Episode 1: The Wrong Grant

Chloe

The rain had been coming down since six, the kind of cold October drizzle that made the whole city look like a photograph left out in the weather. I stood in the hallway of Tyler’s building with a cardboard box against my hip and water dripping off the hem of my coat onto the carpet, and I told myself this was the last favor I would ever do for the Grant family.

I’d packed the box that morning. A hoodie he’d left at my place, two chargers, a paperback with a cracked spine, a watch his grandmother gave him that I could not in good conscience keep, and a candle I’d bought for his bathroom because it smelled like cedar and he’d never once noticed. It was a sad little box for ten months of a person’s life. I remembered thinking that at the time. Ten months and it all fit in a box I could carry under one arm.

I knocked because the bell had never worked. I heard the TV through the door, some low sports commentary, and then footsteps, and then the lock turning, and then the door swung in and it was not Tyler.

Daniel stood there in a towel.

Just a towel, gray, knotted at his hip, and nothing else. His hair was wet, pushed back from his forehead, darker where the water had darkened it, and the silver at his temples caught the hallway light. He was forty-eight years old and built like a man who had spent his whole life doing something physical before he ever sat down at a desk. There was a scar on his shoulder I’d never seen. There was water still running down his chest.

I forgot every word I had prepared.

“Chloe.” He said my name evenly, the way he said most things, and one hand went up to the doorframe. Not to cover himself. Just to lean.

“I’m looking for Tyler.”

“He lent me the place for one night.” He glanced past me, down the hall, at nothing. “My building has a pipe issue. Plumbers start at seven.”

“Right.” I shifted the box. “Well. He’s not answering his phone.”

He looked at the box, then at me, then at the box again, and something in his face moved and settled.

“Come in out of the rain. You’re dripping on the carpet and the super charges for that.”

That was Daniel for you. Five years of birthday parties and holiday dinners and one awful Thanksgiving where his ex-wife had thrown a gravy boat, and the man had never once said a thing that wasn’t practical. I stepped inside and he shut the door.

The apartment looked like Tyler had furnished it from a catalog aimed at men who wanted to seem like they read. Black leather couch, a print of a city skyline over the bar cart, an enormous television. Daniel looked like he was standing in a hotel lobby that had disappointed him.

“You can put that down.”

“I’d rather not stay.”

“Then put it down and go.”

I put it down on the couch. That was the mistake. The cushion gave more than I expected, my coat was wet, my grip was bad, and the corner of the box tipped and everything inside slid out onto the leather and the rug and the floor around my feet. The watch landed face-down. The paperback opened to the middle. And then, because my life is my life, the thing that had been wedged at the bottom of the box since the morning, the thing I’d meant to throw away and had thrown in instead because I was tired and angry and not thinking, landed on the rug and unrolled itself like a ribbon.

My lace bra. Black. The one I’d bought in August and left in his bedroom in September because I thought we were doing something. I hadn’t been in that apartment since September. He hadn’t given it back. He’d never mentioned it.

I stood there looking at it.

Daniel knelt. He didn’t say anything stupid. He didn’t make a sound. He was damp and barefoot and he picked things up with the same careful economy he did everything with, the watch first, face-up, checking it, then the book, then the chargers, and he held the bra in one hand by the strap, not the cup, and he held it out to me without looking away from my face.

“You want this back.”

“Apparently.” I took it. My fingers brushed his wrist and there was nothing to it, nothing at all, except that we both noticed and neither of us said so. The air in that room got very thin and very warm at the same time. I shoved the bra into my coat pocket.

He stood up. The towel had shifted slightly at his hip and I looked at the wall.

“There’s whiskey in the kitchen,” he said. “You look like you need it. And I’m not opening the door to a woman who’s going to catch a cold in my son’s hallway.”

“I don’t need anything.”

“You need something.” He walked past me toward the kitchen, and I followed, which was its own kind of answer.

The kitchen was narrow and bright and Tyler had clearly never used it. Daniel pulled down two glasses, poured two fingers in each without asking, and pushed one across the counter. He’d put on a robe at some point. I don’t know when. It was dark blue and too short in the sleeves.

I drank. It was good whiskey, better than anything Tyler kept in that apartment.

“He cheated on me,” I said.

Daniel’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth.

“With Madison.” I said it like I was reading it off a form. “My best friend. I found out because she left her earring in his car and he told me it was mine and I had never owned a pair of earrings like that in my life. I broke up with him a month ago. The box was supposed to be the last of it.”

Daniel set his glass down. He looked at it instead of at me.

“Before you say it,” I said, “I know. I know what you’re going to say. He’s your son.”

“Yes,” Daniel said. “He is.” A long pause. “You want to know something, Chloe. I wasn’t surprised. I sat in the car outside your apartment the night he told me and I was not surprised, and that is the worst thing a father can feel about his child.” He took a drink. “He takes after his mother.”

I didn’t say anything. Outside, the rain picked up against the window.

“You don’t have to defend him to me,” I said.

“I know.”

“You also don’t have to say that.”

“I know.” He turned the glass a quarter turn on the counter. “I’m going to say something and then we’re going to leave it. My marriage ended because my wife had an affair with a man who worked for me. I found out in a parking lot. I was thirty-nine years old and I sat in the car for an hour and then I drove home and made dinner.” He looked up. “I know what the earring feels like. That’s all I’m saying. I know what it feels like.”

I had known Daniel Grant for five years and in that time he had never told me one true thing about his life. I stood in his son’s kitchen with rain in my hair and I felt something give way in my chest that I hadn’t known was load-bearing.

I opened my mouth to say something and my phone rang on the counter, face-up, and the screen said TYLER and we both looked at it and Daniel reached over and pressed speaker.

“Chloe.” Tyler’s voice filled the kitchen. “Chloe, are you at my place? Because my dad texted me that you came by and I’m looking at your car on the street on the cameras, so don’t lie to me. Are you at my place?”

“I brought your things.”

“Right, the box.” He laughed, and it was a mean little laugh, the one he did when he thought he was being charming. “You couldn’t just mail it, huh. You had to show up at my door at nine o’clock at night. That’s the thing about you, Chloe, you don’t know how to let go. It’s honestly a little pathetic. Like, I’m trying to be nice here, I’ve been trying to be nice, but you keep—”

“Tyler.”

The change was immediate. Tyler went quiet the way a dog goes quiet.

“Dad.”

“You’re on speaker. I’m standing next to her.”

A pause. I could hear Tyler recalibrating, the gears turning behind ten years of getting away with things.

“Okay, look, that’s not what it sounded like—”

“Here’s what it’s going to sound like,” Daniel said, and his voice didn’t rise, not once, not a half a step. It got quieter and slower, which was worse. “You’re going to apologize to Chloe for what you just said to her. Then you’re going to tell her you’re sorry she had to drive across town in the rain to return things that you could have collected yourself, because you are twenty-seven years old and she is not your storage unit. Then you’re going to hang up and you’re going to be here at seven in the morning with a check for the plumber’s invoice.”