There's a knock at the door and it swings open before I get a chance to tell whoever it is to go take a long hike off a cliffside.
Not that it would be a good idea, since Agatha appears on the other side, leaning heavily on her new cane. She is dressed for travel in her elegant grey cashmere coat. Her gaze travels the room as she stands in the doorway. First on the tray, then my wrinkled shirt, then my intact bourbon glass. Finally, her eyes land on the paperwork, still strewn across the room.
"You look terrible," she says as she sets her dark gaze back on me.
"Good morning to you too, Grandmother."
"It wouldn't be a good morning even if it were morning." There's no trace of mercy in her voice. Not that I'm expecting any. She's a Thornwood, after all. "It's almost two in the afternoon, my boy, and I'm about to leave for Cliffwood Rehabilitation Center."
It takes a moment for my brain to process those bits of information. When I do, I straighten in my chair and frown at the elderly minotaur.
"You hate the idea of a rehabilitation center," I say, flat.
"I require quiet to finish mending," she retorts with a pinch of her lips. "And I find I would prefer that quiet to be somewhere I am not obliged to watch you rot in real time."
She settles a fraction more of her weight onto the cane and glares at me like I'm holding a red flag and wiggling my butt.
"I'll be gone about two weeks. I want you out of this house before I return. Boston. Long Beach. The far side of the moon. I do not especially mind which. But not here."
I don't argue. I'm a defeated man, something I swore to myself I would never be. I nod to Agatha anyway.
She doesn't move toward the door. She studies me instead, and when she speaks again the heat has gone out of her voice, which is always how I know she means it most.
"You're a fool," she says.
"I'm aware."
"You had that girl. You had her twice, which is more chances than most men manage once, and on both occasions you found a way to make the same mistake all over again." She shakes her head and her jewelry dangles from her horns. "All these years, Demetrius, and you have learned nothing."
I don't have a rebuttal. That's the part that's been eating through me since the door closed behind Maddie. I always have a rebuttal. I have constructed an entire life out of being right where other people were wrong, and I cannot find a single angle from which I come out right on this one.
"I was trying to give her everything," I say, and I hate the way I sound. Small and defeated.
Agatha looks at me for a long moment, her lips pinched and her eyes hard.
"You have everything," she says. "The money. The company. You have all of it." A pause. "And you are going to spendwhatever years you have left discovering that not one piece of it adds up to enough."
Then she's gone, the cane tapping away down the hall, and somewhere below a door opens and the car takes her away.
There it is. My grandmother is right. I have everything and I have nothing at all at the same time.
I have spent my life confident that any deficit could be answered if you found the right input. More capital. Better timing. The correct person in the correct chair. There is no input for this. This is not a problem that I can solve with numbers and sheer force of will.
I don't get up after that. I'm good at not moving, as it turns out. Another talent I didn't know I had.
But I do reach for that glass. And when that glass is empty, I reach for the bottle and pour myself another one.
I don't see why not.
The bottle gets lighter. The light at the curtains slides from white to a thin, slanted gold, the kind that means the afternoon has stopped pretending to be early. I pour another. Maybe one after that.
I don't know how much time passes and I don't care.
Then a car horn goes off in the drive. One long flat note, and then it keeps going, annoying and stubborn.
The shouting starts a beat later. The words don't reach me up here, only the shape of them, and the shape is unmistakably Jasmine Seaglass. Incredible, really, that Maddie and she are still best friends after all these years.
Less so from where I'm standing right now.
