The Hale Inheritance 1

The house did not know how to be empty. For eleven days after Daniel died, the Hale house in Greenwich had been full. Full of flowers that arrived faster than they could be watered. Full of men in suits from the company who spoke in low voices about interim leadership. Full of Daniel's friends from Yale, from the office, from the sailing club, all of them saying the same thing: He was the best of us. Now, on the twelfth night, everyone had finally gone home. Nathan Hale stood in the kitchen at 2:17 a.m. in his brother's old Harvard sweatshirt, watching the Sub-Zero hum. He hadn't bought the sweatshirt. He'd found it in the laundry room, clean and folded. Everything in this house was still clean and folded for a man who would never come home. He couldn't sleep in his old room. It had been turned into a home gym five years ago. He couldn't sleep in the guest room either, because the walls were too thin and he could hear his mother crying through them. So he was sleeping in Daniel's office downstairs, on the leather couch where Daniel used to nap between calls. The light flickered on. Lila stood in the doorway. She was wearing an oversized t-shirt and bare legs, her dark hair pulled up messily. Daniel's t-shirt. Nathan's stomach dropped. Of course she was still wearing Daniel's clothes. "Sorry," she said, her voice hoarse. "I thought everyone was asleep." "You don't have to apologize for being in your own kitchen," he said. "It isn't my kitchen. Not anymore." That was the truth no one was saying out loud. The engagement had ended when Daniel's car went off Route 7 in the rain. The house, the ring, the future that had been laid out for her - all of it had evaporated with the will reading. Daniel had left her his investment portfolio, but not his name. She opened the fridge. Stared at nothing. Closed it. "I keep thinking the phone will ring and it will be him saying the flight was delayed," she said to the closed fridge. "Which is insane, because he was driving." "I know," Nathan said. She finally looked at him. Lila Monroe had always been the most composed person he knew. When Daniel brought her to their first family dinner three years ago, she had held her own against his father, corrected his mother on market trends, and made his little sister laugh until she snorted. Daniel used to say, "Lila's never nervous. Lila makes other people nervous." Now her eyes were red and swollen and she looked twenty-two, not twenty-nine. "Why are you still here, Nathan?" she asked. Not unkindly. Just tired. "Someone has to keep my mom from selling the company to a private equity firm out of grief." "That's not what I meant. Why are you here? In this house. You hated this house." He had. He'd left at eighteen and only came back for holidays, and even those he cut short. "Because Daniel would have known what to say to her," he said. "And I don't, so I figured I should at least be in the building." Something in that made her face soften. She walked over and took the mug out of his hands - he hadn't even realized he was holding a cold mug of tea - and poured it out. "You've been wearing that sweatshirt for three days," she said. "Observation or criticism?" "Observation. From the restructuring consultant." A ghost of a laugh. The first real one in twelve days. It surprised both of them. They ended up on the floor of the library, because the library was the only room where no one had put a vase of white lilies. They brought the bottle of scotch Daniel had been saving, a 25-year-old Macallan for when Hale Industries hit a billion. "To Daniel," she whispered. "To Daniel," he echoed. They drank. They talked. Not about the funeral. Not about the company. She told him about growing up in Queens, about her mother who cleaned offices. He told her about the little community center he built in Oakland last year, the first building that had ever felt like his. "I saw pictures," she said. "Daniel showed me. He was proud of you. He bragged about you all the time." Nathan looked away, his throat tight. "He never told me that." "He didn't know how," she said. At some point, she started crying again, silently. Not the pretty, composed crying from the funeral. Ugly, shaking, breathless sobs. The kind that comes when you're too tired to hold it in anymore. Nathan didn't say anything. He just reached for her. He meant it as comfort. A hand on her shoulder. She turned into it. Her face was in his neck, her tears hot against his skin. Her hands fisted in that damned sweatshirt. "Lila..." "I just don't want to be alone tonight," she whispered against him. "Please. I don't want to be alone in this house with him gone." He knew he should pull away. He knew every reason why. She was grieving. He was grieving. She was Daniel's. In some way, she would always be Daniel's. But for three years, he had sat at family dinners and watched Daniel love this woman and told himself the pull he felt toward her was just admiration. That it would go away when he moved back to California. That it wasn't attraction, it was just proximity. Loneliness does not care about good intentions. He cupped her face. Her skin was wet with tears. "Are you sure?" he asked, his voice barely there. She didn't answer with words. She leaned in and kissed him. It wasn't soft. It was years of not saying things, and twelve days of grief, and two people who had been left behind trying to find something alive in each other. He kissed her back. They didn't make it off the floor.