My sister sent the text at 7:42.
*He’s outside. He’s not alone.*
I read it and set the phone face down next to my dessert fork. The private dining room at the restaurant on Broughton Street was set for twenty-three people — my book club, our accountant, three couples from the neighborhood, the two installers who had put up with Wes for a decade. I had arranged the table with small jars of tea roses. The coconut layer cake was still uncut.
Wes had been “twenty minutes away” since six-thirty.
At eight he pushed through the door with a woman in a white dress that looked sprayed on. She had that fresh-from-a-sunless-tan look. The room went flat, like somebody had switched off the music. I could see our accountant set down his bourbon and wipe his thumb along the rim.
“Hey, Dana.” Wes’s voice had the rhythm of a man who had rehearsed. “This is Karsyn. She’s going to take your place. At the house, at the business, all of it.”
Karsyn bared her teeth in a way that was meant to be apologetic. “Hi.”
I did not throw the cake. I picked up my bag from the back of the chair, took the last forkful of lemon cream from the plate, and signaled the server.
“Wrap a slice of cake for me. Put the rest on Mr. Harlow’s card.”
I moved past them. Karsyn smelled like vanilla and hair extensions. Wes grabbed my elbow.
“Where do you think you’re going? We have people here.”
I looked at his hand until he let go. “You have people here. I have a car in the garage.”
The valet brought my old Lexus around. The air outside was a wet blanket, September in Savannah, cicadas firing in the live oaks. I drove home to my house on East Hall Street and backed into the driveway.
Wes’s clothes were in the walk-in closet: two tuxedos, six seersucker jackets, a stack of trousers with the creases still sharp. I filled three rolling duffel bags. I did not cut anything. I even wrapped his bourbon bottles in T-shirts to keep them from clinking. At nine-thirty the next morning he showed up with Karsyn behind him on the porch, taking a photo of the front door for her Instagram story.
“Good. You packed,” he said. “I was planning to move into her apartment off Drayton anyway.”
I locked the door behind them.
The showroom sat at the corner of West Bay and Montgomery, a two-story brick building that had been a cotton warehouse before my grandfather bought it in 1979. He put in the giant windows, the steel beams, the parking strip. Fifteen years ago Wes moved his kitchen-and-bath business into the place rent-free. The deal had been my grandfather’s way of helping me, and I had let it roll along because “we” were building something.
Wes’s company, Lowcountry Cabinetry & Stone, sold custom cabinetry, quartz countertops, and high-end bath fixtures. I did the parts nobody clapped for: purchase orders, freight, vendor credits, install schedules, client complaints. I had no title and no paycheck. On paper, I was just the owner’s wife.
That morning I got to the showroom before him. The front doors were locked. I set my tote on the back-office desk and put out a banker’s box, a thumb drive, and a two-page document. The phone in the desk rang: a customer on Skidaway Island wanted to know when her walnut island top would clear customs.
“She no longer works here,” I said into the receiver. “Please hold for the new general manager.”
When Wes arrived forty minutes later, Karsyn had her phone out, filming the marble sample wall.
“Oh good, you’re here.” He tossed his keys onto the desk where clients signed contracts. “Karsyn will train with you this week.”
I handed Karsyn the office phone. “Here’s the extension list, the vendor logins, and the install calendar. The password manager is on this stick. The file cabinet behind you has the open quotes.”
She took the phone like a relay baton.
Then I gave Wes the papers.
“This is a notice terminating the at-will use of my building. You have thirty days. Here’s a draft lease if you want to stay. Base rent is seven thousand four hundred a month plus triple net.”
Wes flipped the pages. “You’re out of your mind. This is my business.”
“Your business. My building.” I worked the key to the back door off my ring and laid it on the desk. “You can keep the front key until the end of the month.”
He told me I was bitter. Karsyn told me I’d regret it. I left through the side door. A neighbor’s beagle named Grunt stood on a porch across the street and howled at a garbage truck. The air smelled like doughnuts from the place on the corner.
The first break came in week two. A factory manager from Hickory, North Carolina, called my personal number.
“Dana, I know you don’t work there no more, but this girl put an order through for a laminated cabinet line when the clients approved custom paint-grade maple. It’s a forty-thousand-dollar kitchen going into a new build on Isle of Hope. She told me to run it as written.”
I was sitting on my back porch with sweet tea, watching a lizard do push-ups on the railing. “You should run what the purchase order says. I’m not there.”
The second break was freight. Karsyn had booked two delivery trucks for the same loading dock at the same time. One driver blocked a lane on Bay Street for an hour, and the city wrote a ticket to the business. The other truck returned to the Port of Savannah warehouse because she had not signed the bill of lading. The second truck emailed her a $600 re-delivery fee. She ignored it until the warehouse put a lien on the shipment.
