Chapter 14 Charlie
CHARLIE
Ididn’t know where I was.
That was the first thing—before the grief, before the memory, before the weight of yesterday resettled on my chest like something with claws. Just the blankness of waking in a room I didn’t recognize, in a bed that wasn’t mine, with light coming from the wrong direction.
The ceiling was wood. Dark beams, rough-cut, the kind that looked like they’d been part of a tree recently enough to remember it.
The sheets were white and impossibly soft—the thread count of someone who’d never had to check a thread count.
And the light. The light was wrong because it wasn’t the flat, wet tropical light of Roatan.
It was sharp. Thin. Mountain light, the kind that comes through clean air at altitude and lands on everything like a verdict.
Aspen. Right.
The flight. The car from the airstrip. Asher’s hand on my elbow as he’d guided me through a door I barely registered. A hallway. This room. Extra blankets already on the bed, folded in thirds at the foot like a hotel but not a hotel because hotels didn’t smell like cedar and woodsmoke and cold air.
Sarah was dead.
There it was. The thing my brain had been circling for the three seconds of blankness, waiting for me to be awake enough to receive it.
Sarah was dead and I was in a billionaire’s guest room in the Colorado mountains because I’d said OK while lying on a floor in Roatan at one in the morning, and now here I was.
I lay there and let it settle. Not fighting it. I’d learned something on that veranda floor—fighting didn’t work. You couldn’t outthink grief. You couldn’t analyze it into submission. It just sat there, heavy and patient, and you either let it be or it flattened you.
The compass was on the nightstand. I didn’t remember putting it there, but I must have, because it was sitting next to a glass of water I also didn’t remember and a phone that showed three missed calls from numbers I didn’t recognize and one text from Mia that said simply: I’m coming.
I stared at that for a long time. I’m coming.
Two words. No question mark, no exclamation point, no follow-up asking where or why or what happened.
Just the Mia equivalent of Destry sitting in a Four Seasons lobby for six hours.
She knew. Somehow she already knew, and she was coming, and that was that.
My eyes burned. I pressed my palms against them and breathed.
The room was cold in a way that felt intentional—like the house itself ran at a temperature calibrated for someone who generated enough internal heat to compensate.
I pulled the extra blanket up to my chin and noticed, with a specificity that made my chest hurt, that it was the exact right weight. Not too heavy, not decorative.
Coffee. That’s what got me out of bed—not courage, not determination, not any of the noble impulses my mother would have approved of. Just the smell of coffee drifting up a staircase I didn’t remember climbing.
I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror and almost laughed.
Almost. My face was swollen from crying, my hair was doing something structurally unsound, and I was wearing the same clothes from last night because I’d been too wrecked to change and too proud to ask where the towels were.
I splashed water on my face. Pulled my hair into a knot.
Put on the sweater I’d packed for Roatan evenings that was laughably insufficient for March in the Rockies but was all I had.
The staircase was wide and open, made of the same rough-cut wood as the ceiling beams. And as I came down, the house opened up around me in a way that made me stop on the third step from the bottom.
It was—God. Log and glass. That was the shorthand, but it didn’t capture it.
The main floor was one enormous space—living area, kitchen, a dining table long enough for twelve that looked like it had never seated more than one.
Floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall, and through them: mountains.
Not the polite, postcard kind. The kind that filled your entire field of vision, white-capped and massive and completely indifferent to whatever small human drama you were bringing to their doorstep.
A fireplace anchored the living area, stone from floor to ceiling, wide enough to stand in.
Embers were still glowing from what must have been last night’s fire.
The furniture was leather and wood and looked like it had been chosen by someone who understood quality but didn’t care about impressing anyone.
No art on the walls. No photographs. Just those windows and those mountains and a silence so deep I could hear the fire ticking.
It was the most beautiful room I’d ever been in. And the loneliest.
