Chapter 19: What Grant Actually Wanted

Grant showed up at Evan’s apartment on a Thursday night in February without calling first, which Evan would later think was probably the only honest thing about the entire encounter. Grant hadn’t planned what he was going to say. He’d just needed somewhere to put pressure that had been building in him for months, and Evan’s door was apparently where it finally found an exit.

Evan opened the door to find his brother standing on the little concrete step in the cold, coat unbuttoned like he’d left the house in a hurry without thinking about the weather, his breath showing in the porch light. Grant’s face had a look Evan recognized from childhood — the look he got right before he was about to argue himself into being right about something he already suspected he was wrong about.

“You must be loving this,” Grant said, not even coming inside, not waiting for a greeting. “Watching everything fall apart. Bet it feels great, sitting over there at Hawthorne while our family’s company burns down.”

“You drove forty minutes to tell me that?” Evan kept one hand on the doorframe, not stepping back yet, not inviting him in. “Say what you came to say from out there. I’m not standing here all night.”

“Because it’s everything you wanted. Dad questioning me every other week. The bank getting cold feet. Tom Hale gone after thirty-three years. Half the floor turning over. You don’t have to lift a finger, Evan, it’s just happening, and you get to sit over there at Hawthorne looking like the good guy while I sit in that office getting asked by our own father whose bed it was.”

“You want to come inside and say the rest of this like a person, or you want to keep yelling it into my yard for the neighbors?”

Grant’s jaw worked for a second. Then he stepped past Evan into the apartment without being thanked for it, and Evan closed the door behind him, slower than he needed to, giving himself a second to decide how much of this he was actually willing to let happen in his own living room.

“Here’s how this is going to go,” Evan said, before Grant could get another sentence out. “You can say whatever you drove over here to say. I’m not going to pretend I want to hear it, but I’ll let you finish. What I’m not going to do is sit here and let you tell me what I feel about any of this. You don’t get that anymore. You gave that up in June.”

Grant looked around the apartment instead of answering right away — the secondhand couch, the cinder-block bookshelf, the general modesty of it — his face doing something complicated, something between discomfort and a kind of bewildered contempt, like the apartment itself was beneath a Mercer and he couldn’t quite figure out why Evan wasn’t more embarrassed by it.