Against the Grain

Chapter 1: The Grain Splits

The fluorescent lights in the Emory University Hospital cardiac unit had a particular quality that Daniel Marsh had never noticed before—a faint, persistent flicker that seemed to pulse in rhythm with the monitors beside his bed. He'd walked past hospitals a thousand times. He'd represented hospital systems in litigation. He'd never been inside one as a patient.

Forty years old. A mild myocardial infarction, the cardiologist said, as if the word "mild" could soften the fact that his heart had briefly, terrifyingly stopped doing its job.

"You're lucky," Dr. Pham told him, flipping through his chart with the practiced efficiency of someone who delivered this speech often. "No significant damage. But your blood pressure is a disaster, your cholesterol is through the roof, and your stress levels—" She paused, looking at him over her reading glasses. "What do you do for a living, Mr. Marsh?"

"I'm a partner at Ridley, Stokes & Whitman."

"The law firm."

"Corporate litigation."

Dr. Pham set down the chart. "I want you to imagine your heart as a machine. You've been running it at maximum capacity with no maintenance for twenty years. The machine sent you a warning. Next time, it might not be a warning."

Daniel nodded. He understood warnings. He issued them professionally.

His mother arrived within the hour, still wearing her church clothes because it was a Sunday and because Lorraine Marsh did not leave the house on Sundays without being properly dressed, even for cardiac emergencies. She stood at the foot of his bed with her purse clutched against her stomach and her lips pressed into a line so thin they nearly disappeared.

"I told you," she said.

She had, in fact, told him. She'd told him when he made partner at thirty-four that he was working too hard. She'd told him when his marriage ended two years later that the job was eating him alive. She'd told him at Christmas, when he'd shown up late and gray-faced and had fallen asleep in the armchair before dinner was served, that something was going to give.

"I know, Mom."

"You don't know. If you knew, you wouldn't be lying in that bed."

His sister Pamela arrived next, driving up from Savannah with her husband Roy and their two kids, who were instructed to wait in the hallway because hospitals were no place for children to see their uncle looking like death. Pamela was five years younger than Daniel and had inherited their mother's gift for pointed silence. She stood beside the bed and held his hand and said nothing for a very long time, which was worse than anything she could have said.

"I'm fine," Daniel told her.

"You're in a hospital."

"It was mild."

"It was your heart, Danny."

The nickname undid him slightly. Nobody called him Danny anymore. At the firm he was Daniel or Marsh. In court he was Mr. Marsh or Counselor. Danny was a boy who spent summers in Tennessee, who smelled like sawdust and creek water, who fell asleep on his grandfather's porch listening to the katydids.

Danny was someone he hadn't been in a very long time.

The firm sent flowers—an enormous arrangement that took up half the windowsill and came with a card signed by the managing partners. Get well soon, Daniel. We need you back. The Harmon Industries case was entering its critical phase, and Daniel was lead counsel. Two years of discovery, a hundred depositions, millions of dollars in billable hours. The case was a beast, and it was his beast.

He spent three days in the hospital and four more at his mother's house in Decatur, where she fed him grilled fish and steamed vegetables and watched him like he might collapse at any moment. He checked his email forty-seven times the first day. His associate, Kevin Liu, sent updates every few hours. Everything was under control, Kevin assured him. Everything was fine.

But Daniel wasn't fine. Something had cracked open in that hospital bed, some sealed compartment he'd been ignoring, and now he couldn't close it again. He lay awake at night in his childhood bedroom, staring at the ceiling, feeling his pulse in his wrist and wondering if each beat was reliable or if the next one might be the one that stuttered.

On the fifth day, he called his managing partner, Tom Ridley.

"I need a leave of absence."

The silence on the other end was substantial. Tom Ridley was sixty-three years old, had survived two divorces and a bout with prostate cancer, and had never taken a leave of absence in his life.

"How long are we talking?" Tom asked.

"Six months."

"Daniel."

"I almost died, Tom."

"You had a mild cardiac event. You're forty, you're healthy, you'll be back on your feet in—"

"Six months. I'm invoking the medical leave provision in my partnership agreement."

Another silence. Tom hadn't expected Daniel to know the provision existed, which was foolish, because Daniel had helped draft the partnership agreement.

"And the Harmon case?"

"Kevin can handle it. I'll be available for consultation."

"This is a career decision, Daniel. I want you to understand that."

"I understand."

He hung up and sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees, breathing carefully. His mother appeared in the doorway.

"I heard," she said.

"I'm going to Cedar Hollow."

Lorraine Marsh's expression shifted through several phases—surprise, confusion, something that might have been hope. Cedar Hollow was the town in the Cumberland Plateau region of Tennessee where her father, William Cavett, had lived and died. Where he'd run a woodworking shop for forty years. Where Daniel had spent every summer from age six to age sixteen, learning to sand and measure and cut, before adolescence and ambition had pulled him away.

"The shop's been closed for eight years," his mother said. "Since Daddy passed."

"I know."

"It'll be a mess."

"I know that too."

She studied him for a long moment. "Your grandfather would have liked that," she finally said.

Pamela was less supportive. She called that evening, her voice sharp with worry.

"You're moving to a town with no hospital?"

"There's a clinic. And a hospital thirty minutes away in Crossville."

"Danny, this is crazy. You need to be near your doctors. You need to be resting."

"I'll be resting. I'll be doing woodworking."

"You don't know anything about woodworking."

"I used to."

"You were twelve."

"Sixteen. And Grandpa said I had good hands."

"Grandpa said everyone had good hands. He said Roy had good hands, and Roy once put a shelf up that fell on the cat."

Daniel almost laughed, which felt strange and good. "I'm going, Pam."

"Fine. But if you die in some backwoods town in Tennessee, I will never forgive you."

He drove up on a Tuesday in late March, taking the interstate north from Atlanta through Chattanooga and then the winding state highways up into the plateau. The landscape changed gradually—the sprawl of the city giving way to farmland, the farmland giving way to forest, the roads narrowing and climbing until the air thinned and the mountains folded around him like cupped hands.

Cedar Hollow sat in a valley between two ridges, a town of about twelve hundred people arranged along a main street that hadn't changed much since the 1970s. There was a hardware store, a diner called Mabel's, a post office, a Baptist church, a Methodist church, a volunteer fire department, and a Dollar General that represented the town's most recent concession to modernity. The houses were a mix of old frame buildings and newer manufactured homes, scattered up the hillsides along gravel roads.

His grandfather's property was at the end of Laurel Creek Road, a quarter mile past the last neighbor. The house was a sturdy four-room cabin that William Cavett had built himself in 1968, and behind it stood the workshop—a long, low building with a corrugated metal roof and double barn doors that Daniel remembered being perpetually open, spilling sawdust and the smell of fresh-cut oak into the afternoon air.

Now the doors were shut and padlocked. The windows were clouded with grime. A Virginia creeper had claimed most of the south wall, its tendrils working into the gaps between the boards.

Daniel stood in the gravel driveway with his bags at his feet and looked at it all—the cabin with its sagging porch, the workshop with its locked doors, the mountains rising green and silent beyond—and felt something he couldn't immediately name. It wasn't peace, exactly. It was more like the moment in a courtroom when the jury files in and everything goes quiet and you know that whatever happens next will be definitive.

He found the key under the third porch step, right where his grandfather had always kept it.