CHAPTER TWO
PIERCE
The new office took up the top two floors of a building I'd bought outright eighteen months earlier, and most mornings I still felt a small, private satisfaction walking in through the lobby with my name etched into the directory board.
Redmond Development. Not a partnership, not a subsidiary of somebody else's ambition. Mine.
The design firm had finished the renovation of my own floor two months back, all clean lines and pale wood and glass walls that made the whole space feel like it was holding its breath. My assistant, Naomi, had the coffee waiting and the day's schedule pulled up before I'd even set my bag down.
"Structural engineer at nine," she said. "Then the Alliance events coordinator at ten thirty about the spring gala, then lunch with the Hendricks Group people, then the four o'clock with legal about the tower's air rights."
"Remind me why I let you schedule four things before lunch."
"Because you told me to stop protecting your calendar from itself." She handed me a folder. "The events coordinator wants final numbers on your table before their ten thirty. She's asking if you want the full table of ten or if you're comfortable sharing with the Kessler group again this year."
"Full table. Ten seats, all business contacts." I said it without much thought, already flipping through the folder, and it was only after Naomi had written it down and moved on to the next item that some part of me registered what I'd just said and didn't examine it any further.
I stood at the glass wall a while later, between the structural engineer's call and the events coordinator's arrival, looking out over downtown Charlotte the way I still sometimes did when I wanted a minute to remember how far the view had come from the cracked parking lot outside Wilkinson Street.
Somewhere behind me, mounted where a wall used to hold a corkboard covered in permit timelines and a single framed photograph of two people laughing near a terrace door, there was now a single piece of commissioned art, abstract, the sort of thing an interior designer picks because it photographs well for the company's press materials.
I didn't think about the photograph often.
I'd tell myself, if anyone had asked, that it was somewhere safe, that the renovation had simply required things to come down for a while and go back up later, and that later just hadn't happened yet because there'd always been something more urgent.
It wasn't a lie, exactly. It also wasn't quite true, and I'd gotten good enough, over the past few years, at living comfortably in the gap between those two things.
The structural engineer's call ran long, an issue with the tower's east wing foundation that required more of my attention than I'd budgeted for, and by the time I hung up, Naomi was already waiting at my door with the events coordinator trailing behind her, a woman named Danielle who'd handled the Alliance's calendar for a decade and knew the guest list politics of every major Charlotte developer better than most of us knew them ourselves.
"Sorry to keep you," I said, waving them both in.
"No trouble. I was just telling Naomi about last year's seating disaster, the one where we accidentally sat the Kessler group next to the people they're suing.
" Danielle laughed, settling into the chair across from my desk, tablet already open.
"We're finalizing the guest list for the spring gala.
You're confirmed for the full table. Do you want a plus one included on the RSVP, or is this a business-only table for you this year? "
The question sat there a second longer than it should have.
"Business only," I said. "Keep it to the ten contacts we discussed."
"Got it. For what it's worth, a lot of the guys are bringing their wives this year. Whitfield's bringing his. The Kessler people are bringing theirs. It's turned into more of a couples thing than it used to be, the last few years."
"I noticed. My table's business, though. We've got the Hendricks deal to talk through and I don't want the dynamic getting social."
"Sure, makes sense." Danielle made a note and moved on to seating charts, and I told myself the explanation had sounded reasonable coming out of my mouth, professional, exactly the decision a serious developer makes about a serious table of serious contacts.
It was only after she'd left, folder tucked under her arm, that the sentence replayed itself in my head with a different weight to it.
I hadn't said I wanted to keep the table business only because of the deal.
I'd said it, and then found the reason for it afterward, the way you find an explanation for something you've already decided to do for reasons you don't especially want to look at directly.
Lunch with the Hendricks Group went well.
Marcus Hendricks was an investor I'd been courting for eight months, old Charlotte money, the quiet sort of wealth that didn't need to announce itself because everyone in the room already knew who he was.
Over salads neither of us really ate, he asked about my background, the usual small talk men like him used to feel out whether you were worth trusting with real money.
"Redmond," he said. "That's not a Charlotte name I recognize. Old money somewhere else?"
"No money anywhere, actually. My father was a framer.
Construction, not finance." I said it easily enough, the way I'd been saying it for years, the honest version of my story that had once felt like an asset, proof I'd built something out of nothing.
"Started with a single block of buildings off Wilkinson that nobody else wanted. Grew from there."
"Admirable." Marcus said it the way people say admirable when they mean something slightly different, something closer to unusual, and I felt the small, familiar flicker of needing to prove I belonged in the room despite the answer I'd just given. "And your wife, what does she do?"
The question arrived plainly enough, an ordinary piece of small talk, the kind men like Marcus asked as a matter of course, the same way they'd ask about a golf handicap or a alma mater.
I had an answer ready. I always had an answer ready.
Laurel's a veterinary technician, works at a clinic downtown, loves it, wouldn't trade it for anything.
It was a good answer. It was true, and I was proud of it, or told myself I was.
