Chapter 12
GRANT
Mom is waiting in my office after the meeting, which means some asshole who can’t mind their fucking business called her, and I start making a mental list of people to fire before remembering my wife has now placed the company under adult supervision.
She is sitting in the chair opposite my desk wearing cream trousers and a black blouse, reading the Wall Street Journal on her phone with the expression of someone killing time before an execution.
“How did you get in?”
“The door.”
“Very funny.” I toss my folder onto the desk. “I’m busy.”
“You’re also sleeping with Sloane Avery.”
Everything in me stops. Mom locks her phone and lays it on one crossed knee. “Warren saw the pictures.”
“What pictures?”
“You leaving the Conrad eleven minutes after she did.”
My knees go weak. Fuck!
“They haven’t hit the press.”
“Yet.”
“Who sent them to Warren?”
“A man who owes him money and enjoys continuing to have kneecaps.”
I rub both hands over my face. “Jesus Christ.”
“He’s unavailable. You did this to yourself, son.”
“Mother.”
“How long has this been going on?” I don’t answer. “Grant.”
“Six months.”
My mom has lived too long to waste energy being shocked by men, and I know that change in her face for what it is the second disappointment settles into her features.
I resent it immediately. Hypocrisy looks ugly as shit when the man who taught you how it works is also the man who left you the diamonds.
“Don’t sit there looking morally devastated. You stayed with Dad after he spent half his marriage sticking his dick into other women all over Nashville and coming home to you like none of it counted.”
The room goes silent.
Mom stands, her face flushed with anger. “Your father’s failures aren’t a family tradition, Grant. You don’t get to point at him every time you need an excuse for yourself.”
“I’m saying you understood marriage was more complicated than one mistake.”
“Six months isn’t a mistake. A mistake is one bad decision. You had months to stop making the same one.”
“Well, that doesn’t change the fact that I love my wife.”
“God, you’re just like him.”
She turns away from me and crosses to the floor-to-ceiling window, one hand slipping into the pocket of her trousers as she looks out over the city. Traffic moves far below us, indifferent to the fact that my mother is dismantling the last excuse I have left.
“Your bastard of a father claimed he loved me too. Harold sat beside my hospital bed when I had my hysterectomy and held my hand through every miserable hour of it. When he was on the road, he called me every night before he went to sleep.” Her mouth twists, bitter and almost amused by the memory.
“He could make me feel like the most important woman in the world and then turn around and fuck anything with a pulse and a hole.”
My jaw tightens. Where exactly is she going with this?
“Love didn’t make the humiliation smaller, Grant.” She fixes her eyes on me. “It made it harder to understand. Because how do you reconcile being loved by someone who keeps choosing to hurt you?”
I look away. “This isn’t the same.”
Mom goes so quiet I can hear the slow pull of her breath. “Of course.”
“Dad had women everywhere and embarrassed you publicly. I didn’t do that.”
“And your secrecy makes you a gentleman?”
“I never stopped going home to Laurel.”
The words are barely out when my mother’s face changes, and suddenly I see my father in them—the resemblance I spent half my life swearing wasn’t there.
Remember which woman you’re coming home to.
I’m his son after all.
My mother lets out a slow breath through her nose. “You stupid little bastard.”
Celia Hargrove has called senators morons, priests opportunists, and one country-club president a hemorrhoid in loafers; she has never called me stupid.
“Excuse me?”
“You think not leaving makes it better.” She picks up her Birkin, the same one Sloane has been prodding me to buy her. “That is exactly what your father thought.”
“I’m not him.”
“No, you’re worse.”
My mouth shuts.
“Harold always told himself the women meant nothing. He thought that made me special.” Her laugh holds no humor. “Imagine the arrogance. He risked our marriage for women he claimed meant nothing and expected me to find that comforting.”
She walks toward the door, stops beside the photograph of Laurel and me on my bookshelf, and lifts it from its frame.
Our wedding. Laurel laughing at something outside the frame, my mouth against her cheek.
Mom studies it for a moment before looking at me.
“Your wife loved you when you were nobody. She gave you money she inherited from a father she adored. She wrote songs people tattoo on their bodies and let the world congratulate you for them. She sat beside your sister for three weeks when Caroline lost that baby because you were touring Europe and I could barely keep myself upright.”
My throat tightens. Caroline. My younger sister. We haven’t talked in two weeks.
Mom seems to read the question on my face, because she continues before I can ask whether she knows.
“And when your father died, she paid the mortgage on my house for four months because the estate was tied up in probate. She made sure I didn’t have to worry about losing my home on top of everything else, and she never told you because she knew you’d turn it into some ridiculous argument about pride.
” She sets the photograph back in its place, careful with it in a way that makes everything hurt worse.
“She took care of this family when you were too busy becoming important to remember who made room for you to do it.”
My throat feels wrong. “What mortgage?”
“Exactly. You’ve spent so long being the person everyone knows that you stopped noticing the people who were there before anyone knew your name.”
“She should have told me.”
Even to my own ears, the sentence sounds pathetic.