Asher was in the kitchen. Standing at a massive six-burner range that probably cost more than my car, wearing a gray Henley with the sleeves pushed up and bare feet on the stone floor. He was pushing eggs around a pan with a wooden spatula and the concentrated expression of a man defusing a bomb.
He looked up when he heard me on the stairs.
“Morning.” Just that. No how are you, no how did you sleep, none of the careful sympathy people deploy when they don’t know what else to do. Just morning, like this was a regular day and I was a person who lived here.
“Morning.” My voice was wrecked. I sounded like I’d swallowed a construction site.
He didn’t comment on it. Just nodded toward the counter, where a mug was already waiting next to a French press.
I wrapped both hands around it and took a sip and it was the best coffee I’d ever had, which was either objectively true or a function of the fact that everything feels like a miracle when you’re running on three hours of sleep and your eyes are so swollen you can barely see.
“Eggs?” he asked.
“Please.”
He slid a plate across the kitchen island.
Scrambled eggs, slightly overdone—the edges a little brown, the texture a little firm, the unmistakable output of a person who was trying and not quite getting there.
Toast on the side, cut in triangles, which was either an aesthetic choice or the only way he knew how to do it.
I sat on one of the counter stools and took a bite. The eggs were fine. Not good, not bad, fine. The kind of eggs a man who could buy any restaurant in Aspen makes because it felt more real than calling someone to do it for him. The kind of effort that meant more than the result.
“These are—” I started.
“Terrible. I know.” He was almost smiling. Almost. “Shane says my eggs are a crime against protein. Destry once tried to stage an intervention.”
“They’re not terrible.”
“You don’t have to be polite. You’re grieving, not delusional.”
I laughed. It came out broken and surprised and wrong—too soon, too much, a sound that didn’t match the weight in my chest—and I immediately felt guilty for it.
For laughing in a kitchen twenty hours after Sarah died.
For sitting on a stool eating mediocre eggs and thinking, against every rational impulse, that there was something painfully sweet about a billionaire who couldn’t cook making me breakfast anyway.
Asher watched me laugh and then watched me catch myself and then turned back to the stove and poured more coffee like he understood exactly what had just happened and was choosing not to make it bigger than it needed to be.
He didn’t ask about Sarah. He talked about the mountains.
“Destry tried to ski Aspen Highlands his first time out here,” he said, leaning against the counter with his own coffee.
“He’d never been on skis. Showed up from New York in jeans and boat shoes and announced he was going to do a black diamond because—and I’m quoting—‘I have excellent proprioception.’ ”
“Did he?”
“He made it approximately forty feet before taking out a seven-year-old, a ski instructor, and a trash can. The trash can was the most dignified part. They had to bring him down on a sled. He sprained both wrists and spent the rest of the trip dictating emails to Shane, who charged him fifty dollars per email and donated it all to a ski patrol charity.”
I was eating my mediocre eggs and watching snow drift past those enormous windows and listening to Asher Pierce tell a story about his brother with the kind of reluctant affection that only siblings could pull off.
And something in me exhaled. Not the grief—that was still there, a permanent resident now, taking up space.
But the tightness around it loosened just enough to let me breathe.
He was doing it on purpose. I realized that halfway through the eggs.
Talking about mountains and brothers and Shane’s entrepreneurial instincts because he understood that grief needed air around it—that you couldn’t sit in the center of it every second or it would eat you alive.
He was making space for me to be something other than destroyed, even if just for the length of a breakfast.
That was when he said it. Casual. Like he’d been thinking about it and had only now found the opening.
“Do you prefer Charlotte?”
I set my fork down.
“I’ve heard Richard use it,” he said. “In the lab. On the project calls.”
Richard. My project manager. The one who called me Charlotte with the careful enunciation of a man who wanted you to know he’d read your full file. I’d never corrected him. Not once in ten years.
“No,” I said. “I don’t prefer Charlotte.”
He waited. Not pushing. Just holding the space open the way he’d been doing all morning—offering room without demanding I fill it.