14. Rafael
— ? —
Rafael
The town of Marigold had decided to starve me out.
It had taken a week to understand the strategy. The first few days, I’d assumed the difficulties were normal. Small-town suspicion of outsiders. Natural wariness of someone in an expensive suit asking too many questions.
But by day five, I’d begun to see the pattern.
The ATM at the general store was perpetually out of order.
A handwritten sign hung from the screen: “Temporarily unavailable. Try again later.” I’d tried again later for six days.
The sign never changed. Every business operated on cash only, and their card machines had all been broken since ‘09, apparently.
The one restaurant in town was always full when I walked in and magically had tables available the moment I left.
“Sorry, hon,” the waitress had said on my fourth attempt. “Completely booked.”
“I can see three empty tables from here.”
“Reserved,” she said, not looking up from her order pad.
“All of them?”
“We’re very popular.”
Bree had been avoiding me with military precision. I’d catch glimpses of her, always at a distance, always turning the other way. She knew where I was at every moment, and she used that knowledge to ensure we were never in the same place.
I’d see her truck disappearing around a corner. Her back vanishing into the feed store. Her braid swinging as she walked in the opposite direction. She was a ghost I couldn’t catch, a shadow that dissolved whenever I got close.
The town helped. They watched me and reported my movements. Closed ranks so seamlessly that I couldn’t find a gap.
On day seven, I paid for my breakfast at Dot’s with the last of my cash and realized I had a problem.
The diner was quiet this morning. Two farmers at the counter, nursing coffee. An older woman by the window, reading a newspaper. All of them watched me without appearing to watch, their eyes tracking my movements even as they pretended to focus on other things.
“That’ll be eighteen fifty.” Dot held out her hand.
I counted out the bills. Eighteen dollars and forty-two cents. Everything I’d left.
“I seem to be a little short.”
Dot looked at the money. Looked at me. A small smile played at the corner of her mouth.
“Card machine’s still down. Been meaning to get that fixed.”
“It’s been down for sixteen years. According to everyone I’ve asked.”
“Technology moves slow around here.”
I stared at her. She held the stare without effort. Her face was pleasant and neutral; she’d been doing this for decades and couldn’t be rattled by anything.
“I’m not leaving,” I said.
“Never said you should.”
“I know what you’re doing. All of you. The misdirections, the broken machines, the tables that are always full. You’re trying to make me give up.”
“Is it working?” Dot’s mouth twitched.
“No.”
Dot’s smile widened. Her expression shifted toward respect. She set down the coffee pot she’d been holding.
“Then I guess you’d better find a job,” she said. “If you’re planning to stay and you’re out of money.”
“A job.”
“That’s what people do around here. They work. They earn. They contribute.” She leaned on the counter. “You want to be part of this town? You want Bree to give you the time of day? Start by proving you can do more than wave money around.”
“I run a multinational corporation.”
In Manhattan, that sentence reordered a room. Dot didn’t so much as blink.
“And?”
“I have four thousand employees.”
“How nice for them.” She topped off a farmer’s coffee without asking.
“I’m worth-”
“Doesn’t matter.” Dot cut me off. “Not here. Here, you’re just a man who can’t pay for his breakfast. So figure out how to fix that, or head on back to wherever you came from.”
She walked away.
I sat at the counter and stared at the eight cents I was short and thought about what she’d said.
A job.
The idea was absurd. I was Rafael Grant. I didn’t work jobs; I created them and signed the checks that paid the people who worked them.
I’d never applied for a job in my life. I’d gone from graduate school to my father’s company, from junior analyst to executive to CEO, the path laid out for me before I was born. The concept of walking into a business and asking for work was completely foreign to me.
But Dot was right. My money and my title meant nothing here. My power extended exactly as far as my ability to convince these people I was worth their time, and so far, that ability was failing spectacularly.
Bree.
She was the key, the way she was always the key. If I wanted to be part of her life, I had to prove I could exist in her world. Not the world I’d built for myself in Manhattan, but the world she’d built here, with her own hands, on her own terms.
I left Dot’s and walked toward the edge of town.
The farm was three miles out. I’d mapped it in my head over the past week, using the glimpses I’d caught and the information I’d gathered.
