Chapter 33 Takedown
Colt
The room is still dark when I open the laptop. I'm in a wingback chair with a cup of Lorna's lobby coffee going cold beside me and a vase of camellias on the writing desk. I'm about to dismantle my father's life from a yellow room in a B&B.
Dade's first email comes in a few minutes later.
Documents are queued. We file at nine-fifteen ET. SEC referral simultaneous. DA on standby for the criminal piece. I need your confirmation by seven. Once we move, we don't pull it back. Be sure.
I've been sure for a long time. I was sure the moment Dom set the manila folder on the kitchen counter and used the words personally compelling.
I was sure the night I sat on my mother's wrought-iron bench by the fountain and listened to her call my wife common.
I was sure when I rented an apartment in Logan Square and sat in it watching Summer build a life that didn't require me.
Signing the document is the only part that's going to feel like anything. The certainty has been here all along.
I type back.
Confirmed. Move at nine-fifteen. Send the cleanup checklist by ten. Don't loop me in on Sonny's response. I will handle that on my own clock.
I close my laptop, take a sip of my coffee and watch the camellias.
***
Bennet Ventures separated last week.
We signed the final document in a conference room in Chicago.
Dom witnessed it. The notary was a woman named Renee who didn't know what she was witnessing.
I signed my name, slid the folder back across the table, and Dom said, Congratulations, partner.
We walked out and got tacos. We didn't toast. There was nothing to celebrate.
My father built one company. I built another. Last week I made mine legally separate from his, so that when his burns, mine stands.
Twenty people in a Loop office with a standing order at the Thai place on the first floor. A board that is two of us, plus Renee the notary's husband, who is a retired SEC compliance officer and the kind of man who reads bylaws for fun.
It's mine. It's clean. It's small. It's enough.
***
Nine-fifteen.
Dade's confirmation comes in minutes later.
Filed. SEC notified. The motion to compel is in. The DA has the criminal package. By eleven, we will have a knock at his office. By noon, this is the lead story on Charleston business news. By two, Bloomberg picks it up.
I read the email twice.
Then I close the laptop. Go to the bathroom. Splash water on my face. Look in the mirror.
The man in the mirror is still ten pounds lighter. He still has a beard but it is more manicured and his dark circles have started to fade.
I look at him.
I say, out loud, "It's done."
I just feel tired.
I pick up my phone. Text Dom.
Me
Filed.
He responds right away.
Dom
Stay off the news. Don't answer your mother.
Me
Wasn't planning to.
Dom
Sonny will call. Let it go to voicemail. Save the voicemail. Don't engage.
Me
Understood.
I put the phone face-down on the writing desk.
I go downstairs and ask Lorna for another cup of coffee.
***
He calls a little before eleven.
I'm in the parlor, drinking my second cup of coffee, pretending to read the Post and Courier on my phone. The phone rings. SONNY BENNET. The picture is from last Christmas, him in a sweater I didn't buy him, smiling for a camera he hadn't been told was on.
I let it ring through and go to voicemail.
It rings again. And again. And again. I don't pick up. Dom said let it go to voicemail, and for once the smart thing and what I want are the same thing. I want to hear what he sounds like. I don't want to give him a word back.
The calls stop.
I listen to the voicemails with the phone flat on the table, on speaker, like something I'd rather not hold.
The first is an order. Call me back. The second is a threat dressed up as concern. The third is rage, and under the rage I can hear the moment he understands it's real, all of it, and that he is no longer the man who controls everything.
The last one comes after a long pause. I can hear him deciding whether to leave it at all.
You are my son.
His voice breaks on the last word. I've never heard him sound like that. Sonny Bennet, sixty-six years old, the granite face, the man who has never let anyone see that he is actually capabale of human emotions.
For half a second, the boy who tiptoed past his father's study at midnight wants to call back and steady him.
The man who was manipulated and controlled doesn't.
I don't call back. I don't text. I let the messages sit there saved, like Dom told me to.
I put the phone face-down on the table and look at the needlepoint footstool in front of the chair. A faded top, the roses on it gone gray. I look at the stitches. I trace them with my eyes.
I don't cry. I think I should. I think the moment is asking for it. The tears are somewhere else, saved for some other day, for something that hasn't happened yet.
Dom texts.
Dom
He call you?
Me
He left a voicemail. I Didn't pick up.
Dom
Atta boy. Get out of the parlor. Go take a walk.
Me
Copy.
The phone rings again. VIVIENNE BENNET.
I put the phone in my pocket. I don't answer. I walk past Lorna at the desk and out the front door onto Queen Street, and I keep walking.
The phone rings four more times before I reach the Battery.
I don't answer any of them. I sit on a bench at the seawall and watch the harbor.
The cannons. The palmettos. The pelicans dive-bombing a school of menhaden a hundred yards out.
The big tankers in the distance moving toward the port.
