Chapter 3
The next morning, Grant sat in the study at the mansion. The door closed. He had three names on the list: Desmond, Keane, Shaw.
But those three names only told him who had lied. They didn’t tell him where Jolene was.
He had tried every method in his system. He had people trace registered residential addresses, check rental records, scan electricity and water accounts across the counties surrounding Savannah.
Nothing.
Not a single trace bearing the name Jolene Tab existed anywhere within a radius of one hundred miles.
Desmond had erased everything—erased it as if she had truly died.
Grant sat still for a while. Then he picked up the internal phone and called one name only:
“Tell Perry to come up to my office.”
Perry Sims walked in three minutes later. He stood in front of Grant’s desk, both hands hanging at his sides, his face expressionless.
It was the face Grant had seen every day for years—the face of a man who had trained his whole life not to reveal anything. No matter what he was thinking, no matter what he feared, no matter what he was hiding.
Perry was the Holloway family’s driver, the man who stood outside the door of every meeting, the man who knew everything and was never asked for his opinion.
And Grant knew from the way his list had formed over the past two days that Perry knew more than all of them.
Grant looked straight into Perry’s eyes. No circling around it.
“Perry. I know she’s alive. I need the address.”
Perry didn’t flinch, didn’t swallow, didn’t look away. He stood still. His face stayed exactly the same.
But one thing changed—so small that only someone looking very closely would have seen it.
His shoulders, those two shoulders that were always straight, always stiff, dropped by one centimeter—as if a cord that had been pulled tight for too long had just been touched by someone’s hand. And it hadn’t snapped, but it trembled.
Ten seconds passed. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds.
The room was so quiet Grant could hear the clock on the wall.
Perry didn’t speak.
Grant didn’t say anything more. He had asked. He wouldn’t ask twice. That was the rule between them—a rule neither man ever said aloud, but both understood.
Then Perry bent down. He picked up the pen on Grant’s desk, tore a piece of paper from the small notebook beside the phone, and wrote one line, one address.
His handwriting was even, clear, and steady.
He placed the piece of paper on the surface of the desk, set the pen down beside it, then straightened again.
He looked at Grant for one second, then he turned, walked out of the room, and closed the door behind him.
From beginning to end, Perry didn’t say a single word.
Grant looked at the piece of paper on the desk—an address on the western edge of suburban Savannah.
He picked it up, read it, folded it, and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
Then he sat there a little longer, thinking about the man who had just walked out of the room.
Perry had known Jolene was alive for the past five months. He was the one who delivered supplies to her every two weeks under Desmond’s orders—the only person who knew the address, the final link between Jolene and the Holloway family.
He had kept silent because Desmond had erased his younger sister’s large debt in exchange for that silence.
Perry hadn’t stayed quiet out of loyalty. Perry had stayed quiet because he was trapped.
And today, with a piece of paper placed on the desk, he chose not to be trapped anymore.
Grant understood the price Perry had just paid.
He didn’t say thank you because Perry didn’t need to hear it. And because between the two of them, thank you was too light a phrase for things this heavy.
He stood, took his coat, and walked outside.
Perry was already sitting behind the wheel, the engine running, his eyes fixed straight ahead. He didn’t ask Grant where they were going. He didn’t need to ask. He had written that address.
Grant opened the car door, sat in the back seat, and said, “Go.”
Perry drove through the gates of the mansion, turned left, and headed west.
Neither of them said another word during the twenty minutes on the road because everything that needed to be said was already on that piece of paper, and everything that couldn’t be said had been understood by both of them for a long time.
Perry stopped the car some distance from the house.
Grant looked through the car window and saw exactly what he had imagined from the moment he read the address on that piece of paper.
A small single-story house with a tin roof and a faded blue painted door, sitting at the end of a dirt road on the western edge of suburban Savannah—the kind of place people came to when they didn’t want to be found.
Grant opened the car door and said to Perry, “Wait here.”
Perry nodded and turned off the engine.
Grant walked to the front door. The door wasn’t locked. He knocked twice.
No one came to open it, but from inside came the sound of a pot touching the stove.
He pushed the door open and stepped in.
Grandma Birdie Tab was standing at the stove, her back turned toward the door. She didn’t turn around when she heard his footsteps.
She was stirring something in a pot. Her left hand holding the handle of the spoon, her right hand gripping the rim of the pot.
Both of her hands were deformed—the fingers curled inward, the knuckles swollen large, moving slowly and stiffly as if every motion had to negotiate with pain before it was allowed to happen.
Grant stood in the kitchen doorway, not yet able to say anything, when Grandma Birdie spoke, her voice calm, without lifting her head:
“I knew you’d come. Sooner or later, you’d come. But I don’t owe you any story, Mr. Holloway.”
Grant didn’t answer. He looked around the kitchen, saw an empty wooden chair beside the dining table, pulled it out, and sat down.
Grandma Birdie didn’t invite him, didn’t look at him. She kept cooking, then washing dishes, then wiping the stovetop, then cooking again.
Grant sat still.
Two hours.
She cooked, washed, wiped. Grant sat. No one spoke.
Jolene wasn’t home. She had gone out to deliver repaired clothes to customers.
And perhaps Grandma Birdie knew that when she chose not to throw Grant out, but also chose not to speak to him. She was waiting—not waiting for Jolene to come home. She was waiting for herself to be ready.
Two hours later, Grandma Birdie turned off the stove. She wiped her hands on the cloth towel hanging beside the cabinet—slowly, one finger at a time—then pulled out the chair across from Grant and sat down.
May you like
She looked at him for the first time since he had stepped inside.
Her eyes weren’t angry, weren’t afraid, weren’t sad. They were the eyes of someone who had thought about this conversation many times, who had told this story to herself in her own mind through a hundred nights and now only needed to say it aloud.
