5. Alison #5
His fingers stop. “What?”
“Victor asked if Dad still had someone at customs.”
Ryan looks at me. “What did Roman say?”
I search for it. Nothing. “I don’t remember.”
“That’s okay.”
“I remember Victor asking.”
“Then that’s what we write down. Nothing more.” He types exactly that. No assumptions. No dramatic conclusion. Just what I heard. When he finishes, he stares at the growing list. Then at me. “I’ve been looking at your dad from the outside this entire time.”
“Okay.”
“Public records. Names I find attached to him. Connections. Whatever I can get.” I nod. “And meanwhile, Roman has spent years talking in front of you because he doesn’t think anything he says will stick in a way that matters.”
“It sticks.”
“I know.”
“He knows it sticks too. He just thinks I don’t understand it.”
Ryan’s expression hardens. “He knows you’re intelligent. He just doesn’t think your intelligence is useful against him.”
That lands somewhere deep — because yes. That’s exactly it. Dad loves telling people about my grades. My test scores. My essays. He likes having a smart daughter. He just doesn’t think a smart daughter belongs in the same category as a smart man.
Ryan looks back at his phone. “We need to organize this.”
“How?”
He opens a fresh note. At the top: ROMAN. Then underneath: People. Places. Money. Trips. Companies / Organizations. He pauses, then adds another. Things Jane reacted to.
I look at him. “Why Mom?”
“Because she knows him better than anybody.”
“She’s scared of him.”
“Exactly.” He lowers his voice. “If something made her question him, scared her enough to fight with him, or made him lie to her, I want to know what it was.”
I nod slowly. That makes sense.
He hands me the phone. “Anything you remember.”
I take it. “What if I’m wrong?”
“Then we check.”
“What if I remember a name wrong?”
“We check.”
“What if it’s nothing?”
“Then it’s nothing.”
I stare at the categories. For months, everyone has been looking at me like I’m the problem they have to solve.
Not in a bad way. Never that. Ryan loves me.
His parents already love our baby. The girls have closed ranks around me so quickly I still don’t entirely understand how it happened.
Arthur is trying to figure out how to get Tobias out safely.
Everyone is helping. But they’re helping me.
Ryan watches my face. “What?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
I look at the phone. “I can actually help.”
His expression changes immediately. “Ally.”
“I know I’ve been helping. That’s not what I mean.” I struggle to explain it. “You found everything. Arthur knows the law. Walter knows politics. The boys have all done this before. Everybody has something they can do, and I’ve just been…”
“Surviving it?”
I look at him. “Yeah.”
“That’s already a job.”
“I know.”
“But?”
“But I want to do something.”
Ryan nods toward the phone. “You are.”
I look down. Carlisle. Aster. Geneva. Montreal. Customs. Things I heard years ago and never understood. Maybe they mean nothing. Maybe one of them means everything.
“Your job isn’t to investigate Roman. You don’t go through his study. You don’t start asking questions you wouldn’t normally ask. You don’t bait Tremblay. You don’t take risks.”
I look at him. “Are you done?”
“No.”
“Ryan.”
He almost smiles. “You hear something because you’re already there, you remember it. That’s it. If Jane tells you something on her own, fine. You don’t push her either.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I know.” He glances toward the end of the aisle before hooking one finger around mine. Hidden between us. Small. Safe. “You’re not bait.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not turning you into some fucking spy.”
“That’s disappointing. Penny thinks we’re spies.”
“Penny thinks putting on sunglasses makes her undercover.”
“She does look good in them.”
“Not the point.”
I laugh, and Ryan squeezes my finger. “Carlisle.”
“What about him?”
“Think.”
I lean my shoulder against the shelf. “Bossy.”
“Very.”
“Annoying.”
“Also very.”
“Obsessed with me.”
“Completely.” That one comes without a joke, and my chest warms. I look back down at the phone.
Then I think. Really think. And something changes.
All those conversations Dad had because I was only his daughter.
All the names. The trips. The phone calls.
The arguments with Mom. The dinners where men drank expensive alcohol and talked around us because they believed the women at the table weren’t part of the conversation.
Victor tonight, telling me he’d been waiting since I was thirteen — saying it in front of me, to me, because it never once occurred to him that the girl he’d been laying down like a bottle had been awake the whole time, listening.
Dad has spent my entire life assuming I could hear him without ever understanding him. Victor made the same mistake tonight. Maybe they’ll keep making it.
I don’t have to know what every name means. I don’t have to solve anything. I just have to remember.
Ryan thought he needed to find a way deeper into my father’s world.
He doesn’t. I’ve been inside it my entire life.