Page 17 of What Remains of Grace

Brooks was gone. Then Jenna left. Then Troy changed. Grace had always been the glue, but even glue wears thin.

Outside, the wind brushed against the screen door. The scent of sugar and rain drifted through the open window from the bakery.

It had been a long time since she’d felt so close to her sister, and yet so far from her, all at once.

5

Staying

The morning light found her before the alarm did. It poured through the thin kitchen curtains, touching every surface like it belonged there. She blinked against it, disoriented for a moment. The couch beneath her, Biscuit curled at her feet, and the dull smell of cinnamon and sea air that never left the house felt unfamiliar for a moment.

The phone she hadn’t touched in days buzzed on the table, a gentle jolt back into the reality of where she was and the terrible truth waiting there for her: her sister was gone.

Jenna lay there staring at the ceiling, trying not to think at all, but Atlanta crept in anyway. The actuality that the world she built had not stopped without her. That her name was still attached to a company, invoices still needed paying, crews still expected answers, and somewhere, people were waiting for her to pick up the phone as if the ground beneath her life had not completely fallen away.

For ten years, that world had been her everything.

She’d built it from a folding table and a rented trailer, using a line of credit that barely cleared, and the kind of stubborn belief that came from having no other plan. J.H. Contracting. Two full-time employees—Hannah and Mark—and a rotation of subcontractors who’d long since stopped feeling like temps, have been with her for years. These were men who showed up before sunrise, called her “boss” with a grin, and never forgot whose name was on the trucks she bought for them. She kept the fuel cards loaded, paid the insurance, and knew every one of their kids’ birthdays because that was the kind of loyalty you couldn’t fake.

Jenna was the problem solver. The one who showed up when the drywall bowed, when permits stalled, or when a client’s patience cracked. Mark liked to say she could stare a broken generator back to life, and maybe she could, mostly because she refused to leave anything unsolved. Hannah kept the books straight, color-coded every file, and made sure the coffee pot was full. Together, they made the impossible ordinary.

The work was demanding, but it was hers.

Late nights under halogen site lights, lunches eaten off tailgates, laughter over take-out balanced on top of blueprints. Thanksgiving at Mark’s when his wife was too sick to cook. Jenna, in an apron, stirring gravy in a stranger’s kitchen, pretending the smell of turkey and detergent felt like home. It was the closest thing to a family she’d let herself have in years.

Now, that world was suspended in her absence. Hannah was fielding calls she couldn’t answer, and Mark was trying to calm crews who didn’t know what was happening.

She hated how easily the logistics came to her: who would handle which clients, how to wind down the projects, what kind of severance would make the loss sting less. Hannah and Mark had given her a decade of loyalty. They deserved more than uncertainty.

She pictured them both, the way Hannah tucked her hair behind her ear when she was thinking, the way Mark bit his thumbnail when he was worried, and the guilt pressed in from both sides.

They didn’t even know where she was. None of them did.

She’d kept her life cleanly divided: work on one side, everything else sealed off. Atlanta was efficiency, invoices, schedules, and the hum of saws and engines. Florida was memory, loss, and things she didn’t say out loud.

In the office, she never mentioned her family, not once. Hannah didn’t know she had a sister. Mark didn’t know about Brooks. None of them knew her hometown, or that the smell of fresh-cut lumber sometimes reminded her of salt air. Distance had been easy when you built walls for a living.

Still, she loved that life; the pace, the order, and the satisfaction of when a line item was resolved. Her phone had been her heartbeat. If she wasn’t on a site, she was behind the wheel, driving from one job to the next, audiobooks humming low through the truck’s speakers.

It had taken years to find balance, and even then, she lived on the edge of exhaustion. But exhaustion was safe. It kept her too busy to look back.

The condo had been her reward.

She’d found it by accident, through a client who couldn’t afford to fix what he’d lost. The unit sat near Alpharetta, tucked behind a stretch of pines that hid the noise of traffic. The man had called her after a pipe burst, flooding from the upstairs unit. Insurance had denied the claim; he was defaulting on the mortgage and desperate to be rid of it.

Jenna had walked through the soggy carpet and ruined drywall, and instead of damage, she saw possibility. She made him a fair offer, considering the condition, and promised to finish the renovation herself. With a small crew and a few late nights, she turned the wreck into something clean, modern, and hers.

The first night she slept there, she left the sliding door open and listened to the rain hit the balcony rail. It had felt like peace.

She loved living in Alpharetta. It had quiet sidewalks, the smell of pine after a storm, and she enjoyed the way the light filtered through her kitchen window in the mornings. She loved the condo too: the smallness of it, the control it offered, the knowledge that her own hands had touched every inch of it.

But she knew she’d never go back.

Some spaces stop belonging to you the moment you walk out the door.

Her phone buzzed again. This time she reached for it.

Forty-three missed calls, hundreds of unread messages, calendar reminders stacked on top of each other. There were voicemails from clients, texts from subcontractors, and one message from Hannah that started with “I hope everything’s okay” and ended with “the framing crew walked off the Forsyth job; the supplier says we’re late on payment.”