Dust and Ashes

She had already told him everything. Now she had to decide whether to tell everyone else.

November 1929. Diana Grant and Teddy Calloway come off a ship at a New York pier eight days into being fully back together, nine years deep and one week old at the same time, and walk into a country in the first weeks of understanding what it had lost.

The wire that called them home from Paris said two things at once: the bank is exposed, and his father has collapsed. Teddy goes down to Wall Street by day and sits in a sickroom on East Seventy-Third by evening, sixteen months sober and holding. It is the emergency that’s holding him. That is not the same thing as discipline, and they both know it. Diana said so out loud at the ship’s rail before they sailed, and has never wanted less to be right about anything.

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