Wild Blood

The Will

CHAPTER 5

The will reading happened on a Monday morning in the offices of Vance & Associates on the fourth floor of the Millbrook City Bank building, in a conference room with the particular quality of rooms designed to contain significant news — neutral walls, good light, a table that communicated seriousness without aggression.

Zane arrived at ten-fifty. He was wearing his best clothes, which were clean and fitted and not expensive, and he had the quality of a man who knows exactly what he owns and has made the most of it without apology. He sat at one end of the conference table and looked at the room.

Roman arrived at ten-fifty-eight. He was wearing a suit that cost more than Zane's truck and carrying nothing, which was the specific posture of a man who expected things to be provided rather than brought. He stopped when he saw Zane — a fractional pause, unguarded, before the recovery — and sat at the opposite end of the table.

They looked at each other.

Same jaw. Same coloring. The same dark eyes, reading each other with different maps of the world behind them.

Patricia Vance read the will. Fifty-fifty — the estate split equally between Gerald Holloway's legitimate son and the son born outside the marriage to a woman named Clara, who had raised Zane alone for the first three years of his life and then made a decision that still didn't fully make sense to him, even now.

When the attorney finished, the room went quiet.

Zane said, "I don't want the hotel properties."

Roman looked at him. "I'm sorry?"

"Sell them. Split the proceeds. I want the ranch." He paused. "The operational portion. The land and the stock. I know cattle."

Roman studied him with the evaluative quality of a man who does this professionally and is good at it. "The ranch is worth considerably less than the hotel portfolio."

"I know that."

"You'd be taking a significant financial disadvantage."

"I know that too." Zane held the other man's gaze, level and without challenge. "I want the ranch."

Roman was quiet for a moment. In thirty seconds of watching this man he'd clocked several things: the stillness, the directness, the complete absence of performance. This was not someone negotiating. This was someone who knew what he wanted because he knew what he was, and those two pieces of knowledge had already resolved the question to his satisfaction.

Roman had never once in his life wanted something with that kind of simplicity.

"Fine," he said.

Zane nodded. He stood. They were the same height, almost exactly, which was its own strange thing — like looking at a version of yourself assembled from different materials by different hands, recognizable and entirely other at once.

"One question," Zane said.

"Go ahead."

"Did he ever mention me?"

The silence that followed was the most honest Roman had been in months. He didn't manage it or frame it or find the diplomatic version.

"No," he said. "He didn't."

Something crossed Zane's face. Not pain — something that had already been pain and had, over years, been processed into something quieter and more settled. He nodded once.

"Alright," he said. And walked out.

Roman sat alone in the conference room for a long time after everyone else had gone. He sat with his folder of estate documents he hadn't opened, in a room designed for significant news, and thought about a father who had been meticulously silent about the things that mattered.

He thought about a brother who had, in the span of three minutes, made the most honest decision Roman had witnessed in recent memory.

He poured himself a glass of water from the carafe on the table and drank it.

Then he opened his folder and began to read.

CHAPTER 6

Second Thursday

Scarlett ran into Roman again at the Greystone Coffee House on the following Wednesday, which in a city Millbrook's size wasn't a coincidence so much as a statistical inevitability.

She was at a corner table with her laptop and her site drawings for a civic library project the firm had assigned her remotely — it kept her useful and it kept her mind occupied, which were the two things she needed most right now. She had a black coffee and three markup pages spread across the table and was deep in the problem of an entrance sequence that wasn't working when a shadow crossed her table.

"Working remotely," Roman said. Not a question. He had the quality of a man who states his observations because he finds them interesting rather than because he needs confirmation.

She looked up. He was in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled, which was either calculated or effortless and she'd decided, based on the farmers' market evidence, that with Roman these things weren't separable.

"I'm always working," she said.

"Can I?" He gestured at the empty chair across from her.

She considered declining. She considered it seriously, because she'd identified Roman Holloway as a particular category of trouble and she was not in Millbrook for trouble. She was in Millbrook to be honest about her life, which was a different project entirely.

"Five minutes," she said.

He sat. He ordered a black coffee when the server came by. He looked at the drawings on her table with genuine interest.

"What's the project?"

"Civic library. Entry sequence isn't resolving. The sight lines from the street don't create the orientation I need."

"What orientation do you need?"

She looked at him. "You know architecture?"

"I know construction. My father's company built things. I spent enough time on job sites growing up." He turned one of the drawings toward him, studied it. "Your main entrance is too far from the street line. You're asking people to commit to a path before they can see the destination."

She stared at him. Then at the drawing. Then back.

"That's actually — yes. That's the problem."

"Pull the entry forward. Give them the view before the commitment."

She picked up a pencil and made a note. He watched her work for a moment with the particular interest of someone who finds competence attractive, which she felt without deciding to.

Five minutes became forty. He was funny — she hadn't expected that, because devastating-looking men in white shirts with a family construction empire weren't typically also funny, but Roman was — and he was sharp about things she didn't expect him to know, and he listened in a way that was entirely focused, and by the end of the forty minutes she was aware that she had been outmaneuvered by someone significantly more practiced at this than she was.

"Dinner," he said, as she was gathering her drawings. "Saturday."

"That's not a question."

"It's an invitation. The form is open."

She looked at him across the table. He looked back with that slow, deliberate smile, and under the smile was something more real — a genuine interest that she'd been trying to categorize since the farmers' market and hadn't managed to place cleanly.

"Saturday," she said. "Text me the details."

He did, that evening. She spent ten minutes longer than she should have deciding what she thought about that.