Chapter Twenty-Two
Marcel
The office is quiet after everyone’s gone home.
Even Clara has gone, thank God. Sadly, Juliet has too.
She told HR that she wasn’t feeling well but that she’d finished her assignment and they let her go.
I tried to get clarity on whether that means let go as in no longer working on the project or allowed to leave for the day.
Human resources said they’d check with the agency that supplied Juliet.
With that uncertainty weighing on my heart, I loosen my tie, roll my shoulders, and let myself sink into the silence.
I should head back to the hotel, but Juliet’s desk is too neat, too .
.. deliberate. She hasn’t just left for the day, she’s made a decision about us because this feels permanent.
With Clara, meetings, and the urgency of everything, I haven’t had the chance to read Juliet’s report.
It sits there on her work station, squared off with surgical precision.
I can feel the energy and love she gives everything radiating from the pages.
I pick it up, expecting numbers, projections, and the kind of bottom line details I need to support my position. What I find instead stops me cold.
On page after page, she’s laid out Eaton’s heart.
Not just the blocks my client wants to gut, but she’s identified all of the families and has recorded the history and potential of the community.
She’s cited details I never bothered to learn and has listed the names of shops, restaurants, and businesses that could benefit from an influx of business.
With an increase in revenue, they will be putting money back into the community with upgrades and expansions.
She’s envisioned a waterfront boardwalk with amusement, entertainment, shopping, dining, and recreation.
Most impressive is the way she mapped out where the town could attract tourists instead of pushing its own people out.
She’s built an argument that doesn’t just make sense, it shines.
In between the lines, I hear her voice and her boundless hope all tied up in the stubborn love she has for this place.
I sit back in my chair with the weight of it settling in.
It’s brilliant. She’s goddamn brilliant and gave me what I needed to support the pause I had just placed on the project.
I told the investors and the Singapore parent company representative that I needed more time to assess our investment before we demolished it.
Our original order had been for the week before Christmas, but I suspended that contract because I had enough evidence to support holding off.
Not only had the library been officially declared a historic building, which meant we had to keep the structure, other zones were also not approved for demolition.
We also hadn’t drafted the buy-out contracts.
In short, we were not ready to break ground and my investors agreed.
What wasn’t assured and what I was struggling with was how to give Juliet and the town of Eaton the Christmas present they deserved.
Staring at the report, I realize Juliet has just handed it to me on a platter.
It offered me a compromise that could satisfy the investors and spare Eaton’s soul.
And now Juliet is gone. Not just home for the day, but after reading the note attached to the report, I know she’s gone forever.
I rub a hand over my face, fighting the twist in my chest. She’s poured herself into this, into me, into all of it and I keep failing her.
I think of all Juliet has suffered because of me such as Clara barging in and disrupting our world, Juliet visiting my mansion full of ghosts and discovering the sad life I lead, and us finding out about our baby and the abysmal way I reacted. The things Juliet’s seen and misunderstood.
And now I have this proof that she’s not just some girl I fell into bed with.
She’s loving and kind, but she’s also a force of determination with innovative problem solving and a vision.
She is someone who can change the world.
She’s not just my infatuation but my paramount.
I could fund her visions and become her investor.
If we created communities like Eaton around the world by revamping and revitalizing tight-knit groups to prosper in their own greatness, I imagine not only the profits but the satisfaction of giving back. It could be Christmas all year.
The thought makes me restless and excited; a dangerous combination because I’m a man of action.
I close the report carefully, like it’s something fragile and precious. Juliet thinks she can walk away. She believes I’ll read this and disregard it to do whatever the hell I want. But she’s wrong. I’ll be damned if I let her go without a fight.
I call the temp agency that her aunt owns to confirm that Juliet has scheduled herself out.
“Ms. Limons is a college student and will be returning to her university, but we have plenty of qualified candidates to fill her role,” the woman from the agency tells me as if Juliet is replaceable.
“I guarantee you, that you have absolutely zero candidates like her,” I say before I hang up the phone.
After that, I had my driver take me back to the hotel with a burning desire to change direction toward Gran’s, but I had nothing to offer Juliet that I hadn’t already given her.
I promised to take her to the doctor and to take her pregnancy one step at a time.
I neither committed to being a father nor confirmed that I’d not be a part of the child’s life.
I left her in limbo with money hanging in the air between us as if to say I’d throw money at her but not my heart.
I didn’t have anything more to offer that she’d believe so I thought over my strategy and game plan.
She wouldn’t be returning to California before Christmas, not with Gran in Rhode Island and the two of them certainly didn’t have the money to run anywhere far.
Back at the hotel, since I can’t sleep, I pour myself a drink, then another, but the scotch tastes bitter and makes me feel even more empty.
I end up circling the room like a caged animal, every glance pulling me back to her words.
Three blocks of derelict housing, relocate the residents, build high-end on that footprint.
Reinvent the docks. Cultivate tourism. Infuse capital into Eaton without razing its history.
Bolster the community without displacing its soul, and give it life.
She’s thought of everything and done my job better than I ever could.
I rub the back of my neck, staring out the window at the snow falling thick and heavy over the town.
Eaton is buried in white, clinging to its last heartbeat while I sit here, wondering how the hell I became the kind of man who thinks only of margins, profits, and bottom lines, not of lives, families, and souls.
I am exactly that Grinch that Juliet sees when she looks deeply into my heart, three sizes too small.
Of course it is, because it doesn’t love anything, including myself.
Juliet sees the people and I see the numbers.
Yet the numbers in her report line up, it’s not some sentimental fantasy, it’s viable and profitable.
I could be her patron and she my soul. She managed to make a business case for compassion and I hate that it rattles me because she’s not just in my head, she’s under my skin and in my heart.
In the hollowed-out place where I thought nothing could touch me after Clara, Juliet has dug her way in.
Juliet’s touched me, no not touched, she’s carved me open.
I drop into my chair, elbows on the desk, staring at her letter.
Thank you for initiating me into the Mile High Club, and for the gift of life, but I can’t love a Grinch if he won’t love himself or the world around him. We are just too different. I don’t need your money. I don’t need your name. All I wanted was you.
Merry Christmas and have a beautiful life,
Juliet
PS. Please, no heroic gestures. I’m a grown up, I made a choice, I can face the consequences.
My chest tightens in a way I can’t tolerate.
I don’t do this, I don’t lose and I don’t give up.
I’m also not a person who grieves other people.
This wanting and needing to prove to Juliet that I’m not the enemy she paints me as is all-consuming.
If I do pursue her I have to be ready to step up and be the man she deserves.
Am I capable of that? In her letter, she said Merry Christmas like a curse and walked out of my life.
As if she’s already mourning what I’d destroy.
I’ve read her dream. I’ve seen it, felt it and I’ll be damned if I let her keep thinking I’m blind to who and what she is. If there is a person on this earth I can show up for, it’s her.
Tomorrow I’ll tell her. Tonight, I’ll stew in the silence, because I can’t chase her down half-drunk and half-crazed with need. But tomorrow, she’s going to know exactly what she’s done to me and to this project. Maybe then she’ll see that I’m not the Grinch she thinks I am.
I fall into a dreamless sleep and feel like shit when I wake up with the sun. I take a shower and re-assess my motivation. I think about my life and the choices I have before me, now hungover, but sober.