Page 75 of The Drifter

I worked for an hour. Maybe more.

I found a legal aid center that did nothing but this—heirs' property, all up and down the Lowcountry, exactly the thing eating my family alive. There was a whole world of it I'd never known existed, lawyers and land trusts and a Gullah Geechee coalition that had been fighting this fight for decades while I stood behind a marble counter thinking I was the only one. I filled a page with names. I wrote down questions. I built the thing the way I build everything, walls up, made to stand, except this time, the thing I was building was a fence around what was mine.

And when I finally sat back, my neck stiff, I felt something I hadn’t felt in longer than I could name.

I felt like I was doing my own life.

I got up and stretched and, then, without deciding to, sat back down and went to the government website. The checklist I'd started in my T-shirt on the sofa like a woman doing something illegal.

How to get a passport.

Dubai had felt like the moon. It felt a little less like the moon now, because a great many things that had felt impossible a week ago had turned out to be relatively easy.

The land was one of them. I'd just spent time on the thing I'd been too afraid to touch for weeks, and the world had not ended. The building still stood without me. Izzy still loved me. And a man had looked at me across a lobby and asked what I'd be doing if I weren't standing there, and I hadn’t had an answer. I was so tired of not having an answer.

I didn’t book anything. But I read the passport page all the way through. I learned that it took a photo and a form and a check and a while. None of it was hard. None of it was the moon. I found where you could get the photo taken. I found what the form needed. I found the courthouse annex where you turned it in, fifteen minutes from where I sat.

And then, because I had come this far and there was nobody in the room to stop me, I opened a new tab and I typed hotels Dubai, and I looked.

I looked the way I'd wanted to look my whole career. Not as a guest. As a builder. I went through the lobbies somebody had built to prove a point—the atriums that went up forty floors, the water features that had no business existing in a desert, the back-of-house I could only guess at from the way the front-of-house moved. I looked at how they'd solved the things Charleston couldn't solve, or wouldn't. I felt the old hunger come up in me, the one I'd never said to a living soul until a hallway, the one that had a shape now.

I didn’t know if I was ever going to build a hotel. That was too big for one day.

But I knew, sitting there, that I was going to go and see one. That I was going to get the passport and take one of those banked weeks that sat in a spreadsheet like money I was never going to spend, and I was going to get on an airplane that went over water for the first time in my life, and I was going to walk through a lobby somebody had built to prove a point, and I was going to stand in the middle of it with nothing in my hands and let it teach me something.

Not for a guest. Not for the desk.

For me.

I closed the laptop.

When I picked up my phone, there was nothing on it—no word, no text, no gravel-and-somewhere-else voice, nothing. I felt the not-hearing land in me like a stone dropping through water.

I set the phone face-down and made myself breathe.

I had done a lot. Real. I had faced the letter I'd been hiding from and I had called my aunt and said the thing I never say. I had started a fight for my grandmother's ground. I had looked up how to leave the only circle I'd ever lived inside of. I had spent hours being a woman who did her own life instead of standing behind a counter doing everybody else's.

And I had done all of it while a man I'd broken my whole vow for was somewhere out there, walking toward the exact kind of trouble I'd sworn I would never stand next to, and not calling.

Both things were true at once. That was what I hadn't understood about opening a door. The room gets bigger, and everything comes in—the good and the frightening, the fourteen acres and the pluff mud, the passport and the man who wouldn't promise. You don't get to let in only the parts you want.

I went and stood in the doorway of the empty room.

I didn't turn the light on. I just stood there and looked at the dresser. For once, I didn’t feel the old ache in it, the closed-off grief of a life not lived. I felt something else. I felt like a woman who had started to build the life the room was waiting for—not the exact shape of it, but the ground of it.

Whatever came, I'd meet it.

I closed the door soft, the way he'd closed it, and I didn’t look out the window even once.

But I kept my phone where I could see it.

22

CLINT

They wouldn't let me leave on foot.

I tried. I got as far as the courtyard with every intention of walking out those iron gates and finding the harbor road, working the day out of my body a mile at a time. Tommy caught me at the steps, looked at me like I'd proposed swimming home, and put a key in my hand.