Page 79 of So Close

Even though she was still angry at him and hurt. For being so stubborn and not having faith that she could take care of herself and know what she wanted …

And for ruining what they had.

She was so, so angry at him for that.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was—

The point was that she couldn’t just give up. She’d thought she could, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t because Beachcrest belonged to her, and to Dewann and to Rick and to Carl and to Deja and Aria and Priya and Lindsey and to everyone who had ever come to stay there. To Trey. So even if it looked impossible, even if time had run out and Trey and Doug and everyone else had given up, she had to try to save it.

For them.

She took a deep breath.

“I have an idea.”

40

“You okay, man?”

It was Monday,theMonday, early afternoon, and the voice was Doug’s. Trey lifted his head from where it rested in his hands, his elbows on the wide oak of his ridiculously over-the-top desk, and looked into the eyes of his chief operating officer.

“Sure,” Trey lied.

It had been jarring, the switch back to his own life.

Sitting in traffic on the way from the airport to Home Base’s offices, his phone in his hand, he was aware of the last of the languor slipping from his limbs. At some point, without his noticing, the freeways and roads of San Francisco had become crowded and hostile, Uber drivers darting into and out of traffic, his own driver cursing grumpily. Every email bumping his adrenaline up. His brain didn’t want to do it; didn’t want to shift from one mode—the warmth and generosity of Auburn’s existence—to another—his, amped up and barren.

He’d been sitting at his desk all morning, waiting to feel like his work mattered, but mostly he’d thought about how it felt to have sand between his toes, the heat of a beach fire on his face, Auburn’s body wrapped around his in all the possible ways, losing himself completely in the sensation of it.

“I’ve got the purchase and sale for you to sign,” Doug said.

Although he’d been waiting all day for this moment—the moment that had been approaching with the inevitability of a head-on collision, for hours—he still felt the painful drop of lead in his gut.

Doug laid the document—a sheaf of white decorated with fluorescent sticky-note flags—on the desk in front of Trey.

He leafed through it, but the words blurred and wriggled. He was just turning pages, not making any sense out of what he saw. “You looked at it? Legal looked at it? It’s in order?”

Doug nodded. “They’ve signed. Carl’s signed. All you need to do is sign where it’s flagged.”

“And then it’s done. Beachcrest is gone, Home Base is saved.”

“Then it’s done.”

He found the first line awaiting his signature. Opened his pen, set the tip of the pen to the page. Signed.

But when he came to the second, he set the pen back down on the desk, closed his eyes, and rested his head in his hands again.

“You want to tell me about her?” Doug asked quietly.

“Who?” Trey looked up.

“Who do you think, Xavier? The woman who’s making you consider throwing all this away.” Doug gestured around them, and Trey obediently looked, but couldn’t make sense of ‘all this.’ Allwhat? The posturing furniture? The money whose purpose was to mint more money? Building and building and building, one block on another—for what? Like a kid who tried to build a tower to reach the moon? “She must be something.”

“She—”

He could still see her face, so angry, so hurt.

“I ruined herlife.”

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