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I sat there in my own kitchen, gently humiliated, more in love than I’d been an hour ago. The campaign, once it got going, was the single most chaotic thing I’d ever been part of, and I once watched a bachelorette party fight a drag queen over a folding chair. The problem was that every member of my family had exactly one gear, and it was overdrive. Benji had appointed himself Director of Communications. He’d taken the title into the sea and drowned with it. He got his ring light. Of course, he got his ring light. Within a week, he’d also acquired a lavalier mic, a “content calendar,” and a way of referring to the bar as “our brand” that made Finn threaten to walk into traffic. He started every morning by announcing the day’s social media “posts” like a cruise director laying out the day’s activities.

“We’re not leaning into the sad angle enough,” he told the group one afternoon, deadly serious. “People give when they cry. I need everyone to be sadder on camera. Rod, when I interview you, I need you to cry about the ice machine.”

“I do not cry on command,” Rod said, with enormous dignity.

“You cried at her funeral.”

“That was earned crying, Benjamin. Is different. Man cannot schedule grief.”

“I literally did. It’s on the content calendar. It’s Thursday—”

“Then Thursday you get no tears and very disappointed man.”

Rod, for his part, had decided the way to save the bar was to feed the entire city of Tampa personally. He’d started cooking for the fundraiser crowds like he was provisioning Winterfell before the white walkers’ arrival. Every surface of the kitchen was covered in trays, and Reina was running so hard she’d developed what Rod described as “a mood.” He’d taken to talking to her in a low, urgent Spanish, coaxing her through the rush like a man walking a spooked horse across a bridge. When Benji tried to film all this, Rod threw a dish towel at the lens.

Jacks contributed by getting Skyler to post one photo, which did more numerically than everything else combined. He then spent the next week being deeply insufferable about being “the reason we went viral,” until Finn pointed out that his entire contribution had taken eleven seconds and involved no thought whatsoever. Jacks responded with, “Yeah, but they were my eleven seconds,” which was annoyingly unassailable.

And then there was the community itself, which turned out to be an uncut vein of pure chaos. People wanted to help, God love them, though helping is not the same as being helpful. Several drag performers wanted to headline the benefit, all of them, all at once, which turned into a turf negotiation of such delicate complexity that Dante eventually ruled them all out. Somebody’s aunt knitted us a two-hundred-dollar Afghan in the bar’s colors that we could neither sell nor throw away. It now lived folded over the back booth like a hostage. A man I’d never seen before showed up, put forty dollars in the jar, told me the bar had “saved his life in ways he couldn’t get into,” and left before I could ask a single question. I still think about him.

“This is a disaster,” I told Dante, shaking my head at the board at the end of a week of it.

“It’s a beautiful disaster, though.” He moved a card. “It’s forty thousand dollars of beautiful disaster.”

“Forty thousand.” I let it land. It was a staggering amount of money, more than I’d dared hope for, especially in only one week. “That’s incredible. Dante, that’s—”

“It’s two percent.” He said it flat, because he’d promised me honesty, and Dante Pierce always kept his promises. “It’s a beautiful, impossible, two percent of what we need, and it’s the easy two percent. The next two percent will be harder, and the two after that will be painful.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. I’m saying it anyway, so neither of us starts believing forty thousand dollars is a rescue when it’s more of a rounding error.” He looked at the board, at all his string and cards. “It buys us the thing I said it would: noise. But it doesn’t buy us the building.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t buy us the building.”

And that was the night another idea finally came to me, one that had been rattling around in the back of my skull since the card showed up on my counter. We were doing the dishes, which was when I did my real thinking, when my hands were busy. Dante had learned that about me already, learned to just wait through the quiet until whatever I was building finished building.

“What if we don’t buy the building?” I asked suddenly.

“That’s the whole problem, Mark. We can’t afford to—”

“No, listen,” he started, then sucked in enough air to last through his next sentence. “So, in a nine-story mixed-use build, your whole pro forma lives and dies on the ground-floor lease-up, because the retail de-risks the—”

“Mark.”

“—the vertical, so if you think about anchor tenancy as a—”

“Mark.” Dante turned off the water. “I understood four of those words, and two of them were ‘the.’”

“Right. Sorry.” I put down the plate I was drying. “Let me try in English.”

“Please, reduce it down for the man who blocks doors for a living.”

“Meridian bought the whole block for condos, nine stories of them. And everybody, Gerald, us, everybody, has been thinking about it like it’s a fight over one storefront, like it’s them or us—but that’s not how a developer thinks about a block.”

Dante leaned against the counter, fully tuned in.

“A tower like that needs stuff on the ground floor,” I said. “Retail shops and a coffee place, some little seven-dollar-latte spot with no chairs. They always do. You don’t put condos straight onto a sidewalk. And here’s another thing: They don’t want to build it and run it. Developers build. They don’t want to be in the retail or property management business. They want a tenant who does all that.”

“You’re saying—”