Chapter Six
Rhys
Dev Kapoor walked into the big conference room at Sterling HQ on Thursday afternoon, looked out the window at the lake, and said, “I want to live in this room,” and I thought, Good. Then buy it.
“It’s yours for four hundred million,” I said.
“Don’t tempt me.” He laughed and shook my hand with both of his, the way he does when he’s already decided.
Dev is forty-five and runs Summit Ridge like a man who’s never once been surprised by a spreadsheet.
He wears quarter-zips to meetings where everybody else wears ties, and it works on him, because he’s the one with the money.
“I’m serious, Rhys. The committee’s still talking about Saturday.
The toast. The lanterns. My wife hasn’t stopped sending me that video. ”
“The video.”
“Four hundred thousand views. It’s the best marketing you’ve never paid for.” He sat down at the head of the table without being asked. I let it go. In a few weeks he’d own a piece of it. “A founder who stands up at his own party and gives the credit away. You can’t buy that. People can smell it.”
Margot came in behind him with two coffees and a leather folder and set one cup in front of Dev and one in front of me, black, and I realized it was four in the afternoon and I’d have wanted milk. I didn’t say anything. She’d been making my coffee for ten years. She had to know by now.
“Let’s do the fun part,” she said, and opened the folder.
The fun part was the calendar. San Francisco first, a former printing house south of Market, eighty-eight rooms. Then Seattle, Denver, Portland, maybe Austin, maybe Chicago.
Six city hotels in five years. Sterling House.
Not a mountain lodge, not a ski town, the first time the name would be on a building where you couldn’t see a single tree.
Dev walked us through the capital stack.
Margot walked us through the ops plan. I sat back and listened to two very smart people talk about my name like it was worth more than I was.
This was the part I’d been chasing since I was nineteen. I should’ve been flying.
I kept checking my phone.
“Everything okay?” Dev said.
“Yeah. Sorry. Go on.”
“We’ll need the usual reps and warranties before the term sheet goes final. Brand, trademarks, IP. The design chain especially.” He tapped the table. “That’s the whole value, frankly. The Sterling look. My committee is buying the look.”
“The look’s in-house,” I said. “All of it.”
And I meant Lucy. I swear, sitting there, I meant Lucy. In my head, in-house was our house. It was her at the kitchen table at midnight with a pencil. It didn’t occur to me until much later that nobody else in that room would hear it that way.
“The archive’s immaculate,” Margot said smoothly. “I’ve had the design team documenting everything for years. Every drawing, every spec. It’s all on our drive.”
“That’s what I love to hear.” Dev smiled at her. “Your taste is the brand, Margot. I told the committee that. We’re not just buying lodges, we’re buying an eye.”
Something snagged in me, somewhere under the ribs, like a sleeve on a nail. I felt it, and I did what I always do with those. I kept walking.
“Where’s Lucy, by the way?” Dev said. “I wanted to tell her about the lanterns. My wife wants to steal the whole idea for her sister’s fiftieth.”
“She’s up in Truckee,” I said. “She’s—”
“Family thing,” Margot said. “Her brother.”
It was true, technically. It was also the second time that afternoon Margot had answered a question before I’d finished hearing it.
“Well, tell her we missed her.” Dev closed the folder. “And tell her she throws a hell of a party.”
He laughed. Margot laughed. I laughed too, a half second late, and the sound of it in that big glass room made me feel slightly sick.
* * *
After he left, I got my keys out of my desk drawer.
Margot was standing in my doorway before I’d stood up. She has a way of arriving. You never see her walk in; she’s just there, like the weather changed.
“Where are you going?”
“Truckee.”
“Rhys.” She came in and closed the door behind her. “Sit down for a second.”
“I’ve been sitting down for five days.”
“And that’s exactly right.” She said it gently.
That was the thing about Margot. She never raised her voice at me, not once in ten years, not even the time I lost a lender in the middle of a pitch because I was on my phone.
“I know you. You want to drive up there and fix it tonight. And she’s going to see you coming a mile away. You know how she is when she’s dug in.”
“She’s my wife.”
“She’s hurt. She’s embarrassed, which is worse. She had a very public moment and she needs to process it privately.” Margot tipped her head. “Give her space. A week. Two. Let her come back on her own terms. If you push her now, she’ll push back just to prove she can.”
I stood there with my keys in my hand.
“Trust me,” she said. “Have I ever steered you wrong?”
I tried to think of a time. I couldn’t. That should’ve worried me more than it did.
