35. Jessika
THIRTY-FIVE
JESSIKA
The weeks after Holcomb's arrest have a quality I didn't expect.
Not relief, not immediately. Relief comes later, in pieces, the way it does when something you've been holding tension against for a long time finally releases and your muscles don't know how to respond.
For the first few days it's mostly just, stillness.
The particular quiet that descends when something loud stops.
Collins testifies to the AG's investigative team for six hours on a Tuesday.
I'm not in the room but I'm in the building, with Brian Holt's second-chair attorney, walking through the corroborating documents, and I can see from the faces of the people coming out of the session that Collins gave them what they needed.
The state police make four arrests over the following week: Holcomb, two of his county liaisons, and the registered agent of the Meridian LLC who was physically present when the discharge was occurring.
Raymond Blake is not among them. Not yet.
He is, according to Brian Holt, cooperating.
Voluntarily cooperating. Whether by genuine contrition or by the calculation that cooperation is the only path to a reduced outcome, I can't say and don't particularly care, what matters is that the AG has him, has his testimony, has the full chain of what happened.
Morgan will have to testify.
Morgan, is at a treatment facility in western Georgia.
He went there from the hunting camp where Grant and I found him, went there voluntarily and with something that looked, in his face, like exhaustion and relief in equal measure.
He's been there for four weeks. He's being treated by a doctor who specializes in bipolar disorder. He calls me every Sunday.
Last Sunday he laughed twice during the call.
I counted.
"You seem different," he said, near the end of the call.
"Do I?"
"Lighter. Like, I can hear it." He paused. "Is it Grant?"
"Partially," I said.
"Entirely," he said. "I know you, Jessie. I've known you your whole life."
"Morgan—"
"He's been carrying that situation for a long time," Morgan said. "The trial. The thing he thought you thought about him. I know he's too stubborn to have said anything about it directly. Did you get there?"
"We got there."
He made a sound that might have been satisfaction.
"Good," he said. "Good. He needed someone to see him right." A pause. "He's always seen everybody else right. He deserves it coming back."
I think about that on the drive home from the AG's office.
He sees people right. It's what he does.
He saw Nova, struggling, armored, furious at the world for reasons she couldn't articulate, and he talked to her like she was a person worth talking to.
He saw my father, proud, rigid, afraid of what illness in his family meant about him, and offered him the particular gift of being needed without comment or expectation.
He saw Morgan, always. For years, through every bad phase and every crisis and every silence, he saw Morgan.
He's been here in Briar County this whole time.
Seeing people.
Asking for nothing.
I pull into the ranch driveway and the porch light is on and Grant's truck is there, he’s been sleeping here most nights for the past two weeks, in the guest room, completely proper, completely patient, while the situation resolved and I figured out what I wanted to do about the fact that I am in love with him.
I know this now. I've known it for a while. I've been walking around it the way you walk around something in a dark room that you know is there, until one morning you turn the light on and just look at it directly.
I'm in love with Grant Vance.
Who testified against me too, in a different way, by being a person I couldn't stop thinking about for years even when I wanted to.
He comes out to the porch when he hears my car.
That's the thing I keep coming back to. He just comes out. Without being asked. Without it being a production. He heard the car, he came to make sure everything was okay, that's the whole story.
"How did it go?" he asks.
"Holcomb is going to take a plea," I say. "Brian thinks he'll get eight to twelve years."
He nods.
"Collins?"
"He'll do time. Less. Maybe three with good behavior." I climb the porch steps. "He wasn't the architect. He was an opportunist who made terrible choices."
"That describes a lot of people."
"Including some of us."
He holds my eyes. Something in his expression.
"Your father's inside," he says. "He made soup. He seemed very invested in whether you ate."
"Presley Mills made soup."
"He made soup," Grant confirms. Dry. "I watched. It was an event."
I laugh.
There it is, the lighter thing Morgan heard. I feel it now too, in my chest, the space where the tension was replaced by something that has room in it.
"Grant," I say.
"Yeah."
"Nova asked me this morning if you were going to move in."
A beat.
"What did you tell her?" he asks carefully.
"I told her I didn't know." I look at him. "What would you tell her?"
He's quiet for a moment. The night is cold and clear and the stars are very bright over the ridge and somewhere in the dark pasture the horses are breathing and the county is doing what it does, turning, slowly, toward whatever comes next.
"I'd tell her that depends on what you want," he says.
"I want you to move in, every day, forever.” I say.
He looks at me for a long moment.
Then: "Okay."
Just that. Okay. No hedging, no qualification, no dramatic production of the decision. Grant Vance, agreeing to a life, in a single word, the way he does everything, completely and without reservation and like the decision was already made somewhere earlier and this is just the acknowledgment.
I put my arms around him and hold on.
He holds me back, careful of his healing arm, his chin against my hair, and we stand there on the porch while the county turns in the dark around us.
The porch light is on.
It's on because I've been leaving it on for him.
He figured that out three weeks ago.
He never said anything.
That's how I knew.