Ten acres, give or take. Chickens, goats, a pig that seemed to have free run of the property.
A white farmhouse with a red roof that I could see from the hill near the inn.
I walked the three miles in my ruined suit and my dusty shoes. The sun was hot. My shirt stuck to my back. Sweat dripped down my temples and soaked into my collar. By the time I reached the property line, I looked less business executive and more vagrant.
Good. Maybe that would help.
The gate was open. I walked through, past the chicken coop where hens scratched in the dirt, past the goat pasture where a small herd lifted their heads to watch me pass. The air smelled like hay and manure and green, growing things. Cicadas hummed in the trees.
I walked toward the cluster of women working near a large barn.
Bree was there.
She was lifting crates, her arms brown and strong, her face flushed from exertion.
She wore jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and her hair was braided back the way it had been in the photograph.
The women around her were talking, laughing, doing the work with the easy rhythm of people who’d done it a thousand times before.
A child was running between them.
Small. Maybe three or four. Dark hair in pigtails. She was playing some kind of game, weaving in and out of the adults, shrieking with laughter every time one of them pretended to catch her.
I moved closer, trying to get a better view.
The child turned.
I stopped breathing.
Her eyes.
They were blue. Not just any blue. Pale blue. The exact shade I saw every morning in the mirror, the one my mother always said made me look wolfish, the one that had marked every Grant man for three generations.
The child had my eyes.
“Stranger!”
She’d spotted me. She pointed at me with one small finger, then broke into a run, heading straight for me with the fearlessness of the very young.
“Stranger, stranger, stranger!”
Rooted to the spot, I couldn’t move, staring at this small person with my eyes and someone else’s face, and my brain was doing math it didn’t want to do.
Four years since Bree left. The child was maybe four. Which meant Bree would’ve been pregnant when she walked out of the penthouse with her suitcase and her fury and her question that I’d answered wrong.
Pregnant.
She’d been pregnant.
“Mommy, look!” The child had reached me. She was tugging at my pant leg, looking up at me with those impossible eyes. “Mommy, we have same eyes!”
I looked up. Bree had frozen in place, a crate still in her hands. Her face was white. The other women had gone silent, their eyes moving between me and the child and Bree.
“Is he my dad?” The question was directed at the yard in general, asked with the casual confidence of a child who expected answers. Then she tipped her head back and looked directly at me. “Are you?”
The question hung in the air. The child’s hand was still on my pant leg. Her eyes were still on my face. She was waiting for an answer with the patience of someone who had all the time in the world.
Bree set down the crate. Crossed the yard in quick strides. Knelt in front of the child.
“Rosie, baby, what did I say about strangers?”
“But he has my eyes, Mommy.”
The words landed somewhere under my ribs and went off. I looked at the girl, really looked this time, at the blue eyes turned up at me with plain curiosity, and every calculation I’d walked into that town with went quiet.
“I know. But Molly was calling for you. She has a cookie. Why don’t you go find her?”
“But-”
“Go on, sweetheart. I’ll be right there.”
One of the older women stepped forward, holding out her hand. The child, Rosie, went with her, casting one more curious glance back at me before disappearing around the corner of the barn.
The yard was silent.
Bree stood. Faced me.
“Is she?” The words came out raw. Broken. “Is she my daughter? Brianna, were you pregnant when you left?”
She didn’t answer. Her face was closed off, her body rigid. The other women had drifted away, giving us space, but I could feel their eyes on us from the corners of the yard.
“Were you pregnant?”
“Not here.” Her voice was tight. Controlled. “Not in front of everyone.”
She grabbed my arm and pulled me toward a structure at the edge of the property. A greenhouse, glass walls fogged with humidity. She shoved me inside and slammed the door behind us.
The heat was immediate. Thick. The air smelled like damp earth and growing things. Rows of seedlings lined the benches, green shoots reaching toward the light.
“Yes,” she said. “Rafael, that’s your daughter.”
The floor disappeared.
I’d thought I understood what I was doing here. I’d thought I understood what I wanted. I’d spent four years searching for a woman, dreaming of reconciliation, imagining some future where I could earn her forgiveness.
I’d never imagined this.
