22. Graham
GRAHAM
I leave the office at two-thirty.
Joel notices — of course he does — but he doesn't say anything this time, just watches me collect my jacket from the back of my chair with the quiet attention of someone who's updated his model and is waiting to see if the new data holds.
I don't explain myself. I don't owe the departure an explanation. I have somewhere to be.
Isla gets home at three-fifteen.
She comes through the front door with her backpack hanging off one shoulder and a painting rolled under her arm, still wearing the slightly dazed expression of a kid whose brain has been full all day and hasn't fully returned to her body yet.
She stops when she sees me in the entryway instead of Rosa.
"You're here," she says.
"I'm here."
"It's not four."
"I know."
She processes this, head tilted. Then she holds up the rolled painting. "I made a volcano."
"Let's see it."
She unrolls it on the entry table — red and orange watercolor, enthusiastic application, a truly impressive quantity of paint in the lava section. It looks less like a volcano and more like a sunset having a crisis, but the commitment is undeniable.
"That's a lot of lava," I say.
"Volcanoes have a lot of lava," she says, with the patience of someone explaining something obvious. "That's the whole point of them."
"Fair enough." I roll it back carefully. "I thought we could do something this afternoon. Before dinner."
"What kind of something?"
"I found a model kit in the hall closet. Birdhouse. We could build it."
. "Have you built one before?"
"No."
"Have you built anything before?"
I think about this honestly. "Corporations."
She stares at me. "That's not the same."
"I'm aware. Are you in or not?"
She drops her backpack by the stairs and says, "Okay," which is as close to enthusiastic agreement as Isla gets about anything untested, and I'll take it.
The kit has forty-three pieces and instructions written by someone who clearly believed pictures were sufficient and words were optional. I spread everything on the kitchen table and Isla climbs into her chair and looks at the pieces with her arms folded on the tabletop, chin resting on her wrists.
"That one goes there," she says, pointing.
"I haven't started yet."
"I know. I'm previewing."
I sort the pieces by size because that's how I approach everything — establish order before committing to action. Isla watches me do this with what I've come to recognize as her approval face: eyes steady, mouth neutral, not correcting me. High praise.
We start with the base. I hand her pieces and she holds them while I work the connectors, and it goes reasonably well until we hit step seven, which involves a roof panel that wants to sit at an angle it was clearly not designed to maintain.
"It's crooked," Isla observes.
"I know it's crooked."
"Marisol would know how to fix it."
I look at her. She looks at the roof panel. There's no strategy in it — she's not trying to redirect, she's just stating a fact the way she states all facts, plainly and without apology.
"Marisol isn't here," I say. "We're going to figure it out."
Isla looks toward the hallway anyway — a quick, reflexive check, the kind she does less often than she used to but still does when something feels uncertain. The hallway is empty. She looks back at the panel.
"Maybe if you hold it from the other side," she says.
"Show me what you mean."
She stands up on her chair — ignoring my instinct to tell her to sit down, because she's fine, she's steady, let it go — and puts both small hands on the far edge of the panel while I press from mine. It clicks. Holds.
"There," she says. Like we did that together, which we did.
"Good call," I say.
She sits back down looking satisfied in the particular way she gets when she's contributed something real, and we keep going, and by the time Marisol comes into the kitchen at five-thirty we have a structurally questionable but fully assembled birdhouse sitting in the center of the table.
Marisol stops. Looks at it. Looks at Isla. "Did you two build that?"
"Graham held it wrong at first," Isla reports. "But then we fixed it."
"It has character," I say.
Marisol's expression does something brief and involuntary — the almost-smile, the one that doesn't quite commit — and she turns toward the refrigerator. "I'll start dinner."
"The birdhouse has a name," Isla tells her. "Gerald Three."
"Obviously," Marisol says, and I hear the warmth in it even with her back to us.
I try to talk to her over dinner.
Not about anything loaded — I'm not looking to have that conversation at the table with Isla between us eating her pasta. Just conversation. The normal kind that has been easy for weeks and is now apparently a controlled substance.
"Joel says the Harmon restructure closes Thursday," I say, passing the bread.
"I saw the calendar update." She helps Isla cut a piece of pasta that is frankly already small enough. "I moved your Friday calls to make room for the debrief."
"I wasn't going to ask you to do that."
"I know. It made sense logistically."
"Right." I try again. "Isla did well today. With the birdhouse."
"She told me."
"She problem-solved a roof panel issue."
"She's good at that." Marisol refills Isla's water. "She'll be good at a lot of things."
She says it with a softness that's completely genuine, looking at the top of Isla's dark head, and I watch it happen and feel the particular frustration of someone being shut out of a room they used to have a key to.
Every answer is correct. Every answer is complete. Every answer is a door closed in a way that leaves nothing to push against.
After bedtime — which Isla allows me to do tonight, a fact I note and do not comment on — I find Marisol in the kitchen with her laptop and a cup of tea, the same position she's occupied on a dozen late nights.
The under-counter light is on. Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders.
She looks up when I come in, and something moves behind her eyes, there and gone.
"She went down easy," I say.
"Good." She looks back at the screen.
I pull out the chair across from her and sit down. She doesn't tell me to leave, which I choose to interpret as permission. "You've been redirecting every conversation today."
"I've been answering your questions."
"You've been answering the surface of them."
She closes the laptop an inch. Not all the way. "Graham?—"
"I'm not asking about the other night. I'm just talking to you."
"I know what you're doing."
"Then you know I'm not going to stop doing it."
She opens the laptop back up and looks at the screen and the line of her jaw is set in the way it gets when she's decided something and is waiting out the pressure. The kitchen hums around us. The clock says nine fifty-two.
"I have an early morning," she says. She closes the laptop all the way, picks up her mug, and stands. "Goodnight, Graham."
She walks out.
I sit at the table and look at the empty chair across me, and the birdhouse still on the counter with its crooked roof panel and its absurd name, and I press my palm flat against the table and stay there in the quiet.
She's not wrong, I think. About any of it.
That's the part I can't argue my way past.