"I'm sure you do. You probably fold them into origami first."
The waiter appears. Keaton, who has worked at the hotel long enough to know what I drink without asking. He sets a glass of bourbon in front of me and turns to Greer, and she orders a single malt scotch, neat, with the casual authority of a woman who has spent time in bars where ordering quickly is a survival skill. I like it. I shouldn't like it as much as I do.
"You said there were things about my mother and the community that might provide context," she says, once the drink arrives. She doesn't sip it. She holds it, the glass sweating againsther fingers, and watches me with those eyes that are lighter than June's and sharper than they have any right to be. "Context for what?"
"For understanding why the offer is what it is. And why your mother's relationship to this town was more complicated than it might appear."
"My mother's relationship to this town was that she lived in it and your family wanted her gone. That seems pretty uncomplicated. I've been reading her journals, by the way. She kept a lot of journals."
The mention of the journals lands precisely where she intends it to, in the soft space between what I know and what I can afford to acknowledge. I take a sip of bourbon. She takes a sip of scotch. We watch each other over our glasses like two people who understand that this meal is a chess game and have both decided to enjoy it anyway.
"Your mother was respected here," I tell her, and it has the advantage of being true, which makes it useful. "She was part of the fabric of Wicked Falls. The historical society. The library board. She taught art classes at the community center for years. People cared about her."
"People care about a lot of things in this town. The question is what the Aldriches care about, and the answer, from what I can tell, is the land under my mother's house."
"Among other things." I hold her gaze. Let the ambiguity sit between us, let her decide whetheramong other thingsrefers to real estate or to the woman sitting across from me in a green dress with shadow pooling in the hollow of her throat.
She catches it. Her chin lifts a fraction of an inch, not retreat, recalibration. "Is that your professional assessment or a personal one?"
"I don't have personal assessments. I have professional opinions and private ones. The private ones aren't covered under attorney-client privilege."
"How convenient for you."
"You have no idea."
The banter is a trap, and I know it, because I'm the one setting it. Every exchange that makes her smile, and she's fighting a smile right now, I can see it in the tension at the corner of her mouth, is an exchange that makes her trust me a fraction more than she should. I am doing what Ward would want me to do: getting close, building rapport, making myself the friendly Aldrich, the safe one.
The difference is that Ward would be performing. I am sitting in this restaurant wanting to make this woman laugh, actually wanting it, not performing it, and the fact that the want is real is the most dangerous thing in the room.
"The family has a legitimate interest in consolidating property holdings adjacent to our existing claims," I begin.
"Callum." The way she says my name this time is different. Warmer, but in the way that a warning can be warm, the heat of something that's about to ignite. "You're very good at this. The careful phrasing, the institutional language. I'm sure it works on most people. But I've been reading my mother's journals, and she spent decades documenting every time your family circled her property. And I walked the mining road this afternoon, and I found the sealed entrance with the brand-new door, and I'm sitting here in your family's restaurant drinking your family's scotch, and I would like, just once, for someone in this town to tell me something that isn't wrapped in four layers of real estate jargon."
The restaurant hums around us. A fork against a plate. A glass against a table. The low, measured conversation of people who can afford to eat in a place like this. Somewhere behindthe bar, Keaton is polishing glassware and pretending not to listen, which is what Keaton does, which is what everyone in this town does: polish the surface and pretend not to hear what's underneath.
I look at Greer, and for the second time in two days I feel the loss of control, the upper hand slipping. She's not buying the institutional language because she grew up hearing institutional language deployed against her mother, and she's developed an immunity to it the way people develop an immunity to a disease: through long, painful exposure.
"Your mother knew things about this town that most people don't," I say. The sentence feels like stepping off a ledge. "She used that knowledge to protect herself and her property. It worked. For decades, it worked."
"And now she's dead." Greer says it flatly, without self-pity, without the performative grief that most people offer when discussing a recent loss. She says it as a fact, the way you'd saythe mine is sealedorthe road is maintained. "And you're here, buying me dinner, trying to figure out if she passed that knowledge along to me with the property."
"Did she?"
The question is out before I can catch it. Unplanned, unvetted, pulled from somewhere I don't let things out of. I hear it leave my mouth and the anger at my own lapse is immediate and precise, because I have just asked Greer the one question Ward told me never to ask directly. Ward's philosophy is oblique. You never ask someone what they know. You watch. You listen. You let them tell you by what they avoid.
Greer lifts her scotch and takes a long sip, watching me over the rim, and the look on her face is so precisely her mother's that for a moment the restaurant falls away and I'm seventeen again, standing in June Holden's kitchen while she poured me lemonade and told me, with the gentle ferocity of a woman whosaw something in me she wanted to save, that being an Aldrich was a choice, not a sentence.
"She left me journals," Greer says. "Decades of them. I haven't finished reading them."
"And?"
"And I'm having dinner with the man who wants to buy my land and just asked me a question he clearly wasn't supposed to ask, and I'm trying to decide if that's a slip or a strategy."
The directness of it hits low, in the gut where I keep the things that actually affect me. I make a decision, fast, instinctive, the kind of calculation I'm good at. I let the mask drop, just enough. Not vulnerability. Access. A controlled opening, the kind you offer when you want someone to step closer to the edge.
"It was a slip," I say.
"Good." She sets her glass down. "I don't trust you. I want to be clear about that. But I trust slips more than I trust strategies, and you just gave me the first honest thing anyone in this town has offered since I got here."
