"You're up early," she observed without looking away from a highlighted page. "I thought you were taking the weekend off."
"I am taking the weekend off," Fletcher replied, opening the refrigerator. "I'm going to get a haircut, eat something I'm not supposed to eat, and come back before you can give me a project."
Brenda smiled over the top of her glasses. "The part about coming back is the only part I believe."
Fletcher was fifty-three, a tall man whose shoulders still carried the strength of someone who had once worked long hours in shipping warehouses to pay for school supplies. The cream linen shirt he wore that morning had no visible label, and his gray joggers had been washed enough times to lose their original shape. He chose comfortable white sneakers and left his expensive watches in their case. For once, he did not want a suit, a driver, or a calendar full of negotiations. He wanted an ordinary Saturday and the familiar sound of clippers at Supreme Cuts.
Before leaving, he reached over Brenda's shoulder and kissed her cheek. She touched his wrist and asked him to stop for peaches if the farm stand on the return route was open. He promised to try, then checked his phone for the gate-access confirmation his assistant had requested from the HOA weeks earlier. There was an old email confirming that his resident record would be active when he returned from London. He had no reason to think about the message further.
The matte-black Range Rover started quietly and rolled down the long driveway. Fletcher passed a row of flowering shrubs that Brenda had insisted on planting herself, despite the landscaping contractor's polite objections. He turned onto Greystone Lane and waved to a groundskeeper repairing an irrigation head near the cul-de-sac. The man recognized him and lifted his cap in greeting. Fletcher waved again and drove toward the main gate, where the morning shift was changing behind tinted glass.
He barely glanced at the men inside the booth. The exit lane opened automatically when his vehicle approached, as it had since he moved in, and he drove out beneath the stone entrance sign without slowing. The words GREYSTONE ESTATES shone against polished brass. At the time, they were merely letters on a wall. By the end of the day, Fletcher would hear those words repeated as though they described a place he needed to earn the right to enter.
West Charlotte looked different from the communities surrounding Greystone. Apartment buildings stood closer to the street, storefronts announced businesses in hand-painted lettering, and buses stopped beneath shelters whose benches had worn smooth from years of use. Fletcher knew these streets from a time when an unexpected car repair meant deciding which bill could wait. He also knew them from years after his success, when people in his position were advised to establish distance from places that reminded investors of hardship. Fletcher had never accepted the idea that success required forgetting one's beginnings.