Page 88

My father reaches over and puts his hand on my forearm, the grip lighter than it used to be but still deliberate.

“Don’t waste time,” he says. “It’s the only thing I want to tell you that has nothing to do with the company. I didn’t waste a moment. Not with your mother, not with Maggie, not with you and Iris. It’s the only item on my list of regrets with a zero next to it. Everything else, I let something slip somewhere. The moments I held onto are the ones I can still see clearly.”

I press the back of my hand against my mouth.

“Maggie tells me you’re finally with Sienna,” he says, his voice has shifted into something lighter.

I look up at him. “Finally?”

“Finally,” he repeats, the slick smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, the same corner where my smile sits. “I have eyes, Grayson. I’ve always had eyes. The way you looked at that girl and the way she looked back at you, it wasn’t subtle. I’m just glad you stopped wasting time.” He settles back against the headboard, both hands folding across his stomach with the satisfaction of a man who has been waiting on a particular outcome for years and has lived to see it. “You only get a handful of it. You should spend it all with the people you love, but especially with the person you love most.”

I look at him.

The gloss in his eyes has nothing to do with dementia and everything to do with whatever he can see beyond this room. Something older. Something that belongs to him and my mother, to a back garden with blue flowers, and a staircase, and a quilt, and a hand moving through her hair on the last night.

“All I have left to worry about is Iris,” he says, the smile going softer. “I don’t want to leave you two alone in the world.” He chuckles, low and rough, and the chuckle becomes a cough that he waves off before I can move. “She is so stubborn, and independent, but she doesn’t want to be alone, you know?”

“I know, but she’s stubborn about that too,” I tell him, and my voice is rougher than I want it to be.

“She gets it from your mother,” he says, and I press my teeth together hard.

I’ve been in love with Sienna Rhodes since I was sixteen years old and I wasted eight years on distance and pride and a woman with a clipboard who made a decision about what I was worth without asking me. And here is my father, clear-eyed in the lamplight of his room on a borrowed good evening, handing me the only thing that has ever mattered more than the company: a reminder that the moments you don’t waste are the ones that stay with you.

I know what I must do.

I’ve known for weeks. Tonight just made it simple.

I lean forward and put my arms around him carefully, the way you hold something that is more fragile than it used to be and more precious than it has ever been. And he puts his hand on the back of my head and pulls me in the way he did when my mother died, and I didn’t cry until he did.

“Love is a blessing, Gray,” he rasps against my shoulder. “So many people leave this world without ever really feeling it. You have it in spades. Don’t be afraid of it. Don’t be careful with it. Give it everything you have.”

The heat in my chest surges to a single clear point.

My father has spent his entire life loving people completely. My mother until she could not hold on anymore. Iris and me through everything. Maggie from the day she walked into this house and didn’t ask for anything in return. He has never loved anything halfway. He has never saved any of it for later.

That is the true inheritance he is leaving me. Not the company. Not his fifty percent or the transfer papers or the thirty-year relationships or the Northeast distribution network. This. This right here, his hand on the back of my head in the lamplight, telling me that love is a blessing and to give it everything.

I can do that.

“Tell Iris to come in,” he murmurs into my shoulder, softer now, his clarity starting to ebb at the edges the way it does, gently and without drama.

I pull back and squeeze his hand once.

I step out of the room to see Iris crouched against the wall in the hallway. When she looks up at me, I can see fear laced through her expression.

“He wants to see you,” I tell her.

“Okay,” she whispers, pushing herself up to her feet.

She taps my chest twice as she slips past me into the room, and I hear my father say her name, just her name, and the door closes.

I’m already moving.

My father’s study is at the end of the hall, and I reach it in eight strides, the door open, the desk lamp still on from when Maggie was in here earlier with the color-coded tabs and her careful handwriting. I pull open drawers until I find the green folder, two drawers down, the tabs sticking out exactly the way Maggie organized them, exactly the way my father organized everything before her, the Douglas family approach to things that matter, which is to put them where you can find them when you finally need them.

I drop into my father’s chair.

The leather is worn in the specific places his weight wore over forty years of sitting here and running a company my great-grandfather built. The desk is a dull brick red with a gold and green lamp in the corner. The pen in the desk tray is heavy silver with his initials on the clip, the one I used to sneak in here and touch when I was a kid.