Chapter 3
Chapter Three
The house felt different with my father in it, somehow smaller, despite its nearly three thousand square feet, and more crowded, even though he was just one person. A tall man, sure, but he was just as slim as I remembered, didn’t seem to be one of those men who put on weight as they got older.
I led my father and Ben into the kitchen, since I didn’t know where else to go. Because I needed something to do with my hands. I went to the coffee maker — Ben’s coffee maker, sleek and modern on the counter — and started a fresh pot, even though none of us really needed any more caffeine.
“Sit down,” I said without turning around. “Both of you.”
I heard the scrape of chairs against the hardwood floor as they complied. Good. At least someone was listening to me.
The coffee maker gurgled and hissed, and I stared at it while I tried to organize my thoughts. There were so many things I wanted to say, so many questions I wanted to ask, that they all jammed together in my throat and refused to come out in any coherent order.
So I settled for the most pressing one.
“How long?” I asked, still facing the coffee maker. It seemed easier to open this conversation without having to look directly at him. “How long have you been watching?”
“Seventeen years.” My father’s voice was pitched low, almost soft. “Give or take.”
I turned around then, because I realized I needed to see his face when he said things like that.
He sat at the kitchen table with his hands folded in front of him, and Ben was in the chair across from him, watching us both with that careful expression he got when he was trying to figure out the best way to help without making things worse.
“‘Seventeen years,’” I repeated. “You’ve been watching me for seventeen years, and you never once thought to, I don’t know, pick up a phone? Send an email? Show up for my high school graduation?”
“I couldn’t risk it.” My father’s dark eyes were steady on my face, pleading with me to understand.
“Any direct contact would have compromised the perimeter I’d set up.
If anyone was watching you — and believe me, people were watching — they would have seen me, and that would have led them straight to you. ”
“That’s convenient.”
“It’s the truth.”
I laughed, and the sound was harsh and ugly even to my own ears.
“You want to talk about the truth? Fine. Let’s talk about the truth.
” I stalked out of the kitchen and down the hall to the office.
Neither my father nor Ben got up to follow me, which led me to believe that they knew it was better to stay put.
The file cabinet looked innocent enough, dark wood to match the antiques in the rest of the room. But it wasn’t the file cabinet that was the problem.
No, that was what it contained.
I found what I was looking for and went back to the kitchen, where Ben and my father sat like a couple of kids who knew they’d get what-for if they got up from their seats without the babysitter’s permission.”
“Let’s talk about these.”
I slapped the folder down on the table in front of my father.
Inside were the canceled checks I’d found months ago when I was going through my grandmother’s papers after she and my mother disappeared.
All those checks had been made out to Finn Lowell and were signed by Emily Thompson. They went back for years and years.
My father glanced at the folder but didn’t open it. “You found those.”
“Yes, I found them.” I pulled out a chair and sat down across from him, with Ben at my right hand.
“Hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, all made out to you. At first, I thought maybe it was some kind of support payment, like maybe you’d worked out an arrangement with Grandma after you left.
But then I started thinking about it more, and I realized the timing didn’t make sense. ”
My father didn’t respond. Instead, he only sat there, waiting.
“The checks started six months before you left,” I continued.
“And they kept coming, regular as clockwork, for years afterward. Ten thousand dollars every month. A lot more than you would have been getting for alimony…well, unless you were making a whole lot less as an accountant than I thought.” I leaned forward then, forcing him to meet my eyes.
“So what was it? Blackmail? Did you threaten to expose what the women in our family could do unless Grandma paid you off?”
A flash of shock showed in his dark eyes. “Is that really what you thought?”
“What else was I supposed to think?” I returned. “You left without any explanation, and then I found out that my grandmother was sending you big chunks of money for years. What would you have concluded from all that?”
He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was now almost hesitant. “I suppose I would have concluded the same thing.”
“So it was blackmail.”
“No.” He shook his head, the movement emphatic. “Sidney, no. It was never blackmail. The money was payment for services rendered.”