The salt and the pluff mud and the wind off the water.
I've lived in this city my entire life. It's not my home anymore, because the woman I love doesn't live here anymore and the family that was supposed to be here isn't one.
I'll keep coming back. Greg and Sarah are here, and they aren't negotiable.
But I won't live here. I'll live in Chicago, in a small clean life with a small loud family, in a city that doesn't give a single shit what my last name is.
That decision sits in my chest like a smooth stone.
The phone rings again. I put it on silent.
***
Summer finds me on the porch of the B&B in the afternoon.
I haven't gone back to my room. I've been on the porch since I came back from the Battery.
Lorna has brought me two more coffees, a slice of pound cake and she hasn't asked any questions.
Summer comes around the corner of the house from the garden, where I assume she's been crying or thinking or both, and she stops at the bottom of the porch steps and looks up at me.
I'm in a rocking chair. My phone is face-down on the table next to me. My laptop is closed.
"Done?"
"Done."
"He called?"
"Five times."
"Vivienne?"
"Eight."
"You pick up?"
"No."
"Either of them?"
"No."
She comes up the steps. Sits in the other rocking chair. She has on jeans and one of my old college sweatshirts that she stole again at some point this morning, and her hair is up in the claw clip, and she looks like the woman who used to murder Stevie Nicks in our kitchen on a Saturday morning.
"You okay?"
"I'm okay."
She is quiet. The rockers creak. Somewhere on the next block, a dog barks twice and goes quiet.
"What did he sound like."
"In the voicemails?"
"In the voicemails."
"Weak, his voice cracked on his last message. I've never heard it do that before."
"Sonny? Are you going to be okay with that?"
"I think so."
"Tell me why."
I look at her. The woman who, a few days ago, stood under the Vibes marquee and let me put my hands on hers for the first time since everything.
The woman who is still mad at me, by every right, but who got in a car, drove, ate cornbread, and slept in a B&B room across the hall from mine because she decided this was worth one more try.
"Because he should have been a better father, a better person," I say.
"And I shouldn't have spent my whole life trying to earn him.
The cracking on son is the closest he's ever come to admitting any of that, and I think the truth is he's going to die before he gets the rest of the way there.
I can't wait for him. I've spent my whole life waiting. I'm tired."
She nods.
"Okay."
"Okay."
"You did the right thing."
"Right and good aren't the same thing today. It still feels like shit."
"Yeah."
She reaches across the gap between our rocking chairs and finds my hand. We hold each other on the porch of a yellow Federal house with a haint-blue ceiling and we rock. Slow. In sync, like our chairs found the rhythm on their own.
The sun starts to drop. The light goes pale gold, the harbor catches it, and the city goes briefly luminous. The kind of light that makes tourists stop on the sidewalk to take a photo.
We watch it.
"I'm giving up the Logan Square place," I say.
She turns her head. "You just signed that lease."
"I rented it so I could be near you without asking you for anything. I didn't think I had the right to ask yet." I keep my eyes on the harbor. "I'm done hedging. I want to live in Chicago for good. Not a rental I can walk away from."
She doesn't say anything.
"I want us to look for a place to buy," I say. "Together. When you're ready. Not because my company's there. Because you're there."
"A place to buy," she says.
"A place to buy. Only if you want it. I'm not asking you to decide today. I'm telling you what I want, so you know it."
She looks out at the gold water. I make myself wait.
"I want to look," she says. "I'm not giving you a closing date. But I want to look."
"That's enough."
"It's a start."
"I'm going to see your mother tomorrow," she says.
"Alone, or do you want me there."
"Alone."
"I trust you."
"That's a new sentence in your mouth."
"I have a lot of them now."
She laughs. The smallest laugh. Then she stands, still holding my hand, tugs me up out of the rocking chair, and puts her arms around my waist, her face against my chest. We stand on the porch of the B&B at twilight while the city we used to live in turns gold around us.
"You did a hard thing today, Bennet."
"Yeah."
"I'm proud of you."
I feel that. I close my eyes against the top of her head. I feel her say it, on this porch, in this city, with my father's name on every business channel in Charleston, my mother's calls stacking up in a silent phone, the harbor going copper behind her shoulder.
"I love you."
"I know."
"That's the part I never doubted."
"It's the only part I never had to earn."
"Even when I should have."
I don't answer that one. I just tighten my arm around her and let it stand.
She steps back. Looks up at me. Tilts her head.
"Lorna gave me a key to the kitchen so we could heat up the leftovers from Mama. You hungry?"
"Starving."
"Come on. There's grits."
"There's always grits."
"There's always grits."
We go inside. I put my arm across her shoulders. She lets me. The phone in my pocket has gone silent. The world outside goes on.
The diner Tupperware is on the counter. Two plates. Two forks. Two glasses. A kitchen that doesn't belong to either of us, in a house that doesn't belong to either of us, in a city that no longer belongs to either of us.