He shook his head more emphatically.
I turned to face him. “Listen to me. The rest of the stuff in your life, the black and white wardrobe, the apartment? Those are containers. Interesting, yes, and useful, but you can let them go whenever you feel like it. This car, though? This car is you, boyfriend, pure you.” I leaned closer. “Trust me. This car has been waiting for you its whole life.”
He ran his hand along the dash. “You’ve already opened the envelope.”
I caught my breath. To an eavesdropper, that comment would have been a non sequitur.
“Yes,” I said. “The second it came.”
“So you know.”
“I’ve always known. I wasn’t waiting on the test results. I was waiting until I was ready to deal with them.”
“And are you?”
The front door opened, and the sounds of the city hustled inside the showroom. And then the door shut, and we were once again in our sanctum, separate and air conditioned and orderly. But the outside was still there, surging and chaotic. One big dice game.
“Yes,” I said. “As of this very second, I am dealing with the fact that I am the daughter of Beauregard Forrest Boone. And I am ready to find out exactly how that unthinkable thing happened.”
Trey watched me say the words. “Okay.”
He extended his hand toward the button. His finger hovered there. And it was like our first time, the tender skin underneath his armor, which he’d taken off for me piece by piece. He was unarmored now, as open as I’d ever seen him. I placed my own hand lightly on top of his, and we pushed the button together.
A soft whirring began as the roof opened above us, folding behind like origami, and Trey entangled his fingers with mine. Fresh sunshine spilled into the car, lemonade sweet, and the showroom ceiling came into view, with its champagne-colored lights and soft gold trim.
Trey tilted his head back and looked up. I let my head fall back too, resting it on his shoulder. All I could see was the showroom ceiling, that arching gilded boundary. And it was safe, that ceiling. But beyond it lay the whole of the expanding universe.
Author’s Note
Tai and Trey’s Atlanta is a place of bustle and leisure, nature and steel, tradition and edge, just like the real Atlanta. These two Atlantas co-exist easily in my imagination, but any native to the area will recognize some differences between my fictional version and the actual one (the most obvious being that in Trey and Tai’s Atlanta, nobody spends nearly enough time waiting in traffic).
Tai’s gun shop resides in my imagination; the city of Kennesaw is real, however. You’ll find it slightly northwest of Atlanta, and it really does have a city ordinance requiring every head of household to maintain a firearm and ammunition. It also has a store specializing in Confederate memorabilia—Wildman’s Civil War Surplus (although any resemblance between Tai’s shop and this one is purely coincidental).
Trey’s Buckhead neighborhood also exists, and includes high rise condominium buildings like his, chic bungalows like Gabriella’s, and ultra-contemporary mansions like the Talbots’. Beardsley Gardens is a stand-in for the popular Barnsley Gardens; I tampered with enough of the resort’s geography that I thought it best to give my imaginary construct a new name, though you will find the quaint English cottages and the ruins of the Italianate villa almost exactly as I described them. Most of the other places I mention—Little Five Points, Westview, Chastain Park, Adairsville, and the Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield National Park—are real, as are the histories and complicated geographies that Tai shares.
The film industry is alive and well in the Peach State—as of this writing, more feature films were made in Georgia than any other place in the world, including California (sorry, Hollywood!). Celebrity spottings are routine in the Atlanta area, as are the yellow directional markers that indicate base camps and on-location sets.
If you’re interested in learning more about the research that went into this book, you can check out my Necessary Ends Pinterest board, plus my other series boards: Civil War—devoted to the War Between the States, especially Georgia’s part in it; Criminal Behavior, which explores villains and scams and nefarious wrongdoings, Trey and Tai’s Accessories, a collection of my protagonists’ clothing, automobiles, and weaponry; and Trey and Tai’s Atlanta, which includes the metro Atlanta landmarks that have cameo appearances in the series. You can find these, and my other writerly and readerly boards, at www.pinterest.com/tinawh.
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