CHAPTER 8
Signatures
°°°
The final signing took place on a Tuesday morning bright enough that the title company's windowless conference room felt like an insult to the weather outside, and Emery arrived ten minutes early with her folder, her three-color highlighting system, and a steadiness in her chest that hadn't been there for the last three meetings.
Rhys was already there when she walked in, two coffees on the table again — he'd stopped pretending they were for anyone but her and him now, black with a splash on her side, too much sugar on his — and a stack of papers organized with the kind of care that told her he'd gone through them himself the night before, not just handed them to Feld and trusted the result.
"You didn't have to double-check his work," she said, nodding at the neat stack.
"I wanted to understand every line before I put my name on something with yours on it." He slid the stack toward her. "Not because I don't trust Feld. Because I don't want to ever again be a man who signs something that affects you without knowing exactly what it says."
It was a small thing to say. It landed like something much larger, and she let herself feel it for exactly as long as it took to open the folder and start reading, because feeling it any longer than that felt like standing too close to a ledge.
Denise arrived a few minutes later with a fresh stack of originals, apologizing for running behind — a closing across the hall had gone long, some dispute over an easement that had apparently turned heated enough that raised voices had carried through the wall — and Emery used the extra minutes to finish her own read of the modification language one final time, pen in hand, marking nothing because there was nothing left to mark.
She'd read this document so many times over the past six weeks that the language had stopped feeling like legal abstraction and started feeling like something closer to a story she'd memorized: the shape of a second location, a class she'd get to teach, a life she was building with her own two hands out of stubbornness and stitching thread and a bank that had finally believed in her enough to say yes.
Denise walked them through it clause by clause — the modification to the deed of trust, the new financing terms, the language that would, once both signatures landed on the final page, release enough equity to fund the Cypress Street buildout in full.
Emery had read every word of it a dozen times already.
She read it once more anyway, methodical, unhurried, and Rhys sat beside her without rushing her, without checking his phone, without doing any of the small restless things she half-expected from a man who used to make big decisions in the time it took to exhale.
"Looks right," she said finally.
"Looks right," he agreed.
They signed in the same order they'd signed everything for six years — her first, then him, an old habit from the day they'd closed on The Wrenhouse that neither of them had ever discussed and both of them, apparently, still remembered.
His pen scratched across the page in the same slanted hand she'd once watched sign a marriage certificate, and something in her chest did a complicated thing at the sight of it, grief and relief tangled together in a way she didn't have a clean word for.
She remembered that other signature, the marriage certificate one, seven years ago in a courthouse two towns over, both of them laughing too hard to hold their pens steady because Rhys's mother had cried so loudly during the vows that the officiant had lost his place twice.
She hadn't let herself think about that day in a long time.
It surfaced now, uninvited and unexpectedly gentle, and she let it sit there for a moment instead of pushing it away, some small permission she hadn't granted herself in eleven months.
"That's it," Denise said, gathering the papers. "Disbursement should hit within five business days. Congratulations, Ms. Cade."
Ms. Cade. Nobody had called her that in eleven months without her correcting them, and she opened her mouth to do it now out of pure reflex and found, to her own surprise, that she let it go instead.
Outside, the June heat had settled into the kind of thick afternoon warmth that made the parking lot shimmer, and Rhys walked her to her truck the way he had every time now, an escort neither of them named and neither of them stopped.
"You should be celebrating," he said. "Not standing in a parking lot with me."
"I am celebrating. This is what celebrating looks like when you've spent the morning reading legal language." She unlocked the truck, then didn't get in, some reluctance she wasn't ready to examine keeping her feet planted on the asphalt. "Cypress Street is really happening."
"It's really happening." He was smiling — a real one, unguarded, the kind she remembered from before, back when smiling at her hadn't cost him anything. "I'm proud of you, Em. I want you to hear that plainly, not folded into anything else. I'm proud of what you built."
"Thank you." She meant it more than the two words could carry. "That means more than you probably realize."
They stood there a moment longer than the conversation strictly required, the old gravity between them doing its quiet work, and she thought about the almost-kiss in her kitchen four days ago, the way neither of them had mentioned it since, both of them tiptoeing around the memory of it like a bruise they didn't want to press.
