Page 52

“I’m coming.”

They walked between the headstones. Knox moved like he knew the path, like he’d walked it enough times to have a route but not enough to feel comfortable. His shoulders were tight, his hands in his pockets. Lucy walked beside him and said nothing because Knox’s silences were different from her own, and this one required her to be present, not helpful.

Arthur Knightly’s grave was simple. Gray stone, name, dates, and nothing else. There was no inscription, no epitaph, no declaration of love or legacy. It had the look of a grave no one came to together.

Knox stood at the foot of the grave, his jaw set, staring at it expressionless.

“Dad,” he said. “This is Lucy.”

Lucy’s throat closed. She stood beside him and felt the devastating weight of a man introducing her to his dead father because this was all he had left.

“She owns a bakery,” Knox continued, his voice steady, conversational, as if the headstone might respond. “She makes the best lemon bars in Brooklyn. She called my palate limited and compared me to fungus, both in the same meeting. She’s the most stubborn person I’ve ever met, and I’ve worked with Ronan Wilder for years.”

“I can hear you,” Lucy said.

“I’m aware.” He kept his eyes on the stone. “She’s also the reason I haven’t watched The Weather Channel in weeks, which is significant because I’ve been watching The Weather Channel for a very long time and it was starting to interfere with my sleep.”

Lucy’s hand found his. He laced his fingers through hers without looking down.

“You loved wrong,” Knox said to the grave. His voice dropped. “I know that now. You loved the performance. The impression. You loved what love could get you, not what it cost you to give. I spent all those years thinking your mistake was loving at all. It wasn’t. Your mistake was treating it like a transaction.” He paused. “I’m trying not to do that.”

The cemetery was quiet, a bird calling from a tree near the fence, the wind moving through the grass.

Lucy studied the headstone. Arthur Knightly had been reduced to a name and two dates, and the distance between them held a life that Knox rarely spoke about except in fragments. The truffles, the fund, the reckless love that cost everything.

“Was he a good father?” she asked. She hadn’t planned to.

Knox weighed the question as he weighed everything, visibly, translating emotion into something he could name. “He was attentive. Generous. He took me to the office on weekends and let me sit in his chair and spin. He taught me to play chess and how to read a balance sheet and that your handshake should be firm but not aggressive.” He paused. “He was also a man who loved a woman more than he loved his own judgment, and the gap between those two things destroyed him.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Yes. He was a good father. Until he wasn’t.”

Lucy held his hand tighter. The sun was warm on their faces.

“She’ll be angry with me soon,” Knox told his father. “I can’t tell you why. But I need you to know that whatever happens, I chose this. I chose her. And I’d rather lose her with the truth between us than keep her inside a lie.”

Lucy squeezed his hand. She didn’t know what he meant. She filed it where she filed all of Knox’s cryptic statements, alongside the grant from his foundation and the way he kept checking his phone for something that never came.

Knox faced her. “We should go.”

“Okay.”

They turned to leave, but Lucy paused and looked back at the headstone.

“Mr. Knightly,” she said, addressing the stone as she addressed Mrs. Hadley, with respect and the understanding that listening was its own form of conversation. “Your son psychoanalyzed my pastry the first time we met. He called my lemon bars ‘acceptable.’ He calculated my rent from the price of a scone. He memorizes coffee temperatures and argues about wildflower budgets, and he does this thing when he’s nervous with his cuffs that he thinks nobody notices.”

Knox’s hand tightened around hers.

“He’s the most infuriating person I’ve ever met,” Lucy continued. “And he’s the only one who ever doubled my catering estimate without being asked twice. I think you’d like him. The version of him that’s learning to stop being afraid.”

She turned to Knox, whose eyes were bright behind his glasses. He didn’t speak. He pulled her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to it, brief and warm, and the gesture was so unlike him, so unguarded, that she ached with the hurt of watching someone let go of something they’d been gripping onto for years.

They drove back in the late light. Lucy held his hand across the center console. He drove one-handed, which was impractical and dangerous and the most romantic thing she’d ever seen him do.

Her phone buzzed. It was Jane.

Jane: How’s the non-boyfriend?