No suit. No watch I recognized. No phone visible. He sat on a bench beneath bare branches, holding two paper cups of coffee.
“I didn’t know what you wanted anymore,” he said when I approached. “So I guessed.”
I took one.
Black, with cinnamon.
He remembered.
We sat with enough space between us for the past year.
“I spoke to Dr. Leland,” he said.
Our grief counselor. The one I had visited twice before Grant said therapy made him feel “managed.”
“She still has an opening next week.”
I looked at him carefully. “For you?”
“For me,” he said. “Whether or not you come.”
That mattered more than any apology he had ever offered.
He stared at the gravel path.
“I built a life where everything could be replaced if it became inconvenient. Employees. Apartments. Deals. Time. I didn’t realize I had started treating people the same way.”
“You realized.”
“Too late.”
“Maybe.”
He nodded as if he deserved nothing else.
For an hour, we spoke honestly in fragments.
I told him loneliness had become a room I lived in while he visited occasionally. He told me ambition had turned fear into fuel until he could no longer tell the difference between success and escape. I told him I was considering the Bellwether fellowship. His face changed when I said Florence, but he did not object.