She'd replayed it more than once since then, lying awake in the dark with the memory of his hand at her cheek and the quality of the silence right before the phone had buzzed.
She hadn't decided yet what to do with the replaying.
It felt, some nights, like evidence of exactly how little distance she'd actually put between them despite eleven months of trying.
It felt, other nights, like the first honest thing her body had let itself want in longer than she could comfortably admit.
"There's a thing Saturday," he said, breaking the silence first. "Clubhouse cookout. Nothing formal — just the brothers, families, Dally'll be there. She's been asking if you're coming."
"Dally asked, or you're using Dally as cover to ask?"
"Both." He didn't try to deny it, which she appreciated more than a smoother answer would have earned. "I want you there. I'm not going to pretend the invitation's only about Dally. But she did ask first, for the record."
She weighed it, standing in the shimmering heat with her hand still on the truck door.
A year ago she would have said no on principle, would have protected the careful distance she'd built with the same discipline she brought to a difficult stitch.
But principle felt like a smaller thing than it used to, standing here with a folder of finalized paperwork in her hand and a man beside her who'd spent the last two weeks slowly, imperfectly, learning to tell her the truth.
"Okay," she said. "I'll come."
Something in his face opened at that, unguarded in a way that made her own chest ache in response. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. For Dally." A beat. "And because I'm curious what it looks like now. The clubhouse. Whether it's changed."
"Some of it has." He held her gaze, something serious moving behind the easy warmth of a moment ago. "Some of it hasn't, and some of what hasn't changed is stuff I'm working on. But I'd rather you see it honestly than have me describe it to you and get to control the picture."
It was, she thought, watching him say it, exactly the kind of sentence he wouldn't have said eleven months ago — not because he was smarter now, but because some old reflex to manage her perception of things had finally, visibly, started to loosen its grip.
"Saturday," she said. "What time?"
"Two. Bring an appetite. Ma's making her potato salad, and if you don't have a plate in your hand within ten minutes of walking in, she'll take it personally."
"I remember." She smiled, the memory of his mother's kitchen surfacing warm and unbidden, years of holidays and Sunday dinners compressed into the small ache of missing a whole family she'd once belonged to and had spent eleven months telling herself she didn't. "Tell her I'll bring the peach thing she likes. "
"She'll cry. Fair warning."
"She cries at everything. It's part of her charm." Emery finally got into the truck, one hand still on the open door, looking down at him standing in the lot with his hands in his pockets and something almost boyish in the set of his shoulders. "Rhys."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you. For today. For — all of it, actually. The signature, the honesty, the not making this harder than it needed to be." She hesitated, choosing the next words carefully. "I know that costs you something. Being different than you used to be. I see it costing you something, every time."
"It's supposed to cost something." His voice had gone quiet, serious in a way that matched hers. "If it didn't cost anything, it wouldn't mean anything."
She didn't have an answer for that. She closed the truck door instead, started the engine, and watched him in the side mirror as she pulled out of the lot — watched him stand there a moment before he turned toward his own bike, unhurried, none of the old restless checking of his phone that had marked every one of their meetings for the past two weeks.
Her own phone buzzed as she hit the highway, and she glanced at it at the next red light.
A text from Priya: Financing cleared yet?
? Also some guy came by asking weird questions about the shop's hours, said he was scoping out competitor spaces lol.
Anyway CONGRATS if it's official, tell me everything.
Emery read it twice, the light turning green, a car behind her honking once before she pulled through the intersection. Some guy came by asking weird questions.
She pulled into her own driveway ten minutes later and sat in the truck for a moment before going inside, turning the message over in her mind, trying and failing to make it feel as harmless as Priya's laughing lol had intended it to sound.
A competitor scoping out a location was ordinary.
A stranger with vague questions and no name was ordinary too, most days, in most lives.
She wasn't sure anymore that she got to have most days or most lives, not with a stranger's car outside a high school still sitting unresolved in her memory, not with the words Salazar and surveillance now permanently lodged somewhere in her understanding of her own life.
She told herself it was nothing. A competitor, like Priya said, or a curious customer, or one of a hundred ordinary explanations that didn't involve the name Salazar or a gray sedan or any of the things she'd spent two weeks learning to be afraid of.
She told herself that all the way home, and didn't quite manage to believe it by the time she got there.