January
Hale Street
Nashville, Tennessee
Tiny bits of freezing rain stuck to Violet Calloway’s cheeks and slithered beneath the bright blue woolen scarf tucked neatly into her black and tan Burberry coat. The ink on the paper in her hand started to blot, and Violet quickly shoved it into her black beaded clutch. Beside the paper, tucked into the depths of the silk lining, her phone beeped, then vibrated twice, indicating a text and two incoming emails.
She’d deal with them later. Technically she was late. There was a party going on at the bar behind her, Clayborne’s on the Corner, but she couldn’t go in yet. There was something she needed to do first. Taking a deep breath and shuddering when more icy rain pelted her, Violet crossed the darkened street, taking care not to slip in the gold heels she’d put on in place of the practical black work pumps. She’d changed in her office before coming, swapping out her standard fitted black slacks and red raw-silk button-down for a black sheath dress and gold metal belt. Had to bring her A game for Daisy’s engagement party and her mother Serena’s critical eye.
Serena would be anxious and waiting, but the letter in Violet’s bag, written in her dad’s slanting scrawl—his thoughts were always miles ahead of his mouth—was long overdue for attention.
They’d buried him in December. She and Daisy had come out here to Hale Street soon after the reading of his will to look at what he’d left them. A few run-down buildings, some with tenants, some without, on a weed-choked street. The buildings were pretty, charming, but in need of complete overhauls to become useable. It had been a surprise to all of them when Daisy and Violet were given the buildings—three each. Once all the assets were tallied and the Hale project had come to light, they’d all assumed that Mickey had deeded the properties to Daisy’s fiancé, Burke Wentworth. It was his vision, too, after all.
Serena wanted her daughters to sell to Burke. Daisy had already given over control of hers to Burke, but the letter stopped Violet. She didn’t know what Daisy’s letter said; they didn’t speak of things that emotional, that raw. The words of her own letter were burned into her brain.
Make your life a happy one, little sugar baby.
I’m asking too much of you, perhaps. It was my dream, but I hope one day you come to love it just as much as I do.
So here she was, weeks later, on Hale Street, avoiding her sister’s engagement party by peering into crumbling old buildings and trying to figure out what in the world her father had meant when he’d said, Bring life back to the places I came from.
Violet stopped in front of the big bow window and pressed her face to the glass of the building Mickey had lived in. The room beyond was long and narrow with tall ceilings and a staircase easing up one wall to the apartment above. He’d lived up there above a hardware store with his parents and Aunt Margie as a boy, before he went to college and met Serena. He hadn’t come back, she knew. At least not right away, and she had the vague sense that was partly her mother’s doing. There was nothing of his life he’d built with Serena here. Sometime in his last year, he’d come back here with a dream. And now she was supposed to make something of it.
There was a reason she had avoided the street in the weeks since her dad died—she didn’t know what to do with it, and his letter seemed to expect so much of her.
With a sigh, Violet turned around and went back across the street to Clayborne’s. Through the foggy windows, she could see Daisy and Burke holding court in the center of the bar and her mother entertaining a tight knot of some of Nashville’s elite. Now or never, she thought, and went inside.
