Chapter 40 Genevieve
Genevieve
My dad’s brownstone looks wrong.
It’s the same brick, the same black iron railing, the same window boxes my father planted with lavender every spring because my mother loved it and he never stopped. But the lavender is dead. Brown and brittle and leaning sideways in the soil like nobody’s touched it in weeks.
The curtains on the second floor are drawn. My father never draws his curtains. He says natural light is the only thing in life that’s truly free, and he refuses to waste it.
Lance cuts the engine and the silence is so thick I can hear my own pulse.
“This is it?” he asks.
I nod. My hand is on the door handle, but my body won’t move.
I’ve imagined this moment for weeks. Every night I couldn’t sleep, every voicemail I left that went unanswered, every time I pressed my phone to my chest and whispered always and in all ways like a prayer to a God I wasn’t sure was listening.
I imagined running up those steps and pounding on the door and my father opening it with that expression he makes when he’s pretending he wasn’t worried, the one where his jaw is tense but his eyes are soft, and he’d say mon chou and I’d fall into him and count to seven and everything would make sense again.
But now I’m here, and the lavender is dead, and I’m terrified of what’s on the other side of that door.
“Hey.” Lance’s hand finds my knee. “I’m right here.”
I look at him. His face is bruised from the Lye, a fading yellow-green along his jaw, and his knuckles are still split from fighting his way out to reach me. He drove twelve hours on cracked ribs and no sleep and didn’t complain once.
“What if he’s not okay?”
“Then we deal with it.”
“What if he’s not here?”
“Then we find him.”
Simple. Like it’s that easy. Like the world isn’t a machine designed to grind people like us into dust.
I take a breath and open the door.
The steps feel longer than they used to.
I grip the railing because my legs are unsteady, and Lance is behind me, close enough that I can feel the heat of him without looking.
I raise my hand to knock, and then I just stand there, fist hovering, because knocking on your father’s door shouldn’t feel like defusing a bomb, but here we are.
I knock three times.
Nothing.
I knock again, harder, and press my mouth close to the wood. “Papa. It’s me.”
Silence. Then a sound from inside. Shuffling. A chain sliding. A dead bolt turning, then another, then a third one that wasn’t there before.
The door opens four inches, and my father’s face appears in the gap.
He looks like he’s aged ten years. His skin is sallow, the hollows beneath his eyes deep enough to hold shadows.
He’s thinner. His hair, always meticulously combed, is longer than I’ve ever seen it, curling behind his ears.
He’s wearing a dress shirt, wrinkled and untucked, and his collarbone presses against the fabric in a way that makes my chest seize.
But his eyes. His eyes when they find me are the same. Dark and sharp and full of so much love it could drown me.
“Mon chou.”
The door opens the rest of the way. I don’t feel myself crossing the threshold.
I don’t feel my legs moving or my arms reaching.
One second I’m standing on the stoop and the next I’m pressed against my father’s chest, my face buried in the collar of his shirt, and he smells like coffee and old books and the faintest trace of the cologne my mother bought him for their anniversary thirty years ago that he’s never stopped wearing.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
I count, the way I always do, committing the embrace to memory. But when I get to seven, I don’t let go.
Neither does he.
“You’re here,” he says into my hair, and his voice breaks on the second word, and that breaks something in me, too, because my father does not falter.
My father is a man who argues federal cases without raising his pulse.
He negotiates with criminals over dinner and sleeps like a baby.
He cooked me coq au vin every time the world got scary and never once let me see him afraid.
He’s afraid now.
I pull back enough to see his face. Tears are running down his cheeks, silent, and he wipes them with the back of his hand like they’re an inconvenience.
“You look thin,” I say, because it’s easier than saying any of the other things.
He chuffs. “You sound like your grandmother.”
“Good. Someone needs to.” I grip his arms. “Papa, what happened to you?”
His gaze lifts over my shoulder, and I watch his expression shift. The lawyer clicks on. The assessment. The calculation.
“Who’s this?”
I turn. Lance is standing just inside the doorway, hands at his sides, shoulders back. He’s reading the room the way he reads every room, cataloguing exits and threats and the distance between bodies.
“This is Lance,” I say. “Lance Calloway.”
“Calloway,” he repeats.