Mom’s mouth twists. “Yes. Clearly her greatest marital failure was insufficient documentation of her kindness.”
∞∞∞
My phone starts ringing before I’ve even made it halfway through the day.
Tessa first. Sloane second. Radio wants to know why the single vanished from every pre-save link overnight.
Distribution wants written confirmation that the ownership position hasn’t changed.
Two artists on our roster have apparently contacted outside counsel after hearing there’s an audit, because panic is the one thing musicians spread faster than chlamydia.
I barely get through the third call before Caroline’s name lights up my screen.
Caroline: Mom told me everything. Don’t even bother calling me.
Perfect.
I call Laurel instead. She answers this time, but I hear voices behind her before she says a word. One of them is male. Deep. Familiar enough that my spine locks.
“Where the hell are you?”
“Why, you miss me already?”
I ignore the sarcasm in her question. “Is that Vale?”
“Why are you calling?”
“I asked where you are.”
“And I stopped answering questions from men who think being my ex-husband makes them my parole officer.”
“Laurel.”
The male voice mutters something I can’t make out. She answers him quietly, and every instinct I possess goes feral.
“What the fuck are you doing with Beckett?”
“Working.”
“On what?”
She gives a tiny, deeply sarcastic sigh. “My catalogue, Grant.”
I stand so fast my chair slams into the wall. “Absolutely fucking not.”
Laurel laughs, soft and breathy, and it grates on my nerves. I know how fucked up that is; I’d almost rather she started screaming.
“I’m sorry. Did you just tell me what I’m allowed to do with my music?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Unfortunately, I’ve spent over a decade knowing what you mean instead of listening to what you actually say.”
“Vale has wanted this for years, and now you’re opening your legs for him.
” The words come out sharp, ugly, and I don’t bother taking them back.
“If you’re doing this because you’re pissed about Sloane, at least have the fucking decency to admit it.
You want to sleep with Beckett because I slept with her?
Fine. But don’t stand there pretending you’re taking some moral high ground when you’ve got another man waiting the second I’m caught. ”
There’s a beat of silence, and my anger finds somewhere uglier to go.
“You expect me to believe this is a coincidence? The second you find out about Sloane, suddenly Beckett is in the picture. You’re meeting with him about your catalogue, and he’s handing you records my company supposedly failed to keep.
How long has this been going on, Laurel?
Was he waiting in the wings all these years, or were you fucking him before you ever found out about Sloane? ”
“Grant, for once in your miserable life, I genuinely need you to take a step back and hear how fucking stupid you sound.”
The line goes dead.
I call back. Straight to voicemail.
I’m halfway through calling a third time when a photograph lands in my messages from an unknown number.
Unknown: Beckett and Laurel outside Vale House.
Laurel has a coffee in one hand, Beckett is carrying her guitar case, and his head is bent toward her as she says something that has put a small smile on the smug bastard’s face. There’s nothing intimate about the photograph unless you know Laurel.
I know my wife. She doesn’t hand people her guitar.
She once made a TSA agent call a supervisor rather than put that case on a conveyor belt because the man reached for it without asking.
I zoom in anyway, like a fucking lunatic, staring at the two details I wish I could unsee.
Her wedding ring is still gone. Beckett’s hand is curled around the handle of the Martin I bought her twelve years ago, the one she guarded like it was a piece of her body.
A second message comes through from Tessa.
Tessa: Photographer is shopping this. Says he has more. Need instructions.
My first instinct is to kill the picture. My second is to call Beckett and explain, in language he won’t have to think too hard about, exactly which part of him I’ll remove if he touches my wife. The third is the one that scares me because it arrives wearing my father’s voice.
She’ll come home.
Laurel always comes home. She cools down. She forgives. She remembers us before she remembers whatever the fuck I did to hurt her. It’s always been that way. I’ve relied on it so many times I stopped recognizing it as reliance; I thought it was simply the natural order of things.
Grant and Laurel. We fight, we bleed, we find our way back to the same house.
Except she hasn’t slept there in two nights, and I’d be lying through my teeth if I said I haven’t felt every fucking hour of it.
I almost texted Sloane to come over, but settled for the videos she sent me instead, jerking off to her fingering her wet pussy until the tension finally drained out of my body enough for me to sleep.
Thank God for the staff. The house keeps running because other people are paid to make sure it does, but Laurel’s absence has turned me into an almost-forty-year-old fucking idiot who can negotiate a multimillion-dollar acquisition and stand in front of my closet for ten minutes unable to decide which tie goes with a shirt.
She always knows. Not because I ask her every morning; she just knows me.
I keep walking into rooms expecting her to be there, reaching for my coffee and remembering she isn’t the one who made it, noticing some stupid little thing she used to handle without either of us thinking about it and feeling the absence like a missing tooth I can’t stop running my tongue over.
An email arrives.
Harlan Pierce: The Audit Committee has voted to retain outside forensic counsel. Effective immediately, neither director may authorize transactions involving Mercer-controlled publishing without committee approval.
My stomach bottoms out so hard I grip the edge of my desk.