Chapter 24
Garrick had watched a number of men decide he was safe the instant they learned what he was worth, and he had never particularly minded it before meeting Toby’s grandparents. He minded it then and he minded it again across the Inn’s breakfast table the next morning.
“You’ve done work in Charleston,” Lawton said, to the business section when Garrick and Maris returned for breakfast. “Nothing south of Broad, though. Who do you know down there?” He turned a page with the ease of a male who assumed he knew the answer. “Because I could make a call.”
He minded the way Cornelia poured coffee for Maris and said, just a splash for you, you take it plain, don’t you, so unfussy, and made it sound like a diagnosis.
He minded, most of all, what happened to Maris in a room with these two people.
She got smaller. Not physically, but something in her shrank and her smile turned careful.
The female who had shouted at him over a Bobcat, who called a collapsed wall a habitat and won, sat at that table with her hands in her lap and managed the situation.
He had never seen her manage before. He hated it.
He said little. He was good at saying little. He drank his coffee and watched, and what he watched was an old, well-oiled machine, running smoothly because it had been running Maris’s marriage and most of her widowhood. No blow landed hard enough to name, but each of them landed.
Toby, mercifully, was immune. Toby had slept eleven hours and woken up a different boy, spilling over with the excitement of sharing the town he loved.
“—and Grondar can lift a car, Grandmother. He lifted a whole hay wagon so Elara could find the bracelet she dropped, and Ben has ears like this,”—arms flung wide—“and Barclay’s daddy is a werewolf but the nice kind, Miss Sara says all the kinds are nice mostly, and when I grow up I’m going to have wings like Mr. Garrick, real ones, and—”
“How… wonderful,” Cornelia said.
Garrick heard the half-second delay before wonderful. The way she looked to the side, as though something unpleasant had been set down on the table that she was too polite to acknowledge. Lawton’s smile stayed fixed a beat too long.
“Real ones,” Lawton said, with a small chuckle. “Well. We’ll see what you want when you’re older. Boys change their minds a hundred times.”
“I won’t change my mind,” Toby said.
“Toby,” Maris murmured, managing.
“He won’t,” he said quietly.
Lawton looked at him, and the chuckle turned into the kind of smile males used on business associates whose opinions they intended to ignore.
“He’s five, Mr. Stonehaven. At five I wanted to drive a fire engine.”
“I wanted to fly when I was five,” he said. “I do.”
Nobody had an answer to that. Toby beamed like the sun had personally endorsed him.
He could have ended it there. He was good at ending things.
He’d ended entire projects with a single sentence and let the silence do the rest. He could have looked at Lawton Pinckney long enough to make him aware, in the animal part of his brain that predated all his manners, that the largest thing at the table was not amused.
He chose not to. That would have been for himself.
It would have felt good, and it would have cost Maris something in the long run.
These two people were her son’s only grandparents and would be for the rest of their lives.
So he drank his coffee, and he refused—flatly, silently and completely—to agree with a single thing they believed.
He gave them no laugh at Toby’s expense.
No shared adult glance over the boy’s head.
No polite murmur of of course, the city has its advantages.
He simply sat, grey and enormous and immovable, and let them find out what it was like to be in a room where their worldview did not echo back.
It was, he thought, a very small thing. It might have been the hardest small thing he had ever done.
Maris told him about the offer in the truck, on the way to the mansion, with Toby delivered to Dot’s grandmother’s for the morning and the grandparents left to pack.
She told it with her voice absolutely neutral. Ashby, Jeff’s old school, with a place already held. The trust released early, all of it, enough for the school and everything after. A house, three streets from the grandparents, in Toby’s name. Family. Cousins. His father’s people.
“And me,” she said. “I’d come. Obviously. They’re not… It’s not cruel, Garrick, that’s the thing, I keep waiting for the part that’s cruel and there isn’t one. It’s a good offer. It’s a genuinely good offer.”
“It is,” he said.
She looked at him sideways. He kept his eyes on the road.
He could solve the problem. He could pay Ashby’s tuition and buy a house three streets from the Pinckneys and never notice either against the quarter’s numbers.
He could match every advantage on that table and raise it.
Cornelia would reclassify Maris the moment the wire cleared, from the girl Jefferson married to the woman Garrick kept, and she would realize she had no control over Maris.
He could fix it. He didn’t offer.
He gripped the wheel until the leather complained and he didn’t offer.
Aidan had told him a story once, months ago, about a fawn he had found down in a creek bed with a broken leg, and splinted, and fed off his fingers for six weeks.
And how the kindest thing and the cruelest thing had turned out to be the same thing, which was to open the gate and let it go without deciding for it what its life should be.
You can love something and still not get to hold on to it, Aidan had said. They’re separate things.
He had thought it was a story about wildlife.
If he wrote the check, he would have decided for her.
He’d have made the school and the house and the boy’s future one more thing he had built and put his name on.