“Mr. DeGrance.”
“How much does he know?” he asks me, but he’s looking at Lance.
“Everything,” I say. “He knows everything.”
My father studies him for a long moment. Then he steps back and gestures us inside. “Lock the door behind you. All three.”
The brownstone is dim. The kitchen, which used to be the warmest room in the house, with copper pots and steam and my dad’s singing, feels cold.
The stove is clean like he hasn’t touched it since I left.
There are takeout containers stacked by the trash.
A laptop open on the table, surrounded by legal pads covered in his cramped handwriting.
Files. Manila folders. A second phone next to his regular one.
“Nice to see you do have your phone.”
“Sit,” he says, and it’s not a request.
We sit. Lance takes the chair closest to the door.
“Papa.” I fold my hands on the table because they won’t stop shaking. “You owe me an explanation.”
“I know.”
“Four calls. Weeks of silence. The code word. And then nothing. Nothing. I thought you were dead.”
His jaw tightens. “I’m so sorry, mon chou.”
“Then talk.”
He places his palms flat on the table, the way he does before opening statements. Grounding himself. Organizing.
“You know who I represent,” he says. “You’ve always known, in broad strokes. Criminal defense. High-profile clients. The kind of people whose names you don’t say at dinner parties.”
“Papa, I don’t need the preamble.”
“You’re going to get it anyway.” His voice firms, and there he is, the man who taught me to never let opposing counsel hear you sweat. “Badon Hill has been my client for years.”
“You mean Brutus Myrddin,” Lance interrupts.
My father’s eyes flick to him. “Yes. The organization, his associates, anyone who needed representation on their side of the line. I’ve defended cases you wouldn’t believe, Genevieve.
Things I’ll never tell you. Things I’m not proud of.
But it was work, and the work paid well, and it kept you fed and safe and in good schools, and I told myself that was enough. ”
He sucks in a breath.
“Eight months ago, the FBI came to see me.”
My stomach drops and Lance shifts in the corner.
“They had a case. A RICO investigation into Badon Hill’s operations, the financial networks, the shell companies. They wanted me to cooperate. To turn over privileged communications, client records, anything that could help them build the case from the inside.”
“You’re a defense attorney,” I say. “You can’t just hand over client files. That’s…”
“Illegal. Unethical. Career-ending.” He nods. “I told them no. Attorney-client privilege is sacrosanct, and regardless of who my clients are, I don’t betray a confidence. That’s not the kind of lawyer I am.”
“So what changed?”
His face fractures, a crack in his composure, and then it’s gone.
“You did.”
The room goes very quiet.
“When you called me and told me about the email you found. About your firing, and Art convincing you to move. I knew things weren’t safe. You were in danger, most likely because of me.”
I already knew this. I’ve known it since the email in Art’s office, since Lance confirmed it, since my father used the code word and told me to stay put. But hearing him say it, hearing his voice go thin and precise the way it does when he’s holding himself together with sheer will, is different.
“I went to Cameliard, and Chef Michel told me the truth. That he was forced to fire you. Threatened. His children, mon chou, they had pictures of them at school. Badon Hill engineered it,” he continues.
“Getting you blacklisted from every restaurant in Boston. Every connection I had, every favor I’d ever called in for your career, they dismantled it systematically.
And then a convenient opportunity appeared in a small town in Connecticut, connected to Arthur Penngrove, who was connected to the Round Table Tavern, which was connected to everything I’d spent a decade pretending I didn’t see. ”
“So I was insurance,” I say.
“You were leverage.” The word comes out like he’s swallowing glass.
“If I cooperated with the FBI, they had you. If I testified, they had you. If I so much as hinted that I was anything other than a loyal soldier, my daughter was living under the thumb of the dangerous men. But I didn’t know, Genevieve.
I had no idea that Frederick Lawrence and Arthur Penngrove came with ill intentions.
Had no idea who Brutus Myrddin and Badon Hill really were. ”
Lance hasn’t moved. His breathing is steady, but his hands are flat on his thighs, fingers pressing hard enough that the tendons stand out.
“That’s when I went to the FBI,” my father says. “Not as a cooperating witness offering client records. As a father who’d just learned his child was being held hostage by the people he’d spent a decade defending.”
“What did you give them?”