Page 74 of Always Been His

“Henry says everything twice,” I say, turning a page.

“Grayson,” she murmurs.

“I know what Henry means,” I tell her. “I’ve been attending meetings with Henry for eleven months. I know exactly what he wants, but I’m not burying my father prematurely. I’m not taking his company away from him.”

She sets her pen down, lowers her glasses, and folds her hands on the table beside the legal pad. She looks at me the way she has been looking at me since I was a kid. With pity in her eyes.

I didn’t make it easy for her. I was bitter about losing my mother because she left a shape in this house that nothing and nobody was ever going to fill, and I wasn’t interested in watching someone try. I was cold to Maggie for years. Not bad, just polite and distant in the specific way that is its own form of cruelty, the kind that gives you nothing to push back against.

She didn’t push back, because my father, as always, chose wisely.

Maggie is kind and patient. She shows up every day without thanks or celebration. She was at every football game for me. She taught Iris how to bake. She never made us call her mom. She’s the same version of herself every single time, which, as a kid, I didn’t understand the cost of, and now, at twenty-nine, I understand completely.

I was twelve and Iris was ten when our mother died, and neither of us can really remember a version of her that wasn’t already tired. The Helen Douglas I carry in my memory is a woman reading stories in a dim room, a woman with a voice that was always slightly quieter than it should’ve been, a woman who smelled like the specific hospital-adjacent sweetness of someone fighting a battle they’re not going to win. She was kind. That much I know. She would smooth my hair when she passed me in the hall. She wrote letters to me and Iris, to be read on our birthdays until we’re fifty, telling us things she didn’t have time to teach us. She looked at my father like he was the most incredible thing in her world even when the world was getting smaller.

I don’t know who she would’ve been if she’d been well.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about losing a parent when you are young. It isn’t only the person you lose. It’s the version of them that you never got to know. The healthy version. The one with a future.

Maggie isn’t our biological mom, but she is the closest thing to a mother I can remember.

“Your father wants you to sign,” she says.

“No, this is his baby, Mags. You know what he did to get this company out of debt,” I counter, leaning in, my voice breaking.

“Grayson,” she presses softly.

“I know what he would want, Maggie,” I tell her. “I’ve been preparing for this since Brown, whether I wanted to or not.” I look at the papers. “But I can’t pry it from his hands on his death bed.”

Maggie inhales slowly, reclining in her chair.

“I want him to know,” I continue, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect it to, which is the only thing I inherited from my father that I’m certain about. “Even if only for a minute. Even through the fog. I want there to be a moment when he looks at me and knows that his son is taking care of what he built. I want him to hand it to me.”

The kitchen is quiet. The clock above the doorway counts out a few seconds.

“Gray,” Maggie starts.

“I know what you’re going to say,” I cut in, not unkindly.

“I’m going to say it anyway.” She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine. Her hands are small and warm. “Richard Douglas has been proud of you since you were born. He knew you were ready to be CEO when you walked into that boardroom aged twenty-one, in a suit too expensive for his buddies, listened to their every word, and then proved them wrong. He said the boy has got the thing that makes millionaires. He said it just like that. The boy has got the thing.”

I stare at the table.

“He has been proud of every version of you,” she continues. “Through your childhood. Through Brown. Through the year you spent not wanting to take over the company and did it anyway because it needed you. The paperwork isn’t going to change that. Signing or not signing isn’t going to change that. He would give it to you if he could.”

“I didn’t know that,” I murmur, staring at the paperwork.

“You are endlessly stubborn and ridiculous.”

“But I want to hear him say it.” My voice cracks on the last word in a way I didn’t plan for, and I press my back molars together hard and look at the window over the sink. “I want him to look at me and know my name and tell me he is handing me what he built. That’s all.”

Maggie’s hand tightens over mine. She looks at me for a long moment, then she nods, once, and picks her pen back up.

I look back at the papers.

Seventy percent of Douglas Corp. My father’s fifty percent. My great-grandfather’s company, my grandfather’s company, my father’s company, now sitting in a stack of papers in the middle of the kitchen table waiting for me to pick up a pen and make it mine. Two hundred and sixty-two billion dollars’ worth of infrastructure, contracts, thirty-year relationships, and Northeast distribution, all carrying the Douglas name, all running on decisions I’ve been making for eleven months from a building my father built from a single warehouse in Bangor.

The contract is just paper.