And somewhere down the years Maris would look up from a life he had purchased and realize that he’d held on to her.
There would be a wall between them made out of his generosity, and it would have gone up the day he made it too easy.
“You could—” she started, and stopped.
“I could,” he agreed.
“You’re not going to.”
“No.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly after a long pause.
He didn’t answer. It didn’t feel like something to be thanked for. It felt like standing perfectly still and watching something burn.
Aidan came by that afternoon with the corridor survey, and stayed to say goodbye to the Pinckneys, who had insisted on a farewell tour of the famous Stonehaven grounds before the drive south.
It went well enough at first. Lawton was expansive about the restored stonework and the terraces and the view.
Garrick answered in words of one syllable.
Cornelia admired the rose garden in the insincere voice of a female being polite about something she didn’t care for.
Maris walked them through the gardens, small again, and his fists were clenched by the time they reached the old wall with its ferns.
“Remarkable,” Lawton said, surveying the ruined masonry Maris had fought so hard to keep. “Though I confess I don’t quite see the appeal of leaving it broken.”
“It’s a habitat,” Toby said, trotting along next to them. “There’s four kinds of fern. Mama counted.”
“Did she?” Lawton asked indulgently. He turned to Garrick and gave him the deal-room smile, male to male, and Garrick knew what was coming a full second before it came.
“You know, I have to ask, Stonehaven. A male of your stature. You must find it limiting, being out here. Playing with old walls. It’s a hobby, surely. Not where the real work is.”
Nobody in the garden moved.
Maris looked up. Aidan, three beds over, straightened slowly.
“No,” he said, and felt the heat rise behind his eyes. Gold, hot and unmistakable, blooming in front of Toby’s grandparents in the middle of his garden. He didn’t try to stop it. He didn’t want to.
Lawton’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. His body took a step back, instinctively reacting to danger.
“The real work,” Garrick continued, in an even voice that never rose and never needed to, “is here.”
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Cornelia laughed brightly at nothing, and said the light was going and they really must be off, and the tour ended.
Aidan found him afterwards, watching the dark car pull away down the long drive with Toby waving from the gravel and Maris beside him with one hand raised.
“So,” Aidan said mildly. “That was fun.”
He didn’t respond.
“For a second there.” Aidan rocked back on his heels. “By the ferns. I thought you were going to eat him.”
“I considered it.”
Aidan huffed a laugh, and then stopped because Garrick hadn’t laughed. Aidan studied him, the teasing smirk absent for once.
“You didn’t fix it,” Aidan said. “Whatever they’re trying to do. You could’ve made it go away and you didn’t.”
“No.”
“That was hard.”
“Yes.”
Aidan nodded slowly. He clapped Garrick on the shoulder, and went to his truck, and left without saying anything else.
Maris came up the drive with Toby’s hand in hers, both of them looking wrung out.
Garrick picked Toby up without being asked, and the three of them went into the house together as the light failed.
They ate supper, and Toby had a bath, and Garrick read him a story with the boy tucked against his chest. The crushed cardboard wing retired quietly to the trash while Toby slept, and Garrick had already sketched out how to build him better ones with real hinges, before he could stop himself.
Fixing things, he thought. It’s all I know how to do.
He carried Toby back to the cottage and stayed until Maris slept.
And then, instead of going up to the roof, instead of going to stone, instead of any of the things he’d spent fifteen years doing to avoid it, he walked back through the dark house to the west corridor. He stopped in front of the closed door.
He’d stood here before. Twice this autumn, at least, hand raised, and turned away.
He put his hand on the door. The wood was cool. Behind it, he could feel, the way he’d always been able to feel it, the specific weight of stone that no longer held anyone. A gargoyle always knew. He’d never once been able to pretend the room was empty.
He opened the door and went in and sat down on the floor.
The room held very little. A chair his mother had loved.
A window that faced west, because that was the direction she was buried.
And Corwin Stonehaven, in grey stone, exactly as he had been the morning Garrick came home to visit a father and found a statue instead.
The broad shoulders. The folded wings. The strong angular face so like the one Garrick saw every morning.
His father had chosen the stone. He had given in to grief and Garrick had come home too late and found him already gone, and he’d shut the door and not opened it for fifteen years.
He could forgive being left by death. He could not forgive being left on purpose.
Garrick sat on the floor in front of him and did not weep. He didn’t make a speech. There was no one to make it to. The stone was only stone now, whatever it had once been.
“I found you,” he said, after a while, to the quiet. “And I left.”
Behind the wall, in a small dark cottage, a female and a boy who might be gone by spring were sleeping.
A good school, a good house, a good offer, everything a loving family could give.
All of it four hours south, in a life with no room in it for grey skin and folded wings.
He had refused to buy them. He had done the hardest thing he knew how to do, which was nothing.
He stayed until the moon rose, and then he stood. He looked once more at his father’s face, and didn’t reach for it.
“I’m not walking away twice,” he said, and left the door open behind him.