By the end of the first month, Wes had signed my lease. The seven thousand four hundred hit my account on a Tuesday at 9:03 a.m. I was at the kitchen counter, flipping a fried egg. He had to choose between paying me or moving the entire business in thirty days. The phone call came from my bank as a push notification.
The scene in the showroom went worse.
Wes’s new manager was Karsyn. She believed running a showroom meant sitting on a white leather chair, drinking iced coffee, and pointing. She did not know what a 5/8-inch toe kick detail was. She did not know that painted cabinets from our supplier took nine weeks, not three. She thought “Cambria” and “Corian” were the same thing.
A captain from the Savannah Yacht Club came in with his wife to finalize a $70,000 bar renovation. Karsyn told him the stone was “just a counter.” He walked out and called a competitor in Bluffton.
Then the order I’d heard about from Hickory landed. The client’s custom paint-grade island arrived in a flat, white thermofoil that looked like a rental apartment counter. The client’s wife stood in the middle of the showroom and read the purchase order out loud. A passing tour group stopped to listen.
By mid-month two, Wes hired a real operations manager from Atlanta. She asked for $85,000 a year plus two percent of gross. The first thing she did was order Karsyn to stay out of the project files.
The second thing she did was send me an email asking for a copy of the lease. I sent it within the hour.
Around that time, Wes and I met at my attorney’s office on Bull Street. The divorce was not emotional. It was math. The house on East Hall Street was mine, bought before marriage. The building on West Bay was mine, inherited before marriage. The showroom equipment, the display cabinets, the inventory, the delivery van, the Italian range pedestals in the back storage area — those had been bought during the marriage with joint funds.
“Half of the business assets are hers,” my attorney said. “You can buy her out or we sell everything and split the proceeds.”
Wes had a red crease across his forehead from where his sunglasses had been. “I don’t have that kind of cash.”
He took out a personal loan at 11.9 percent to pay me $64,000 for the inventory and vehicles. The bank required him to put the van and a portion of the business as collateral. The day the wire cleared, I paid off the remaining seven months on my car loan and put the rest in a money market account.
The showroom emptied.
Wes hung yellow “LIQUIDATION SALE” banners in the windows facing West Bay. He sold floor-model kitchen displays at cost, then below cost. The quartz slabs went to a contractor from Pooler for pennies on the dollar. The imported fixtures disappeared one by one. Karsyn stopped showing up after the incident when a client from Skidaway threw a faucet box at the wall. She texted Wes that she had not signed up to get yelled at by people who spent more on a backsplash than she made in a month.
He called me from the showroom on a Thursday night in late October. The rooms behind his voice were hollow.
“I’m closing the business. Are you happy now?”
“I’m not part of your closing.” I was on my porch, wrapping a cloth around the chain of the swing. “You’ll need to have the space broom-clean by the thirty-first.”
I went to the showroom that final morning with a clipboard and a camera. The building smelled like dust and old wet cardboard. Wes stood near the back door, his shirt untucked. There was a stain on his collar the color of rust. The only thing left was a rolled-up promotional rug and a cappuccino machine missing a portafilter.
“I need you to sign the move-out inspection,” I said.
He wrote his name without reading. His fingers left a smear of graphite on the paper.
“The dumpster out front is still on site. If you don’t remove it by Friday, I’ll have it hauled and deduct the cost from the last month’s rent.”
He looked at me with something that used to be pride. “She left. Karsyn left on Tuesday. Said I wasn’t the person she signed up for.”
I put the paperwork in my bag. “That’s unfortunate.” I did not look up. I could hear the city traffic outside, the faint clop of a horse carriage on Bay Street.
Two weeks later, he appeared at my front door in a navy windbreaker with a bouquet of gas-station tulips. The plastic wrapper had a yellow price sticker that said $7.99. The morning air had teeth; the mosquitoes had given up for the year.
“Dana, I made a mistake. A huge one. That woman didn’t know anything about the business. You kept it all running. I see that now.”
He tried to step into the door. I left the safety chain on.
“I talked to my attorney,” he said. “We can get the money back. I can reopen. You can run the showroom with me. Just like before.”
I reached into my pocket and took out my phone. The screen already had my bank app open. I turned it toward him.
“The deposit from Bassett Dental for the first three months of their new lease cleared this morning. Eighteen thousand dollars. They’re moving in after the buildout.”
He looked at the phone. He looked at me. “You leased the building to someone else?”
“You had your chance to run a business there.” I closed the door. The deadbolt clicked before he could answer.
Through the glass I heard him say my name once. I walked to the kitchen, put the phone face up on the counter, and added an event to my calendar: *Send signed lease to property manager. Change all exterior locks Monday.*
The notification for the deposit stayed on my screen for the rest of the evening.
