33. San Ysidro Road Leads You HomeFive Years Ago

San Ysidro Road Leads You Home

Noone Properties' West Coast satellite office is in the Upper Village of Montecito—a quiet enclave in Santa Barbara, not too far from Windbreak, not too far from The Ranch. The office is in a wooded area, on the second floor of a small brick building. Ivy covers the front door. Flowerpots line the small waiting area. Mountain views and treetops sneak in from every window.

We walk past the receptionist and into Joe's office.

He is sitting at his desk, on a phone call. He covers the receiver with his hand.

"Would it kill you two to send a text first?" he asks.

"He was going to leave it to Grace?" Sam says.

But Sam isn't really asking. We know the answer. I put the copy of Jabberwocky on the desk in front of Joe.

"What the hell is this?" he asks.

"We know, Joe," I say. "We know they were involved."

Into the phone he says, "I've got to call you back."

He hangs up and starts paging through the journal. He shakes his head, as if in disbelief. Maybe he can't believe that my father kept it. Maybe he can't believe that it's sitting in front of him now.

He looks up at us. Then he motions toward the chairs on the other side of his desk. "Have a seat, then."

"We're good to stand," I say.

"Then you're going to be standing for a while. If you want to know the whole story…"

"We wanted to know the whole story last week," I say. "We wanted to hear the whole story before we knew there was a whole story to tell."

"Come on, guys, you know it wasn't my story to tell."

"No, we totally hear you on that," Sam says. "It was a lot better for us to try and figure this out for ourselves."

He crosses his arms over his chest, angry. Hurt.

Joe meets Sam's eyes and sighs. Then he moves to the front of the desk, the side that we are on, and sits down on the edge of it.

"Okay," he says. "What do you want to know?"

All of it, I want to say. Where it all started, what happened next, and how it all ended here.

"They were together in high school?" I ask. "Grace and Dad?"

"Define together."

"You define it."

"Okay, well, first we dated, Grace and I," he says. "Very briefly."

"And then they did?"

He nods. "A lot less briefly."

"But you knew about it?" Sam says.

"About them? Sure. Give or take fifty years."

"So they were in a relationship?" I ask. "That whole time."

He shakes his head, like he doesn't want to answer that. Like he doesn't want to give anything approaching an answer that might hurt me. Because, what does that mean then? In terms of how my father felt about my mother? By, extension, how he felt about me?

But, somehow, it feels unrelated, like this is about something else. Something sad and raw and definite.

Sam rubs his eyes, overwhelmed. "So it was always going to be Grace who Dad left the company to?" he asks. "The whole time?"

"Yes."

Joe says it unapologetically, letting Sam take that in. I turn to Sam and I expect to see pain there. But what I see instead is something like processing. And something like relief.

"You have to understand, your father and Grace… it goes way back."

"We got that part," Sam says.

"He brought her into Hayes shortly after he took over, not too long after I joined the company," he says. "She had just moved back from California, and it was supposed to be temporary. But when she came in, it was obvious from the beginning that it wouldn't be."

"Why not?" I ask.

"Your father knew exactly what he wanted these hotels to be. It was a niche that hadn't been executed well until then, and he had the vision. But when it comes to scaling that, in a way that each property is successful on its own, it's all about the messaging. And Grace… she was a storyteller, you know. And she understood how to generate that message. She probably understood it better than your father. Certainly, he thought so."

He pauses. And I think of what Sam said to me in the car—how alive my father seemed at work. And I start to recalibrate why that was. It wasn't just what he got to do there; it was who he got to do it with.

"All of which is to say that she was really great at her job. Not just the marketing. But the branding. Communications. All of it. And she made him better at his."

"So when did you find out?" Sam says.

"About what?"

"When did you find out he was going to leave the company to her?"

"Officially? Probably five or six years ago. Somewhere around then, but I always assumed."

"You assumed?" Sam says.

"I did, Sam. I assumed. Like I said, he needed her. Though that sounds binary, like it worked one way. And it wasn't. It worked both ways. They were… in it together. So I always knew that was going to be what your father wanted to do."

"You sure about that, Joe?"

"What are you getting at, kid?"

"Dad didn't just fall that night," he says. "The night that he died."

"What are you talking about?" He looks back and forth between us, taking that in. "You think someone hurt him? That's what you're saying?"

Then his eyes narrow, hearing what Sam didn't exactly say.

"And you think I had something to do with that?"

"I don't know, Joe," Sam says. "You gave your life to this company, and it was never going to be yours and maybe you got mad about that. That it wasn't going to you. That he was giving it to a woman you were with first—"

"Oh you've got to be kidding me. I knew that was his plan. And I knew about them for fifty years. The whole time. Do you know how many girlfriends I had in high school?"

"So then it's just a coincidence that you tried to convince him to sell the company to your current girlfriend?"

"That had nothing to do with me. That was all your father. He didn't want to do it without Grace. He didn't want to do much of anything without her. I didn't discourage it, but he needed something easy after Grace died. He needed to be done with it. And Cece was eager to do it. She'd always wanted the company. Did I broker that? Absolutely. At your father's request."

"And you weren't mad when he reneged on selling to her at the last minute?" Sam asks. "At losing your last chance to be in charge?"

Joe stands up and moves right in front of Sam, inches from his face. Sam moving in the rest of the way, their noses practically touching, Sam clinching his knuckles, Uncle Joe clinching his wrist.

"Fuck you, kid."

