Page 95 of The Night We Lost Him

“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.