Jade
It's been two days since the BBQ and I've checked the phone so many times that I've started leaving it in other rooms deliberately, making myself walk to it rather than reaching for it every twenty minutes. It doesn't help. I still know exactly where it is. I still know the screen is blank.
Mom still hasn't responded.
Phoenix has noticed something is wrong. He hasn't asked.
This is one of the things I've learned about him in the months I've been living inside his life.
He watches and waits, and when he finally asks, he already knows most of the answer.
I'm not ready for that conversation yet so I've been staying slightly ahead of him, keeping myself occupied, taking my laptop to the back deck in the mornings and staring at the manuscript and producing very little.
This morning I gave up on it entirely. I'm sitting at the kitchen table with cold coffee and the newspaper I don't subscribe to but Phoenix gets delivered every day, and I'm reading the same paragraph about a city council vote in Malibu for the third time without taking in a single word, when my phone rings.
It’s not Mom. It’s Olive.
I look at the screen for one full ring. Then I pick up.
"Jade." Her voice is low and unhurried, she speaks without filling silence just to fill it. "I hope I'm not interrupting."
"You're not," I say. "I'm reading about a parking ordinance."
A brief pause. "Put it down…please”
I do as she asks.
"I've known for a while," Olive says. "I want you to know that before anything else."
I set down my coffee cup.
"A photograph on Phoenix's phone, early on. Your last name. And then I saw you stand in my garden the first time he brought you to the house and I knew." She pauses. "You hold yourself exactly the way your mom … Sydney did at your age. The same stillness in a doorway. I'd have known you anywhere."
My hand is flat on the table. I look at it.
"I told Nicholas when I was certain," she continues. "We talked about it. We went back and forth, actually. I wanted to tell you. He thought we should wait." She takes another pause. It’s shorter this time. "I didn't entirely agree with him. But I went along with it."
"How long?” I ask.
"Since before the library," she says. "Since before you were properly part of any of this."
The library. The night Olive walked in on Phoenix and me and I'd wanted to disappear through the floor. She'd known then. She'd looked at me with that unreadable expression and handed me a cup of tea afterward and she'd already known exactly who I was.
"You gave me a key," I say. "You texted me book recommendations. You offered to read my manuscript…" I stop. "You knew the whole time and you did all of that anyway."
"Yes," Olive says.
“Why?"
She's quiet for a moment. "Because you're not your mother. You're not the fight we had or the years between us or any of the things that happened before you existed." A pause. “My son loves you and that was enough."
I should be angry and I'm not, which I'll think about later.
“The fact that you are her daughter changes nothing," Olive says. "I want you to understand that. Not how I felt about you then and not how I feel about you now. You came into this family as yourself. That's how you'll stay in it."
My throat closes. I press two fingers against it and breathe through my nose.
"Jade."
"I'm here," I say. My voice comes out steadier than it has any right to.
"I know this is a great deal to absorb." She pauses. "I also know you've texted your mother."
I go still. "How do you know that?"
"Because I know Sydney," she says. "And I know you. And I know that if you'd called her, she would have found a way to say nothing for forty-five minutes.” Olive takes a beat. "She hasn't responded?”
“No."
Not I don't know what you're talking about. Not James Dupree was just a man I dated. Whatever she sends back, it won't be either of those. Whatever comes will confirm everything without technically saying a word.
"She will. In her own time, which will frustrate you considerably. But she will." Another pause, shorter. "If you have questions about the history, about any of it, I'm willing to answer what I can. Not Sydney's version. Mine. They're not the same story."
I look out the kitchen window at the Pacific. The marine layer is back today, the water gray and flat, the horizon disappeared into a cloud. Phoenix will be home by six. I have approximately seven hours to decide how much of this I want to tell him.
"Can I ask you something now?" I ask.
"Yes."
"Did you know when Phoenix first brought me home. That first dinner."
She takes a moment before she answers, which tells me more than a quick yes or no would have. "I suspected. I wasn't certain until later."
"But you suspected."
"Yes."
"And you said nothing."
"No," she says. "I said nothing."
I think about this. Olive has talked with me about writing and offered to read my novel. All of it with this sitting underneath.
"Why?" I ask.
She's quiet for a moment. "Because you weren't ready. Or maybe I wasn’t. Because Nicholas asked me not to. And because," she pauses, "I thought you deserved to find out yourself.”
Outside a wave breaks hard against the base of the bluff. I hear it through the glass, that deep concussive sound, and then the pull of water drawing back over rock.
"That's a generous way to frame it," I say.
"It is," she agrees. "It's also true. Both things can be true."
I almost smile. She doesn't defend herself by denying. I've watched her do it with Nicholas in the kitchen when she thought he was wrong about something, quiet and unmovable. I'd admired it from across the room. I admire it more now that it's directed at me.
"What's Sydney's version?" I ask. "Of what happened between you."
"That's a longer conversation," she says. "Come for lunch. Come this week, when you're ready. I'll tell you what I know and I'll tell you my part in it honestly, which isn't entirely flattering." She takes a beat. "It rarely is, when you tell things honestly."
My chest aches. I hadn't known I was holding my breath until just now.
"Okay," I say. "This week."
"Good." Her voice warms slightly, just enough to notice. "How's the book going?”
I laugh, short and genuine. "Terrible."
"Good," she says again, and I can hear that she means it. "That means you're in the middle of it."
We hang up and I sit at the kitchen table for a long time without moving.
Nicholas had known who I was before Phoenix ever brought me home.
At some point Phoenix had been told. I didn't know exactly when or how much, and I hadn't asked, and that was its own thing to sit with.
I could be angry about that. I could frame it as the Crawfords managing me the same as they manage everything, positioning people like pieces on a board.
I've watched Nicholas do exactly that. I know what it looks like.
But Olive had called. Two days after the BBQ, before my mother had said a single word, Olive had picked up the phone and told me she knew and it changed nothing.
She hadn't waited to see how it shook out.
She hadn't let me sit with Sydney's silence for a week before offering something to put against it.
She'd called while I was still reading the same paragraph about a parking ordinance for the third time and told me I wasn't alone in it.
Not before she knew the whole picture. After.
On the back deck the marine layer is starting to thin at the edges, a strip of pale light appearing where the cloud meets the water.
I watch it through the kitchen window. By the time Phoenix gets home it will probably have burned off entirely, as it does most afternoons, the gray pulling back to reveal whatever was underneath it all along.
I open my laptop.
The manuscript is still there, forty thousand words of a woman surviving inside a world that keeps trying to reduce her. I read the last paragraph I'd written four days ago. Then I put my hands on the keys and start writing the next one.
I write for two hours without stopping. When I finally look up the marine layer is gone and the Pacific is blue all the way to the horizon and my coffee has been cold for so long the mug has left a ring on the table.
I'm still there when I hear Phoenix's car in the driveway.
I close the laptop. Stand up. Rinse the cold coffee down the sink and start a fresh pot and listen to his key in the lock, his footsteps in the hall, the sound of him dropping his jacket over the chair by the door that I've told him twice is not a coat rack.
He comes into the kitchen and stops when he sees my face.
"Hey," he says.
He looks at me for a moment. Then he crosses to where I'm standing and puts his hand against the side of my face, his thumb at my cheekbone, and just holds it there. His palm is warm. He doesn't ask anything.
I lean into his hand and close my eyes.
I'll tell him. Just not tonight. Tonight, I need it to still be mine.