Page 83

So I roused him from his slumber and let him out.

I brought everything to Mark at his kitchen island: my notebook and two coffees and Dosty asleep under the table on my foot.

“I have a plan,” I said. “Most of a plan, anyway, and before you say anything, it doesn’t solve the money. Nothing solves the money yet, but it changes what we’re doing while we try.”

Mark looked at the notebook, at my forty pages of hopeful thinking. His eyebrows went up.

“You made a binder?”

“It’s a notebook.”

“That’s a binder’s worth of notebooks, Dante. That’s a man with a system—”

“Do you want to hear my plan, or do you want to talk about my notebook?”

He shut up and listened, which was one of ten thousand things I loved about him. Most men who talked as much as Mark did couldn’t receive information or ideas, but he’d go quiet and actually take them in when it mattered.

So I laid it all out for him.

We had seven years of goodwill and hundreds of regulars who owed this place something and had never once been asked to spend it. We had Benji’s mailing list, gathering dust behind the drag brunches. Then there was the press angle, a beloved neighborhood institution priced out of Ybor, the kind of story half the city’s reporters would climb over each other to write.

“We could throw a benefit,” I suggested. “A real one, a whole night built to pull every dollar and every voice this place has ever earned.”

Mark shifted, his brow furrowing. I couldn’t tell if he was noodling through my plan or figuring out how to tell me it was insane.

“It won’t get us to two million or whatever crazy number we need,” I said. “We’ve got to be honest about that. It might only get us a fraction of what we need, but it does two things money can’t. It buys us noise, and it buys us time. A company deciding whether to bulldoze a landmark thinks differently about a quiet little bar than it does about a loud one with the whole neighborhood behind it and reporters asking questions.”

Mark was quiet a moment, then he asked, “You’ve been up nights doing this?”

“Some.”

“How many nights?”

“All of them.”

He reached over and put his hand flat on the notebook, on my forty pages, as though he could feel the work through the cover. Something moved across his face that I couldn’t read at first, and then I could, and it got to me.

It was relief.

The man had been carrying this alone in his own head, running his own numbers at his island in the dark, and here was somebody handing him forty pages that said, “You don’t have to do this alone.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to save what’s mine,” he said, low. “For weeks, I’ve been lying awake, same as you. I kept asking myself, ‘How do I save my bar?’ and ‘How do I hold on to the thing I built?’ I kept coming up empty because it’s too big for one guy to—”

“What’s ours now.”

He froze.

“You keep saying mine,” I said. “Your bar. What’s yours. What you built.” I turned my hand over and laced my fingers through his on top of the notebook. “It stopped being just yours years ago, Mark. It’s Finn’s. It’s Rod’s and his queen’s. It’s Benji’s and Jacks’s and Adrian’s—every one of those idiots who cried in the meeting. It’s mine now, too, God help me. I bought in whether I meant to or not. You’ve been trying to lift the whole thing by yourself because you think the whole thing is yours to lift. It isn’t. It’s not. It’s ours. We’re protecting what’s ours now.”

I watched the word land on him.

Ours.

I watched a man who’d spent his whole life saying “mine” hear a different word set down next to his. I watched him try it on. I watched it fit. His eyes went bright.

“Ours,” he said, testing, his voice rough.

“Ours,” I said firmly.