Page 73 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Nobody had an answer to that. Toby beamed like the sun had personally endorsed him.

He could have ended it there. He was good at ending things. He’d ended entire projects with a single sentence and let the silence do the rest. He could have looked at Lawton Pinckney long enough to make him aware, in the animal part of his brain that predated all his manners, that the largest thing at the table was not amused. He chose not to. That would have been for himself. It would have felt good, and it would have cost Maris something in the long run. These two people were her son’s only grandparents and would be for the rest of their lives.

So he drank his coffee, and he refused—flatly, silently and completely—to agree with a single thing they believed. He gave them no laugh at Toby’s expense. No shared adult glance over the boy’s head. No polite murmur of of course, the city has its advantages. He simply sat, grey and enormous and immovable, and let them find out what it was like to be in a room where their worldview did not echo back.

It was, he thought, a very small thing. It might have been the hardest small thing he had ever done.

Maris told him about the offer in the truck, on the way to the mansion, with Toby delivered to Dot’s grandmother’s for the morning and the grandparents left to pack.

She told it with her voice absolutely neutral. Ashby, Jeff’s old school, with a place already held. The trust released early, all of it, enough for the school and everything after. A house, three streets from the grandparents, in Toby’s name. Family. Cousins. His father’s people.

“And me,” she said. “I’d come. Obviously. They’re not… It’s not cruel, Garrick, that’s the thing, I keep waiting for the part that’s cruel and there isn’t one. It’s a good offer. It’s a genuinely good offer.”

“It is,” he said.

She looked at him sideways. He kept his eyes on the road.

He could solve the problem. He could pay Ashby’s tuition and buy a house three streets from the Pinckneys and never notice either against the quarter’s numbers. He could match every advantage on that table and raise it. Cornelia would reclassify Maris the moment the wire cleared, from the girl Jefferson married to the woman Garrick kept, and she would realize she had no control over Maris.

He could fix it. He didn’t offer.

He gripped the wheel until the leather complained and he didn’t offer. Aidan had told him a story once, months ago, about a fawn he had found down in a creek bed with a broken leg, and splinted, and fed off his fingers for six weeks. And how the kindest thing and the cruelest thing had turned out to be the same thing, which was to open the gate and let it go without deciding for it what its life should be. You can love something and still not get to hold on to it, Aidan had said. They’re separate things.

He had thought it was a story about wildlife.

If he wrote the check, he would have decided for her. He’d have made the school and the house and the boy’s future one more thing he had built and put his name on. And somewhere down the years Maris would look up from a life he had purchased and realize that he’d held on to her. There would be a wall between them made out of his generosity, and it would have gone up the day he made it too easy.

“You could—” she started, and stopped.

“I could,” he agreed.

“You’re not going to.”

“No.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly after a long pause.

He didn’t answer. It didn’t feel like something to be thanked for. It felt like standing perfectly still and watching something burn.

Aidan came by that afternoon with the corridor survey, and stayed to say goodbye to the Pinckneys, who had insisted on a farewell tour of the famous Stonehaven grounds before the drive south.

It went well enough at first. Lawton was expansive about the restored stonework and the terraces and the view. Garrick answered in words of one syllable. Cornelia admired the rose garden in the insincere voice of a female being polite about something she didn’t care for. Maris walked them through the gardens, small again, and his fists were clenched by the time they reached the old wall with its ferns.

“Remarkable,” Lawton said, surveying the ruined masonry Maris had fought so hard to keep. “Though I confess I don’t quite see the appeal of leaving it broken.”

“It’s a habitat,” Toby said, trotting along next to them. “There’s four kinds of fern. Mama counted.”

“Did she?” Lawton asked indulgently. He turned to Garrick and gave him the deal-room smile, male to male, and Garrick knew what was coming a full second before it came. “You know, I have to ask, Stonehaven. A male of your stature. You must find it limiting, being out here. Playing with old walls. It’s a hobby, surely. Not where the real work is.”

Nobody in the garden moved.

Maris looked up. Aidan, three beds over, straightened slowly.

“No,” he said, and felt the heat rise behind his eyes. Gold, hot and unmistakable, blooming in front of Toby’s grandparents in the middle of his garden. He didn’t try to stop it. He didn’t want to.

Lawton’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. His body took a step back, instinctively reacting to danger.

“The real work,” Garrick continued, in an even voice that never rose and never needed to, “is here.”