A daughter. I had a daughter. A small person with my eyes and Bree’s stubbornness, who’d run toward me without fear and asked if I was her father.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The words came out hoarse. “Why did you hide her?”
“We weren’t a couple.” Bree’s voice was hard. “We had an agreement. A business arrangement. When I left, I didn’t know how good a father you’d be.”
“You didn’t give me the chance to find out.”
“Because I was scared.” Her control cracked, and the rawness underneath showed through.
“I was scared that you’d dismiss her the way you dismissed me.
I was scared that you’d traumatize my baby with your distance and your phone and your inability to be present for anything that wasn’t your precious company.
I didn’t want her to suffer the way I did. ”
“You thought I’d hurt her?”
“I didn’t know what you’d do. That was the problem, Rafael.
I never knew what you’d do because you never let me in.
You never showed me who you really were.
You just showed up at night and reached for me in the dark and then disappeared into your office every morning, and I was supposed to build a family on that? ”
“I’d have been there.” My voice broke. “If you’d told me. I’d have been there.”
“Would you?” She laughed, but there was no humor in it.
“Would you have shown up to her soccer games? Would you have read her bedtime stories? Would you have canceled board meetings to take care of her when she was sick? Or would you have done what you always did, and let Katherine send a card, and apologized for the disruption?”
The word hit me in the chest.
Disruption.
The card I’d sent after the blackout. The moment I’d ruined by treating it as an inconvenience instead of a beginning.
“Was it so horrible?” My voice was barely a whisper. “Being married to me?”
“It was when you treated me like a piece of furniture, Rafael.”
“I didn’t realize-”
“That was the problem!” She was shouting now, years of anger finally breaking loose.
“You never realized. You were never there. You never saw me. You never wanted me. You made jokes about my life in front of the entire country and didn’t even notice when I cried in the bathroom afterward.
Why would I think you’d want my baby? Why would I think you’d be any different with her than you were with me? ”
“Because she’s different.” I stepped toward her. “Because she’s a child. Because-”
“And I wasn’t?” The hurt in her voice cut through me. “I was your wife, Rafael. I needed you. And you chose your company, every single time.”
“I know.” The words came out broken. “I know, and I’m sorry, and I can’t change what I did, but I can change what I do now.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s not.”
“We’re divorced. There’s nothing linking us anymore except-”
“Except her.” I took another step closer. “Except that little girl with my eyes who just asked if I was her father. That’s a link, Bree. That counts.”
She was crying. I could see the tears on her cheeks, the way her hands were shaking. The humidity of the greenhouse was making my shirt cling to my skin, but I barely noticed.
“She’s a girl,” I said quietly.
“What?”
“You asked why I’d want your baby. The contract wanted a boy.” I swallowed hard. “I used to pray that if you got pregnant, it’d be a girl. That would’ve given me more time with you.”
The words landed between us. Bree stared at me, her tears still falling.
“I wanted more time,” I continued. “Every day of our marriage, I wanted more time, and I was too stupid and too scared and too focused on the wrong things to take it. But I’m here now.
I’ve been searching for four years because letting you go was the biggest mistake of my life.
I never stopped wanting you, Bree. I just never knew how to say it. ”
“It’s too late.” But her voice wavered.
“Then let me prove it.” I dropped to my knees in front of her.
The dirt floor was damp. It soaked through my pants immediately.
I didn’t care. “Let me be her father. Please. Let me be in her life. I’ll prove I’m a good father.
I’ll prove I can be the man you needed and didn’t get. Just give me the chance.”
She looked down at me. This billionaire CEO kneeling in the dirt of her greenhouse, begging for the right to know his own child.
“Please,” I said again.
A long silence. The humidity pressed against us. Outside, I could hear birds calling, the faint sound of women talking, the distant shriek of a child’s laughter.
My child’s laughter.
“Okay,” Bree whispered. “Okay. You can be in her life.”
I sagged with relief. My forehead dropped to my knees. I stayed there for a moment, breathing, trying to comprehend that she’d said yes.
Then I looked up.
“One more thing.”
Her expression was wary. “What?”
I hesitated. Bit my lip. The question was absurd, but I had to ask it.
“Are you hiring?”