The door closed behind him with a quiet click.
I folded my hands on the table and said, “Where were we?”
The white-haired man closed the lease packet.
“I’ll take this to the investors,” he said. “I’ll call in a week.”
“Two weeks,” I said. “I’m busy.”
Part 6
The call came in twelve days.
They accepted.
Thomas gave me the news late in the afternoon while we sat on the cabin porch drinking coffee the way Grandpa Arthur used to make it, too strong and too sweet. He held the mug with both hands and looked out over the water while he went through the details.
The lease agreement had been approved by Mercer Capital’s board. Sixty years, with a review every decade. Fixed annual revenue of six hundred eighty thousand dollars, plus two point three percent of the resort’s gross revenue. The environmental clause stayed intact. The reversion clause stayed intact.
And I kept every deed.
“There’s one more thing,” Thomas said.
I looked at him.
“Scott Kesler told me Brandon was let go from Mercer Capital last week. Conflict of interest. The attempt to challenge the trust while the company was negotiating turned out to be the final straw.”
I did not say anything.
I looked at the lake instead. The water was calm. The sun was dropping behind the trees on the north ridge, the same ridge my grandfather bought in 1991 with money from timber he cut and replanted himself.
“You’re not going to ask how he’s doing?” Thomas asked.
“No.”
Thomas nodded, took a sip of coffee, and did not ask again.
I signed the contract on a Friday morning in Thomas’s office. There were no photographers. No celebration. No champagne. Just seven deeds, one lease agreement, and my name on every page.
The white-haired man introduced himself properly then. Richard Hail.
When it was over, he shook my hand and said, “If you ever decide you want to invest, look me up.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But my grandfather taught me to invest in land. I think I’ll stick with what I know.”
I drove back to the cabin and sat on the porch for a while before going inside. It was real autumn by then. The trees had turned red and gold. The lake held all of it in its reflection, the color, the clouds, the dark pines at the top of the ridge.
Then I went inside, grabbed the easel, carried it back out, and opened the same box of paints Grandpa Arthur used.
I started painting the lake again.
It was terrible.
The proportions were off. The trees looked like fat green broccoli. The sky was nowhere near the orange I was trying to capture. It did not matter.
When I finished, I signed it in the bottom corner. Not with his initials.
With mine.
C.A.L.
Clare Ashford.
Then I hung it on the wall beside his nine paintings.
The tenth painting. The worst one in the room. And somehow the one that belonged there most.
That night, I called Megan.
“Thank you,” I said. “For the couch. For the borrowed car. For reminding me the cabin existed.”
She was quiet for a second.
Then she asked, “Are you okay?”
