Chapter 19
chapter nineteen
seb
Mia's phone buzzes twice as the car turns up the drive, and I watch her glance at it, recognize the sender, and put it face-down on her knee without opening it.
"Hartfield?"
"Brandt. The review's still open. I'm not reading it until tomorrow." She looks up at the house coming into view — stone and ivy, a garden gone slightly wild. "I'd rather arrive somewhere as myself, not as whatever that email is about to make me."
I understand that more than I'd like to.
I haven't brought anyone here. This was my father's house first, and I inherited it the way you inherit a responsibility, not a life. I've never actually grieved here. I've managed the house. I'm not certain those are the same thing.
"You've gone quiet," Mia says.
"I don't think I ever properly grieved in this house," I say. "I kept the roof intact. I paid Elena. I made sure the rooms continued existing. I don't know that I've ever sat in any of them and simply let myself feel what they're full of."
She doesn't answer immediately, considering rather than withholding.
Elena meets us at the door before we've fully parked — sixties, silver-haired, an apron she's clearly worn through three decades of cooking in this kitchen, her expression doing something complicated when she sees Mia.
"You brought someone," she says to me, in Italian, then switches to English without missing a beat. "He has never brought someone."
"Elena."
"I am simply stating facts. Facts are not rude." She turns to Mia, extending a flour-dusted hand. "You are the one from the documents. He told me a little, before you came. Enough."
"I'm the one from the documents," Mia agrees, shaking it.
"Good. Come. Lunch has been ready for twenty minutes and it has opinions about being kept waiting."
Lunch happens at the long table in the kitchen rather than the formal dining room — Elena's quiet decision about what kind of welcome this house should offer.
She produces bread, then soup, then a series of small dishes that arrive without explanation, and throughout all of it she keeps up a steady commentary in two languages, mostly about me, mostly unflattering, mostly true.
"He was a terrible teenager," she tells Mia. "Sullen. Read constantly. Refused to discuss his feelings, like his father."
"That tracks," Mia says.
"You see this already? Good." Elena's tone shifts, settling into something more considered.
"Laurent remembered everyone's birthday.
Every member of staff, every year, without fail.
He could not say thank you to your face — it embarrassed him, somehow.
Instead he would arrange something. The mechanic who fixed his car got opera tickets, because once, years earlier, the man mentioned liking opera in passing, and Laurent remembered it for a decade. "
"That's lovely," Mia says.
"It is also," Elena says, "how he managed never to actually speak to his own son for two years after Seb's mother died. He sent things. Books, mostly. He never once asked Seb how he was."
The table goes quiet. My hand has gone still on the spoon.
"Elena," I say.
"You did not tell her that part," Elena says, unbothered. "I am telling her that part. She asked to know him. I am not going to give her only the half that makes us all look good."
I look at my soup, which suddenly requires more attention than soup generally warrants.
"Is that true," Mia asks me, quietly.
"It's true," I say. "We didn't speak properly for almost two years. He sent a book every few weeks instead. I have all of them. I never told him I'd read them."
"Why not."
"Because admitting I'd read them would have meant admitting I'd been waiting for them," I say. "And neither of us was prepared to admit that to the other."
Mia looks at me for a long moment.
"That's not the same pattern as the documents," she says slowly. "Or it is. I'm not sure yet."
"It's the same pattern," I say. "I just give it a different name."
After lunch, Elena disappears, and I take Mia through the house properly — not a tour, more an introduction, room by room, though I find myself dreading the study before we've even reached it.
The study is the heart of the house. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, the dust-and-paper smell of several thousand books that have been read rather than displayed, organized by year read rather than year published — his system, applied retroactively to every book he'd ever owned.
"This is where it gets dense," I say, touching a section near the centre.
"Late seventies, early eighties. Building a business, married, had me.
He didn't have time to read carefully." I move my hand along the shelf to a noticeably thinner section.
"There's a gap here. About six years. That's when my mother got sick. "
"And after."
"The shelf starts filling again. Differently. Slower."
Mia reaches toward a slim volume sitting just past the gap, fingers extending before I've fully registered what's there.
"Don't," I say, sharper than I intend, my hand already closing over hers.
She stops immediately. We both look at the book, then at each other.
"That one," I say, "is the first thing he read after the funeral. I've never opened it. I don't know why I just did that."
"Yes, you do," Mia says, not unkindly.
I let go of her hand. "I do."
"You don't have to show me everything today."
"I know." I look at the spine, the cracked corner of it. "I'd like to, eventually. Not because I owe you that. Because I think I owe it to myself, and I don't currently know how to do it alone."
We end up in the garden, on an old stone bench near the wall, the herbs gone a little wild along the border, a fountain that hasn't run in years sitting dry and forgotten at the centre of the path.
"He never asked you how you were," she says, "for two years. And you never told him you read the books."
"No."
"That's not gentle, Seb. Elena made it sound gentle. It isn't. It's two people refusing to need each other out loud while doing everything possible to make sure the other one was provided for."
"It wasn't gentle. I know that."
"Is that what I'm walking into," she says. "With you."
The question lands harder than I expect it to.
"I know I asked you to come tonight instead of waiting for tomorrow," I say, "because waiting felt like exactly the kind of thing he would have done.
I know the instinct is in me. I felt it just now, in the study, when I stopped your hand instead of telling you what I was afraid of.
" I look at her directly. "This is what I inherited.
It's not what I intend to offer you. I'd like you to be able to name it, every time you see it, without worrying it'll cost you something.
He never had anyone do that for him. I don't want to make the mistake of assuming I don't need it either. "
She doesn't answer right away. Her hand finds mine instead, fingers lacing through, the kind of answer that doesn't need a sentence behind it.
"That's a real answer," she says. "Better than the first one."
"Grief lives here," I say. "That doesn't mean it owns the place."
"That's a good line."
"I've had time to develop it. I'm less certain I've earned it yet."
Her phone buzzes again. She doesn't look at it.
"There's a desk in the study," I say. "Letters.
A box of photographs Elena's never let me throw out.
I haven't opened most of it since he died.
I told myself it was logistics. That isn't true.
I haven't opened it because I don't know what I'll find, and I don't know which parts of him I'm ready to recognize in myself. "
"Then let's find out together."
"Tonight."
"Tonight," she says. "I didn't come to Milan for the version of him that's easy to love."
The light is starting to go, and I think about a desk I have avoided since he died, and a woman sitting beside me who has already proven, in a Hartfield office in London, that she will not let an institution simplify a man she's never even properly met — and who has just proven, in my father's study, that she will not let me simplify myself either.
I stand. I offer my hand.
"The desk's locked," I say. "I don't actually know where he kept the key."
She looks at me, her fingers closing around mine without hesitation.
"Then we'll have to look," she says. "Together. That's the part you don't get to do alone tonight."