Kendrick

Alexandria’s POV

The meeting was on a Wednesday.

Jamie had set it up without drama, sent Kendrick a time and a location through his assistant and told me the night before the way he told me things now — directly, without managing how I received it. Lunch. A restaurant in Summerlin that was neutral ground by virtue of being somewhere neither of them would usually go.

He didn’t ask me to stay home.

He didn’t ask me to come either.

I spent Wednesday morning pretending I wasn’t thinking about it. I wrote in the garden until the heat made staying outside unreasonable, then moved inside and made tea and sat at the kitchen island with my notebook open and the same paragraph unfinished for forty minutes.

The thing was I trusted Kendrick. That wasn’t the issue. Kendrick was one of the most honest people I knew, which meant he would say exactly what he thought in that lunch and I had no control over what that was. And I trusted Jamie more than I had three months ago, which was a sentence I would not have believed I could say three months ago.

But trust was still new enough in this house that I could feel the edges of it. Where it was solid, where it was still forming. It wasn’t fear exactly. More like the particular alertness of someone who had been burned enough times that warmth still made them flinch a little before they could accept it.

My phone buzzed at noon.

Kendrick. A text, not a call.

It went fine. He’s not what I expected.

I read it three times.

I typed back: What did you expect?

A pause. Then: A threat. He was just a person trying to figure something out. Still think he bought my company for insane reasons but he was honest about it which is more than I expected.

I set the phone down and looked at the unfinished paragraph in my notebook.

Then I picked the phone back up and called him.

He answered on the second ring. “Hey.”

“Tell me.”

“He came alone,” Kendrick said. “No assistant, no lawyer. Ordered coffee and didn’t touch it. He was nervous, which I didn’t expect either.”

“Jamie doesn’t get nervous.”

“He does. He just performs stillness over the top of it.” A pause. “He wants to give the company back.”

I went very still. “What?”

“Not the whole acquisition, that’s complicated legally and probably not worth it. But he wants to restructure it. Make me editor in chief with actual operational control. His investment stays but he steps back from any content oversight.” Kendrick’s voice was measured, the way it got when he was processing something he hadn’t finished deciding about. “He said the way he acquired it was wrong and he wanted to correct what he could.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment.

“He also said,” Kendrick continued, “that Vera Mills was your intellectual property and always had been and that any future work you wanted to publish through the platform was yours completely. He’d already had his lawyer draft something but he said he wanted me to know in person.”

The kitchen was very quiet.

“Alex,” Kendrick said.

“I’m here.”

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Every time I think I’ve found the ceiling of what he’s capable of changing he goes higher and I don’t know what to do with that.”

“You don’t have to do anything with it right now.”

“I know.” I pressed my hand flat on the counter. “What are you going to do? About the restructuring.”

“I’m going to say yes,” he said. “Because it’s a good deal and because I built that platform and I want it back even if the path to getting it back is strange.” A pause. “Does that bother you?”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.” And it didn’t. What Jamie had done in acquiring the company had been wrong, the motivation behind it had been wrong, but the company itself was real and good and Kendrick had built something there that deserved to keep existing.

“Can I ask you something,” Kendrick said.

“You can ask.”

“Are you going to stay.”

The question was gentle. Not loaded the way it might have been a few months ago, not with the subtext of you could come here instead, you could choose differently. Just a genuine question from someone who wanted me to be okay.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I think I’m—” I stopped. Looked for the right words. “I think I’m in a different question now. It’s not are you going to stay or are you going to go anymore. It’s more like. Who are you going to be. Regardless.”

Silence on his end, the considering kind.

“That’s a better question,” he said.

“I know. I just got there late.”

We talked for a while longer about other things. His plans for the platform, a writer he’d been working with who was doing interesting things, the ordinary texture of a friendship finding its way back to itself after a strange detour. When I hung up I sat at the island for a long time not doing anything in particular.

Jamie came home at five.

Earlier than usual. He came into the kitchen and set his keys down and looked at me at the island and something in his expression said the lunch had cost him something he wasn’t sure how to account for yet.

“Kendrick called me,” I said.

“I thought he might.”

“You were going to tell me anyway.”

“Yes.” He went to the fridge. Got water. Leaned against the counter across from me. “I should have asked you before I acquired the company. I should have asked you before I did most of what I did.” He looked at his water glass. “I can’t undo it. But I can make it less wrong.”

“You’re doing that,” I said.

“It’s not enough.”

“No,” I said. “But it’s real. That part I believe.”

He looked up at me.

“Kendrick said you were nervous,” I said.

Something moved across his face. Embarrassment, maybe, or something close to it. “He noticed that.”

“He’s observant.”

“Apparently.” He set the water down. “I wanted to get it right. The conversation. I don’t have a lot of practice getting things right with people I’ve wronged.”

“How do you think it went?”

He considered it seriously. “Honestly? I think he hates me a reasonable amount and respects me a marginal amount and that’s probably the best outcome I could have gotten.”

I almost laughed. Almost. “That’s self-aware.”

“Therapy,” he said, with the very small dry tone he’d started using when he referenced it. Not mocking it. Just acknowledging that it was doing something he hadn’t expected.

I stood up from the island. My back had been aching all day, low and persistent, the baby rearranging my interior geography in ways that were becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. I pressed my hand to the small of my back and Jamie noticed immediately, the way he’d started noticing physical things — not obsessively, just with the attention of someone who was paying a different kind of attention now.

“Okay?” he said.

“Back ache. Normal apparently.”

He nodded. Then, carefully, “Can I—” He stopped. Started again. “Is there anything that helps.”

The question was so careful. So aware of the line between offering and overstepping.

I looked at him across the kitchen. At the man who had been my tormentor and my home for ten years, standing in his own kitchen at five in the afternoon asking permission to help me with a backache.

“Heat,” I said. “There’s a heat pad in the hall closet.”

He went and got it without another word.

I sat back down at the island and thought about Kendrick saying he was just a person trying to figure something out and thought about the suitcase in the closet upstairs with the passport no longer inside it and thought about the baby, fifteen weeks now, doing whatever fifteen week old things it was doing in the quiet dark of its world.

Jamie came back with the heat pad.

He plugged it in and set it on the counter beside me and stepped back.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

Simple as that.

Outside the Wednesday afternoon was becoming a Wednesday evening and inside the kitchen the heat pad warmed up slowly and the house held us both and didn’t ask us to be anything we hadn’t figured out yet.

That felt like enough.

For today that felt like enough.i