31. Ryan
RYAN
She calls on a Wednesday morning while I'm in the study with the quarterly accounts and Cormac's coffee going cold on the corner of the desk—he left it when he went out to the south slope, the way he's started leaving things without announcing it.
I've been getting used to that. I've been getting used to a lot of things.
Her number on the screen. I answer.
"Ryan." The register of her voice when she's decided something. She sounds like a woman who's been rehearsing. "I heard something, and I wanted to hear your voice."
She heard from Greta, who heard from someone who came to the harvest. Not all of it—she makes clear she doesn't have all of it, just that Cormac is seeing Jade.
My Jade, is how she says it. In a tone that manages to make me the victim and my father the cause without technically saying either thing out loud. She's always been good at that.
She talks for a while. I let her. I've been letting her talk since I was twelve—since the estate went quiet the way it goes quiet when someone removes herself from it and doesn't come back.
She called from her new city. She called from apartments I'd never seen.
She told me things about my father: the estate came first, the estate always came first, he loved with both hands closed, he didn't leave room for her to be uncertain.
I took it all in. I didn't know I was taking notes.
I built my whole understanding of him from those calls and I used that understanding as the foundation for the worst thing I ever did.
She finishes. There's a pause. She's waiting for me to say I know, Mum. The way I've been saying it since I was twelve.
I look at the desk. Cormac's handwriting in the margin of the quarterly printout—one correction, two words, the column closed.
He was at this desk at five-thirty this morning.
He was at it yesterday. He's been at it every morning I can remember from childhood, and a lot of mornings I can't, and all the mornings this fall that I've come down the stairs to find the lights on and the coffee made and the ledger open on the table with his coffee ring on the corner.
She'd told me he wasn't there. Not physically—she never said that.
But emotionally closed. More married to the land than to the people on it.
I'd built a picture from those calls. A man who looked like my father but had his hands closed around a thing that wasn't us.
I'd believed it for long enough that I stopped noticing I believed it.
It just became the architecture of what I understood about love: that it ran out, eventually, when something mattered more. That the estate mattered more.
I've been living here for three months now.
Getting up early because he gets up early.
Doing the south run because there's a south run to do.
Watching him move through his own house—the way he sets a cup down for someone before they've asked, the way he says stay through harvest and doesn't follow it up, just waits to see what she'll do.
The way he's been waiting to see what I'll do.
She's still on the line.
"At least he was there," I say.
Silence.
"At least he built something." I'm not raising my voice. I don't need to. "At least when you left, he didn't leave too. He stayed. He kept everything going and he made Sunday dinners and he made sure two boys who needed their father to still be their father had one. He did that."
More silence. The weighted kind.
"Ryan—"
"I'm not saying you were wrong to go." I mean it.
I've worked through this. "I'm saying I spent a long time with your version of him as the whole story, and I used it to excuse things I did, and I can't keep doing that.
He's not who you told me he was. Maybe he was once.
But he's more than that. And what I did to Jade—that's mine. It's not his."
A long pause.
She says: "You've always been too much like him."
I don't know if that's meant to sting. I take it differently than she intends it.
"Maybe," I say. "I hope so."
We say our goodbyes—careful, not entirely warm, the way they've been since I was old enough to understand that when she left the estate she also left me and Killian, and she'd made her peace with that, and I'd made my peace with her making her peace with it.
You don't stop trying to get there entirely.
You just eventually stop organizing your life around the trying.
I put the phone down.
The study is quiet. Cormac's coffee is cold on the corner of the desk.
Outside I can hear the south slope—crew moving, equipment, somewhere in there Killian's voice giving someone an instruction, and farther out, Jade in the barrel room doing the noon check the way she does every day.
The hydrometer. The temperature gauge. The number in the ledger in the same column Cormac uses.
I pick up his mug and carry it to the kitchen. I rinse it. I put a fresh one on.
When he comes in at noon there'll be coffee waiting. He won't say anything about it. He doesn't have to. That's already the language we've been working out between us—small, unremarkable acts of staying, which is the only thing I know how to say to him right now that's worth saying.
He went to her bare from the first night. Nothing between them—his cum inside her, her body holding it, the whole weight of what that means. I've been lying awake with the knowledge of that for weeks. Not jealous. Clarified. I know exactly what I want when she says it's time.
I go back to the accounts.