“And you’ve got Denver at eight tomorrow,” she said, already opening the door. “Early night.”
* * *
I didn’t go home. The house was too quiet without the dog’s nails on the floor. I drove up to the ski school instead, which in June isn’t a ski school so much as a shipping container full of wax and a hillside of wildflowers.
Jonah was out back with a paint roller, putting a fresh coat of red on the rental shack. He had paint in his hair. He always has something in his hair.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” He didn’t stop rolling. “You look like crap.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean it with love. You look like crap with love.”
I picked up the second roller off the tray, because if I stood there with my hands empty I was going to say something I didn’t know how to say, and I started on the other end of the wall.
We worked toward each other without talking for a while.
The paint smelled like our dad’s truck, which is a thing I haven’t thought about in years.
“Dev came in today,” I said finally. “They’re in. It’s done. Sterling House.”
“Congratulations.”
“He told me to tell Lucy she throws a hell of a party.”
Jonah stopped rolling.
He set the roller in the tray, very carefully, and turned around and looked at me, and I got the feeling he’d been waiting five days for me to walk through that gate and hand him exactly that.
“You toasted your COO at your anniversary, bro.”
“I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do. I think you know it technically.
The way you know the lake is cold.” He wiped his hands on his jeans, which made them worse.
“Your wife was standing up at the top of that lawn. I watched her face. I watched her put her clipboard down because she thought you were talking about her. And then you said Margot, and everybody clapped, and she picked it back up.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have anything.
“She drew that lodge, Rhys. She drew all of them. And you stood on the dock she drew and thanked the lady who does your calendar.”
“Margot does a lot more than my—”
“I know what Margot does. I’m saying what Lucy does. You never say what Lucy does.”
The roller dripped red on my shoe. I looked at it.
You want to know the stupid part? When we were kids, Jonah and I shared a bunk in a single-wide trailer off a gravel road east of Reno, with a swamp cooler that rattled all summer and a window over the kitchen sink that looked out at nothing.
Sagebrush. Power lines. A junked Buick. I used to lie on the top bunk at night and tell him about the hotel I was going to build.
The fireplace you could walk into. The windows full of mountains. Rooms where strangers ended up talking.
I could never see it, though. I could talk about it for hours, and I could never once see it. It was a feeling in my chest with no walls around it.
Then I met a girl with graphite on her fingers, and I told her the same story I’d been telling since I was eleven, and on the dock where we got married she drew it on a cocktail napkin while I talked.
And there it was. The whole thing. Walls and light and the hearth, exactly the way I’d felt it, better than I’d felt it.
She saw it before I did. She saw it in me before I did.
“I’m going up there,” I said.
“Good.”
“Margot says give her space.”
Jonah looked at me for a long time. Then he picked up his roller again and went back to the wall.
“Well,” he said, “Margot would know.”
* * *
I got home at ten and didn’t turn on the lights, because the only person who ever turned them off behind me wasn’t there.
I ate standing up at the counter. I fed nobody.
The dog bowls were still by the back door, both of them, washed and stacked.
At some point I went and stood in Lucy’s study doorway in the dark and looked at the dark shapes of the shelves, and I didn’t go in.
It felt like her room in a way it never had when she was in it.
I took my place card out of my wallet, where it had lived since Sunday morning, and propped it against the coffee maker. The lake at dusk. The footprint across the corner.
At two in the morning I was lying on top of the covers with my phone on my chest.
“I’m sorry,” I said out loud, to the ceiling, to see how it sounded in an empty room. It sounded small. It sounded like the truth, which I wasn’t used to.
I started typing. I wrote that I was sorry.
I wrote that I’d been an idiot, that Jonah was right, that he was always right and it was unbearable.
I wrote that I didn’t know the napkins were painted, and that I should have known, and that I should have known a thousand other things, and I tried to list them and couldn’t, and that was worse than anything, that I couldn’t even make the list. I wrote that I’d found my card.
I wrote that it was the color of her dress.
I wrote that I remembered the napkin on the dock, the real one, the first one, and her pen, and my champagne ring on the corner.
I wrote that I’d been selling her the whole time, and I didn’t know how to stop.
It was eleven paragraphs long. I read it three times. It sounded like a pitch. Every line of it sounded like a man who wanted something.
I held down the delete key and watched it go, letter by letter, from the bottom up, until there was nothing left in the box but the blinking line.
Then I typed two words and sent them before I could think.
How’s Juni?