I step between them, putting a hand on each of their chests, pulling them back apart.

"Guys, take it down," I say. "Just, slow down."

Sam looks at me and pulls back. Uncle Joe is still shaking his head, but he calms himself too.

He sits back on the edge of the desk, leans in toward Sam.

"Look," Joe says. "I know it's hard to hear, but it wasn't about you and Tommy or your abilities or any of that. He just… couldn't. Everything he did was for her. This was the one thing he got to do with her every day. And he couldn't keep doing it himself, not in her absence. The one thing your father couldn't figure out how to do in his entire life was to be without her."

He pauses, looks back and forth between both of us. And I feel the pain that must have existed for my father—for him and for Grace—that they were together and they weren't together. Why would anyone make that choice? But I start to hear the answer without Joe needing to say it, as if anyone needs to say it: the reasons that you move away from the people you love are sometimes the very reasons you wish you could move toward them.

"The point is, ultimately, he decided it wasn't fair. He decided you and your brother deserved your shot to do with it what you would."

"Or maybe not. Maybe he just ran out of time," Sam says. "Why else would he have called Cece the night he died?"

"Guess that was possible. But he seemed pretty settled in his decision. Besides, there was a much simpler explanation."

"And what's that?" Sam asks.

Before Uncle Joe can answer, I do it for him.

"He was trying to reach you," I say.

He nods. "He was trying to reach me. I have bad coverage at Cece's. He must have been trying to get to me for something."

He motions to me.

"I probably should have told you all of this," he says. "Cece certainly thought I should have. But I was reluctant to do that, to be honest. I just didn't know how we could tell you any of this while also protecting the things, I think, he didn't want shared…"

I see it in his eyes, the sorrow there. And I understand, suddenly, what our uncle Joe was trying to do until the end—he was trying to protect our father. It's what he's still trying to do now, the only way he knows how.

"You have it," I say.

"Have what?" Joe says.

"His cell phone."

He holds my gaze, for a minute, not replying. But then he walks around his desk and opens the bottom drawer, pulls a cell phone out.

"When I went to Windbreak, that next morning, I found it in the bedroom," he says. "Your father and Grace had gone to such lengths to keep their relationship private, to hold it just for themselves. I didn't want… It felt like the least I could do to help them keep it quiet now."

He turns the phone over so we can see the home screen. A picture of Windbreak stares back at me—a picture of the view from Windbreak's porch. The sun setting over the ocean, the edge of his favorite chair. It's my father's phone. Our father's phone.

"Take it. Clearly you think I'm hiding something, so take it. Look through the whole thing. See for yourself."

He starts to hand me the phone, but I wave him off. I have no intention of opening it now. I don't want to see what my father was trying to hold on to for just him. And for her.

But Sam, apparently, feels differently. He drills me with a look and takes our father's phone out of Joe's hand.

"I'll take that, thank you."

I look down at the phone in Sam's hands, at that screensaver, that photo of Windbreak staring back at me.

"I'm going to try and put aside how insulting it is that you think I could ever hurt your father," Joe says. "I know better than anyone how easy it is to confuse grief for guilt."

I look back up at Joe, those words penetrating. Confusing grief for guilt. He isn't wrong. It was easy to think that Uncle Joe was guilty of something, to misread his behavior as suspicious—to misread his sadness as remorse.

And when you are grieving, guilt lives inside your sadness, doesn't it? The guilt lives there like an unfortunate side effect of what you haven't done. You haven't saved who matters most.

"But you believe this too?" Joe says. "That something happened that night?"

I meet his eyes, a new clarity coming to me.

"I do," I say.

And it's true. The whole pattern is gnawing at me, moving closer to me. My father's own words coming back to me. Our first night at Windbreak together, on that cliff together. Windbreak doesn't just belong to me . Which is when I get there.

"Joe, how about Windbreak?" I say. "Was he going to leave that to her too originally? To Grace?"

He nods. "A long time ago. But, for as far back as I remember, it was always going to you."

"Why?"

"Grace didn't like to be there without him any more than he liked being there without her." He shrugs. "And your father knew anyone else would sell it. Figured you wouldn't. Figured that maybe you would know what to do with it. How to build something as beautiful as that land is."

"He told you that?"

"He did. He told me that."

I nod, a memory floating back in. That conversation with my father, one of our last, when he wanted me to come with him to Windbreak, when he'd asked for my opinion on renovating the property. I'm looking to make some changes. Now I knew why he suddenly wanted my opinion—he wanted me to be invested in Windbreak, to start thinking of it as mine. Because that had been his place with Grace. And now that Grace wasn't there, Windbreak mattered less too.

It catches me all at once, the breadth of it, what I've needed to know. And everything clicks into place. The clues now connected, weaving together in their intricate layers, circling their unifying force. Grace.

Grace, Cory. My father's before, and his after. The person he most wanted with him at Windbreak. The only person he ever wanted to be with. How reductive and yet how true. As if he is the only one to get to claim that.

That's when I realize there is someone else, someone who also wanted to claim that. To claim that what they built was the love that counted more. Because just as you can confuse someone's grief for guilt, you can do the opposite.

You can think their guilt is grief.

That's what I saw on someone else's face, isn't it? It was guilt. He felt guilty for what he'd wanted.

He felt guilty for where it led him.

To the last place he should have been.

The edge of a cliff.

A cliff and a love and a final goodbye, which, despite the ring still on his finger, still didn't get to be his.

I turn to my brother. "I know who was there that night."