Phoenix
Ileave before Jade is awake. She's on her side when I get up, one hand curled under her cheek, her breathing slow. I stand in the doorway for a moment and look at her before going.
The drive to my parents’ house takes forty minutes in early morning traffic. I don't turn on the music. I run through what I know and what I'm going to say when I sit across from my father, and by the time I pull through the gates I have an idea of how it should go.
The house is quiet at eight in the morning. The housekeeper lets me in and tells me my father is in the study. She’s new and offers to show me where it is but I grew up here.
The door is open. He's at his desk, white shirt, no jacket, sleeves rolled to the elbow the way he works when he's been at it for hours. There’s a cup of coffee next to him and a file is open in front of him. He looks up when I walk in and something in his face goes quiet. It’s almost as if he was expecting me.
"Phoenix." He closes the file. "Sit down."
"I'll stand."
He doesn't argue. He leans back in his chair and waits.
"You know why I'm here," I say.
"I have some idea."
"Jade told me last night." I move into the room but stay on my side of the desk.
The study smells like old paper and the cedar of his cologne, the same scent I associate with every serious conversation I've had in this room since I was fifteen years old.
"She told me about James. About Sydney. About what happened. "
Dad picks up his coffee cup and drinks from it, unhurried. Sets it back down. "And …"
"And I want to know what you knew and when you knew it."
He holds my gaze. "I looked into her," he says. "Before you brought her home. I look into everyone."
"She was a woman I was seeing. Not a business partner."
"No," he says. "She was a woman you were serious about, which made it more important, not less." He pauses. "I found her background. Sydney Catalano's daughter, raised in Boston, father not in the picture. I found the James connection."
"You found it."
"Yes."
"And you said nothing."
He doesn't answer that with words. He holds my gaze and waits, which is its own answer. He made a decision to say nothing, and he's not going to apologize for that decision.
I turn away from him and move to the window. The coffee smell is stronger here, close to the tray on the credenza. I put my hand on the windowsill and look at the roses and breathe through the anger building in my chest.
He knew. He knew about James and the pregnancy and Sydney raising her alone, and he knew all of this before I brought her to this house for dinner and watched my mother ask her about her writing and watched her charm every person at the table. He watched all of it knowing.
I turn back from the window.
"Why did you invite James to the BBQ," I say.
Dad looks at me steadily. "I hadn't seen him in a while. I called him. It was a Sunday afternoon." A pause. "At the time, Jade wasn't supposed to come."
"Her plans changed.”
"Yes."
I look at my father across the desk. Sixty-two years old, straight-backed, the white shirt immaculate at eight in the morning, his hands folded on the closed file. I have spent my entire life learning to read this man and I still don’t know who he really is.
He could lie to me. He has before. But this feels like the truth. What he's describing requires him to have predicted that Jade's plans would fall through that specific afternoon. My father plans things, but he plans them around variables he can control.
"All right," I say.
Dad looks at me. "Is that all."
"For now."
He picks up his coffee. "She's good for you," he says, not looking at me. He says it flatly, like a man who has observed something long enough to be certain of it. "Whatever you're thinking about the rest of it, hold that alongside it."
I look at him. "That's an interesting thing to say."
"It's a true thing." He sets the cup down. "You've been different since she came into your life. Steadier. Less like me at your age." He meets my eyes. "I consider that an achievement."
I don't have an answer for that.
I leave the study and walk back through the house, past the marble foyer and the kitchen where Jade has sat across from Olive a dozen times in the months since the BBQ. The house is quiet around me. My footsteps on the tile are too loud.
My mother is in the garden when I come out the back. She's kneeling at the south wall with her shears, working through the roses, and she looks up when she hears the door.
"Phoenix." She pulls off one glove. "Come sit for a moment."
"I need to get back."
She reads the tension in my shoulders, the set of my jaw, everything I learned to control from my father that she learned to see through anyway. "Five minutes," she says.
I sit on the low wall across from her.
She doesn't ask what happened in the study. She pulls her other glove off and sets both of them on the stone beside her and looks at me with those calm gray eyes.
"He told you what he's willing to tell you," she says. Not a question.
"Yes."
"And the rest?"
"He filed it away."
"I don't know if he knew before you brought her home," Olive says.
"I genuinely don’t, and I know your father better than anyone alive.
If he looked into her early and found out who she was and said nothing, that's one thing.
If he found out later and still said nothing, that's another.
" She pauses. "Either way he let it unfold without telling you. That I'm certain of."
I look at her. "That's not reassuring."
"It's not meant to be." She picks up one of the cut stems and turns it in her fingers. "What I do know is this, you found her yourself. Whatever he knew or didn't know, that part was yours." She sets the stem down. "Hold onto that."
The garden smells like jasmine and cut grass and the cold stone of the wall is solid under my palms.
"She's going to be all right," Olive says. "With James. With your father. With all of it. She's tougher than she looks."
"I know."
"You should go home to her."
I stand. She lifts her face when I lean down to kiss her cheek, her hand coming up briefly to my arm.
I walk back through the house and out to the front drive and get in my car, sitting there for fifteen minutes.
The estate is quiet around me. The cypress trees along the drive stand absolutely still in the early morning air. Through the study window I can see the shape of my father at his desk, the lamp on, the file open again, already back to work. Whatever had happened this morning, he had moved on.
I think about a photograph I stole when I was ten years old.
A little girl in a purple dress, dark hair, dark eyes, a gap between her front teeth.
I don't remember much about that day, whatever occasion brought us into the same space, but I remember the photograph.
I took it and I kept it and I told myself I'd find her again when the time was right.
It took seventeen years. I spent them keeping that promise.