“I believe he spent much of his life searching for the lost pieces of himself that never seemed to materialize—the mother he scarcely remembered, the young man whose innocence was destroyed by a brutal war … When he was present, he loved my mother and me and he worked hard. Sometimes, though, he would fall silent and descend into dark places. But we were a happy family and he indulged my affinity for taking things apart—clocks and adding machines and scales, anything with moving parts. When I took over the business, that was the passion I followed.

“It’s probably mere sentiment, but when my father reclaimed the building as his own, he felt as if he had found his lost mother.”

Andrew tried to see his long-gone parents through the fog. He carefully folded the faded green ribbon and put it back into his billfold. “The Sunrose Building is part of my blood and bone. It is a repository of treasures seen and unseen. I need to stay in order to keep my mind from wandering away. It is the only way to keep the world intact.” He looked at Blythe—no, Natalie—whose eyes were misted with grief. “And so perhaps that is why you must understand—I will never leave it.”

When Natalie returned to work at Pinnacle Fine Wines, no one at the firm appeared to know or care that the world had changed irrevocably.

A few of her coworkers made sympathetic noises. For the most part, they avoided her. It was probably awkward being around her. When someone suffered a loss so shocking and so enormous, it was impossible to know what to say.

Saying anything at all probably seemed risky to acquaintances at work. They were likely worried they might set off a storm of hysterical tears and then they’d have to figure out how to deal with the breakdown. And at the end of the day, there was nothing that could be said that would help.

She disliked being viewed as a wounded bird. Now that she knew how her coworkers felt about her, she sensed an even deeper ambivalence with her job situation. Amplified by grief, the discontent rang through every moment of the day—the meetings, the filings, the projections, the account maintenance. Her weekends were shot, since she had to make trips to the city to look after her grandfather. Between visits, she pictured him alone, reading, missing his daughter, drowning in memories of his father and his mysterious past.

Her usual laser focus at work was lacking. She frequently caught herself ruminating on the dilemma of what to do about the shop. And her grandfather. And her mother’s debt. And the old building that had fallen into disrepair. Cleo and Bertie had agreed to keep an eye on things and on Grandy, but the arrangement was temporary. There was no long-term plan in place.