It was the first uncomplicated male interaction I’d had in months, and I nearly mistrusted it on principle.
Over the next week, he helped me replace a worn line on the boom and never once asked why a woman who looked like she’d stepped out of a court hearing kept taking out a beautiful racing boat alone on Tuesdays. That restraint earned him more goodwill than grand gestures ever would have.
Still, I kept him in the category of Useful Harbor Human. My life did not have room for romantic foreshadowing. It barely had room for clean laundry.
The night before the hearing, Grant cornered me in the parking garage beneath Blackwood’s office.
I had just come down the elevator with a banker’s box full of copies and notes when I heard my name.
“Natalie.”
I froze, then turned.
He stood beside one of the concrete pillars in a navy suit that fit a little worse than it used to. He’d lost weight. His tie was crooked. The golden confidence he wore for years like a second skin had thinned to something strained and frantic. He looked tired in a way money usually prevents.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said.
“I just need five minutes.”
“No.”
“Please.”
That word again. Men never use please until the world stops arranging itself around them.
I shifted the box higher against my hip. “Talk to your attorney.”
“I’m trying to talk to my wife.”
“I don’t think you are.”
His face twisted. “You think I don’t know what this looks like?”
“I know exactly what it looks like.”
He took a step closer. “I made mistakes.”
I almost admired the smallness of that phrase. Mistakes. As if he’d forgotten dry cleaning, not built a side relationship while leveraging my father’s death.
“You betrayed me,” I said. “You lied to me for at least eighteen months. You used our money to finance the lie. You let your mistress into my house to steal from me. You explored financial access to my father’s assets while he was dying. Those are not mistakes. Those are choices with administrative follow-through.”
His jaw tightened.
“I was angry,” he said. “You and James—”
“Careful.”
“He never treated me like family.”
I laughed, because there in the concrete echo of that garage, he was still auditioning for sympathy.
“You brought another woman to his funeral.”
“He was dead, Natalie.”
The sentence hung there, ugly and revealing.
He heard it immediately. So did I.