braided back, brown shot through with lighter strands from the sun.
Her hands were capable. Strong. Moving with the efficiency of someone who’d done this a thousand times.
She was laughing at whatever one of the customers had said, the laugh reshaping her whole face, and I understood suddenly why the woman in the photograph had looked so different.
She was free.
Four years. Four years of searching, of hoping, of carrying her face in my memory and wondering if I’d ever see it again.
Four years, and here she was, twenty feet away, completely unaware that I was watching.
I should’ve approached. That was why I’d come, after all. To find her. To talk to her. To say all the things I should’ve said in that hallway when she’d asked if I loved her.
I didn’t move.
Instead, I stood there in the late afternoon light and watched my ex-wife sell tomatoes, and I felt my knees threaten to buckle, and I understood for the first time in my life what it meant to want a person so badly that the wanting became a physical sensation.
She was older. Four years older, with fine lines at the corners of her eyes. She was thinner, too, the softness I remembered replaced by the lean muscle of someone who worked with her hands.
She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
And she was happy. Genuinely, visibly happy, in a way she’d never been in our penthouse, in our marriage, in our life together.
I’d done that. I’d made her so miserable that her happiness now depended on my absence.
The weight of that truth pressed down on my chest. I’d spent four years searching for her, telling myself I wanted to make things right. But standing here now, watching her laugh with strangers, I had to confront a harder question.
Did I have any right to disrupt this?
Did my regret matter more than her peace?
Someone moved in my peripheral vision. The kid on the bicycle. He’d circled back and was now coasting toward the farm stand, casual and purposeful. His legs pumped lazily at the pedals, but his eyes were fixed on me.
He stopped beside Bree, leaned in, and whispered.
I watched her body change. The relaxation disappeared. Her shoulders went rigid and her hands stopped moving over the produce, and her spine straightened into the posture of someone preparing for a fight.
She turned.
Our eyes met across the square.
The color left her face.