Chapter Fourteen — Six Months
Zaire spent the six months after the wedding learning things about himself he wasn't especially proud of.
He left Kingston Global Logistics — not dramatically, not in a blaze of righteous fury the way he'd imagined it in his father's study, but slowly, methodically, the way he did most things once the anger cooled into resolve.
He transferred his shares into a trust his grandmother helped him structure, over his father's furious objections, and walked away from a corner office he'd occupied for six years without once, in all that time, having chosen it for himself.
Ruby Kingston, it turned out, was the only member of his family who didn't treat the canceled wedding like a catastrophe.
"Your grandfather ran numbers out of the back of a barbershop on Auburn Avenue for eleven years before he ever touched a legitimate dollar," she told Zaire, the two of them alone on her porch one Sunday, her hands steady around a glass of sweet tea while his shook slightly around his.
"You know what he told me, right before he went legit?
He said the hardest thing in the world isn't building something out of nothing.
It's tearing down something everybody respects because you finally realized it wasn't built for you.
Took him twenty years to work up the nerve.
You did it in four months, over a woman.
That's not shame, baby. That's the family gift skipping a generation and landing right where it needed to. "
"She won't talk to me, Grandma."
"Did you expect her to?"
"No," he admitted. "I just hoped."
"Hope's not a plan," Ruby said. "Your granddad didn't get me back by hoping. He got me back by becoming a man worth trusting and then waiting until I noticed. Took him the better part of a year. You in a hurry?"
He wasn't, he realized. Or rather — he was, every single day, in the specific hurry of a man who wanted urgently to fix something and couldn't, and had to learn, for the first time in his charmed and over-managed life, the difference between wanting to fix something and actually being capable of it.
He started a company. Small, at first — a logistics consultancy that specialized in exactly the kind of mid-sized, Black-owned businesses his own family's conglomerate had grown too large and too cautious to bother with anymore, the kind of clients who needed someone who understood the industry without needing them to sign over a piece of their company to get good advice.
He hired two people. Then five. He worked out of a converted warehouse in the West End with bad coffee and good light, and for the first time since he was maybe twenty-two years old, he went to sleep at night having built something with his own hands instead of inheriting it.
He didn't call Kamiko. He didn't send flowers, texts, or voicemails. He'd used up his welcome on all of that, he understood now, and further attempts would only prove her right about him — a man who took what he wanted whether or not it had been offered.
He waited. It was, he'd think later, the hardest and most important thing he ever did.