The Grandsons, Part 1: The Lights Are On...

...But Nobody Is Home

This is Part 1 of The Grandsons, a serialized novella about legacy, ambition, and collapse.

New Chapters on Fiction Fridays.

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"The Grandsons"

PART ONE

THE LIGHTS ARE ON (But nobody is home)

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The sun rose diagonally here, sliding sideways from the east through the hills and across green hills each morning. And then again throughout the day and in the evening, sideways through the eucalyptus, oaks, and sky-high redwoods, in long, filtered bands. Mornings were slow to unfold—fog clinging to canopies, lifting like stage curtains from rows of gabled brick—even the trees bent with memory, the cypress leaning windward like archivists. The town itself seemed arranged by inheritance, not by bloodlines, but by the things left standing.

Stone Chapel Towers. Ivy-choked libraries. Courtyards echoing with half-spoken Latin and the rustle of admissions brochures. It wasn't the East Coast, not really—but the illusion held. The West's answer to old-world gravitas. Hallowed halls of learning. A mausoleum built for a railroad king. Rows of red-tile roofs stretch like a benediction toward the foothills.

You could live an entire life here in the shadow of things someone else had built. You could call it home without ever having to hammer a nail.

The street names held weight—Valparaiso, Holy Cross, University Ave, El Camino, Woodside—spoken like scripture. Each one a quiet invocation: the vale of paradise, the holy cross, the path, the university. A promise of purpose, of arrival, of enlightenment. Even Woodside - rooted in old-timber redwoods- carried the illusion of permanence. A place to dwell. A place to endure. Ironic, maybe, given its start as a waystation during the Gold Rush, when ancient sequoias were carted down from Skyline to feed the building boom in cities to the north, or summer retreats for robber barons. Later, it because a hideout for hippies and Merry Pranksters- now paved over by unrecognizable estates and long drives.

Mansions hid behind oleander hedges. Schools issued uniforms and legacies. Tennis courts hid behind brick seminaries and altars of learning. Equestrian fields shimmered when freshly cut- mirages of past prestige.

This valley was once a place of systems. Systems of land, lineage, discipline. Even the streetlights felt placed by a draftsman's hand. There had been rules: daylighting angles, window setbacks, and family names. That order still hummed beneath the surface, like an old blueprint stored in a drawer no one dared throw away.

And yet—

The air was shifting. The land still held its pedigree, but the meaning of ownership had begun to drift. The institutions stood intact, but the people inside them were newer, faster, untethered. They hosted silent discos in mansions bought sight unseen. They rewired Tudor estates with Lutron. They ran product demos in red-brick parlors and brainstormed disruption from chaise lounges.

Despite the training.

Despite the blueprints and codebooks.

Not everyone knew what they were building.

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He opened the showroom with good intentions.

Or maybe just good lighting.

A prime address, a famous last name, and walls tall enough for a slat board—he had everything but the parts. The kitchen vignettes never arrived. The bathroom displays remained hypothetical. The renderings looked great on paper. And so he stood there amid unplumbed fixtures and dusty catalogs, gesturing at a future he couldn't install.

He talked about his grandfather often. The builder. The visionary. The man who brought modernism to the masses and slabs to the suburbs. You'd think he'd drawn the elevations himself, the way he spoke. But what he'd inherited wasn't a talent—it was a story. And stories, as any architect knows, won't hold weight unless they're properly supported.

The grandson had gone to school back east – not as far east as you might think, but the buildings had Ivy, and the quad smelled like wet stone and cigarettes. Well, back then.

It felt edgy.

It felt prestigious.

It had a legacy, even if the heyday had passed before his voice changed.

He'd only been a kid during the school's most radical years, but he claimed that legacy like souvenirs – he'd visited then once, maybe twice. That counted, right? Anyway, he'd lived through it- the way some people claim a decade by throwing on a fresh bootleg band tee.

He returned with sketches, lineage, and a desire to build something of his own. What he built was half-walls and shipping delays. He hired brilliant people, then forgot their names.

His renderings were delicate, light-dappled, and full of promise. Like the aspirations he had when he started school, whether he finished or finished with the same light and inspiration, no one ever quite knew. Because even his project timelines were handwritten, smudged, and perpetually out of date, the drywall never made it past inspection. The plumbing never connects. The lease is the only thing that comes close to being completed.

But… he had his dog.

Reliable.

The kind that followed him from room to room, curled up beside half-assembled cabinetry, and waited by the front window, even when no one came.

Loyal. Even when the work wasn’t.

Devoted. Like his brother- coming back home to help.

Soon, but not soon enough.

And maybe that was enough.

Enough to sign the lease.

Enough to get a write-up in the lifestyle section.

Enough to believe in the myth of inherited momentum.

But not enough to finish anything.

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