This was crazy. “What services?”
Finn glanced at Ben, then back at me. “Your grandmother hired me to set up a surveillance network around Silver Hollow so I could monitor for threats before they could get close enough to do any damage. The checks you found were my operating budget.”
I stared at him. Of all the explanations I’d imagined, that sure as hell hadn’t been one of them.
“Grandma hired you,” I said slowly. “To spy on…what, exactly?”
“On anyone who showed too much interest in Silver Hollow or the forest or your family.” He paused for a second or two before adding, “People like Ben, before I determined he wasn’t a threat.”
I looked over at Ben, who gave me a small nod. Apparently, they’d already covered this part of the conversation outside.
“Grandma never mentioned any of this,” I said. A weak defense, I supposed, but I hated the idea that she’d kept so much from me. The women in my family were supposed to keep our secrets from the outside world, not from each other.
“She wouldn’t have,” my father replied. “The whole point was to keep you and your mother insulated from that side of things. You had enough to worry about. Emily didn’t want you to have to think about the human threats on top of everything else.”
“So she just — what? Outsourced that part to you?”
“In a manner of speaking.” My father pressed his lips together, and for a few seconds, I wasn’t sure if he intended to continue.
But then he said, “It wasn’t supposed to be permanent.
When I first left, I thought I’d be gone for a year, maybe two.
Just long enough to set up the network and train someone else to run it. But then things got complicated.”
I knew all about complicated. “Complicated how?”
He was silent for a few beats, his dark eyes distant. Outside, the green lightning flickered, and I felt the Dragon’s presence pulse beneath my feet — that banked heat, that ancient patience.
“I started detecting precursor signs,” he said at last. “Small fluctuations in the portal’s energy signature, that is.
At first, I thought it might be equipment error, since it wasn’t as if I was trained in any of this, but the readings were consistent across multiple sensors.
” He looked at me then, and his expression was bleak.
“Something was changing, Sidney. The portal was becoming unstable, years before any of the recent events. I couldn’t come back and risk being a liability when I had no idea what might be coming. ”
“A ‘liability,’” I repeated. “You keep using that word.”
Still with that bleak look on his face, he said, “Because that’s what I am.
What I’ve always been.” He spread his hands on the table, and I noticed for the first time how weathered they looked, how scarred, as if from innumerable small cuts.
“I’m a mundane. I don’t have any abilities or any connection to the portal network.
If someone wanted to get to you or your mother or Emily, I would have been the obvious weak point. The easiest target.”
“So you decided the best way to protect us was to abandon us.”
Harsh, and maybe I should have tried to find a more diplomatic way to say those words. Then again, why should I be diplomatic with the man who’d walked out the door when I was ten years old? Right then, I didn’t give a good goddamn what his reasoning might have been.
He flinched. Good. He should flinch. He should feel some fraction of what I’d felt, of what I’d gone through during all those years of wondering why my father had left and why he didn’t love me enough to stay.
“I decided the best way to protect you was to remove myself from the equation,” he said.
His voice shook a little, and he waited for a second before he went on.
“I needed to put distance between us so that anyone who came after me wouldn’t find you at the end of the trail.
It wasn’t — ” The words broke off there, and I watched him swallow as he stopped to gather himself once again.
“It wasn’t what I wanted, Sidney. It was never what I wanted. ”
“And yet you did it anyway.”
“Yes.” He met my gaze at last, and I saw the weight of those seventeen lost years in his gaze. “I did it anyway. Because keeping you safe mattered more than keeping you close.”
The coffee maker beeped, signaling that the pot was ready, but none of us moved to get up. The kitchen felt very quiet, very still, like the whole house was holding its breath.
“The birthday cards,” I said. “You sent them for a few years after you left, and then they stopped. Why?”
His mouth tightened. “Emily asked me to stop. She said they were confusing you, making you think I might come back. She thought a clean break would be easier.”
“Easier for whom?” Right then, a little spasm of anger went through me. Not at my father this time, but at my grandmother, for thinking she knew best.