"She keeps busy," I said instead, and reached for my water glass, and let the conversation slide sideways into a question about zoning variances before Marcus could ask a follow-up.
Marcus, to his credit, didn't push, moving easily into a discussion of the Ellison site's zoning history, and by the time the salads were cleared he'd mentioned, almost offhand, that his own wife ran a small nonprofit focused on literacy programs in underserved schools, spoken with the same plain pride I used to bring to any mention of Laurel's work at the clinic.
I noted the ease of it, the total absence of any performance in how he described her, and felt a fresh, uncomfortable awareness of exactly how much performance had crept into my own version of the same kind of sentence.
"She sounds like a remarkable woman," I said, meaning it, and meaning something else underneath it that I didn't say out loud.
"She is. Best thing that ever happened to me, marrying her.
I tell people that regularly, mostly because it annoys her, but also because it's true.
" Marcus laughed, entirely unaware of the weight his casual honesty carried for the man sitting across from him, and the conversation moved on to numbers, and I spent the rest of the lunch only half present, a portion of my attention snagged on the ease with which another man had just done, without any visible effort at all, the exact thing I'd apparently stopped being able to do myself.
I didn't examine that either, not really, not in the moment.
It was only driving back to the office afterward, stopped at a red light two blocks from Redmond Development's building, that I noticed my own hands on the steering wheel and thought, distantly, that I hadn't said anything false to Marcus Hendricks.
I hadn't claimed to be single. I hadn't denied Laurel existed.
I had simply let a perfectly good, entirely true sentence go unsaid, and let the silence stand in its place, and told myself that was different from lying.
The light turned green. I drove on.
Back at the office, Naomi caught me in the hallway before I made it to my desk. "Legal moved the four o'clock to four thirty. And Whitfield called while you were out. Said it wasn't urgent, just wanted to catch up before the gala."
"Did he say what about?"
"Just said to give him a call when you had a minute.
He sounded good. Asked how you and Laurel were doing, actually.
" Naomi said it lightly, already moving on to the next item on her list, and it took me a second to place why the sentence stuck the way it did.
Whitfield always asked about Laurel. He'd asked about her at every gala since the one where he'd first dismissed her over a canapé table and I'd corrected him for it, and every year since, without fail, he made a point of it, like a man settling a small debt he'd never quite finished paying.
I called him back between meetings, more out of habit than urgency, and he picked up on the second ring, already talking before I'd finished saying hello.
"Redmond. Tell me the tower's still on schedule, because I told two board members it would be and I'd hate to be made a liar."
"On schedule. Might even beat it if the concrete pour goes the way we're hoping next month."
"Good man." A pause, papers shuffling somewhere on his end. "Laurel doing alright? I still think about that woman putting me in my place at the Dunhill, you know. Best thing that happened to me in years, getting told off by a vet tech in a green dress. Knocked some sense into me."
"She's good," I said. "Busy. Work's been keeping her on her feet."
"Bring her to the gala this year. It's been too long since I've seen her. Tell her I still owe her an apology for that first impression, if she'll let me buy her a drink to make up for it."
"I'll mention it to her," I said, and meant, in the moment, that I actually would, and then the call moved on to numbers and permits and the rest of the day swallowed the conversation whole, the way days did, until I found myself back at my desk at six with the mention filed away somewhere I didn't plan on retrieving anytime soon.
I sat there a minute longer than I needed to, looking at the spot on the wall where the photograph used to hang, and told myself, again, that there was still time to sort it out before the gala.
Whitfield's voice, warm and unbothered, asking after her the way he always did, sat uncomfortably alongside the ten business-only seats I'd already confirmed, and I didn't have a good answer for why those two things felt like they belonged to different men.
That evening, making dinner, I burned the chicken again despite every intention of finally getting it right, and Laurel laughed about it in a way that untangled something in my chest that had been sitting there, tight and unexamined, since lunch.
She told me about the cat's dramatic recovery from anesthesia, and I told her about Grierson's old firm trying to get a subcontract on my building, and for the length of that meal I was simply a man having dinner with his wife, nothing underneath it, nothing left unsaid worth noticing.
It was only later, after she'd gone up to bed and I stayed downstairs a while longer with the dishwasher running, that I thought again about the corkboard wall in my office, and the photograph somewhere in a drawer I hadn't opened in longer than I wanted to count, and the ten business-only seats at a table where half the other men would be bringing their wives.
I found myself, standing at the kitchen sink long after the dishwasher had finished its cycle, thinking about the first year of Redmond Development, back when the whole operation ran out of a rented office above a dry cleaner two blocks from Wilkinson Street.
Laurel used to bring me lunch there most days, sitting on the corner of my desk while I ate, asking real questions about the permits and the financing that most people found too dull to sit through.
I couldn't remember the last time she'd sat on the corner of any desk of mine.
The offices had gotten nicer. Something else, I was beginning to suspect, had gotten smaller in exchange.
I told myself I'd sort it out before the gala. There was still time. There was always, conveniently, still time.