Something felt wrong when he pulled into the driveway. It’d been a foggy, grey day this afternoon. A gentle sifting snow also begun an hour or so after the low clouds rolled in, and it had driven James’s anxiety up. He’d managed, despite being on edge, and was talking positively to himself on the drive home for handling it as well as he did.
But it’d worried him. A morning text after he’d left for work got him a normal conversation for a bit. Lunchtime happened around the weather change and their correspondence was shorter. James hoped it was due to his working - Rosie had been given to Lane and Grayson for the day - but he didn’t like the silence. It’d given him a bad feeling.
Coming home made it worse. The Pontiac shut off. He closed the door very carefully and locked up; the keys went into his pocket. The door’s open, a worrisome voice told him - and it was right.
Gently pushing it inward, James found the house without a single light on. His eyes roamed over the open floor design. This was a choice Harry had made a long time ago, and James appreciated it. But natural light flooded the house, and all the open windows meant that the fog and light snow were visible from nearly every wall.
James hated the feeling in here. The place he called home, where he returned to and felt so comfortable and (relatively) safe in had been turned into a personal hell ground from five years ago. He swallowed so noisily that it instantly put him on higher alert, in case someone - something - else heard it. Slowly closing the door, he made sure to click it into place as quietly as humanly possible, and slid the deadbolt.
There are far more details about how he grew up, but he also notes that having a name like that did get him some perks, he says begrudgingly. It’s amazing how attitudes change by simply hearing a name. On the same token, it isn’t nice to see the shock and disappointment when people put a face to a name, and sometimes the immediately following guilt sparks more hatred and anger. Grayson’s gotten better at controlling that.
Taking advantage of that was something he was intending to do. Now, Mario argued that he’d already done that by naming his company ‘Fowler Gardening and Landscaping.’ Again, Grayson agreed. But he wanted to take it a step farther. People like a fun, short, memorable name. It’s dumb that the original title was sort of considered “a mouthful” but one does what one can. After the company was officially his, his first order of business was renaming it to ‘Sunny Day Gardening.’
James liked it - not that the former name was in any way bad. This was cheerful, though. The new uniforms - which were green and white - were an eye-catching-without-being-an-eyesore yellow. New t-shirts and ball caps came in that same color and were lettered by black-bordered, white letters. There is one with brown trim around the letters, and Grayson personally prefers that, so he wears it as a silly status symbol of being the boss.
