5. “Saturday” #3
He leaned forward.
“There is one more name I need from you,” he said. “Someone close enough to know about the divorce filing the day you signed it. Someone who would have been tracking my movements at the firm. Someone whose name I have been holding off the list because I trust him with my life.”
I felt my mouth go dry.
I knew where he was going.
He was going there carefully. Like a man stepping out onto a frozen pond in the spring, listening for the give.
“Eden.”
“Daddy.”
“Is there any reason — any reason at all — that someone might think the story was leaked from Atlas’s office. Or by Atlas. Or with Atlas’s knowledge.”
The fire moved.
I opened my mouth.
I almost said it.
I almost said: it wasn’t him. It was never him.
It was never going to be him. He has been protecting me since Tuesday morning at 8:47 when I walked into his office in a black dress and asked him to dismantle my marriage.
He has been protecting me since I was eighteen years old and my mother was dying and he sat across from me at dinner and didn’t look at me directly because he understood that looking at me was the first thing in his life he had not earned the right to do.
I almost said: I love him. I love him, Daddy.
I held my face.
I held it the way Atlas had told me to hold it. The way I had been holding it for forty-eight hours and one minute and now seventy-two hours and counting.
“No, Daddy,” I said. “There isn’t any reason.”
He looked at me for a very long moment.
He looked at me with the face of a man who had, in forty years of public service, become extraordinarily good at recognizing when someone he loved was lying to him.
He did not call me on it.
Not yet.
He stood up.
He came around the desk. He kissed the top of my head the way he had kissed it a thousand times in this room, in this house, at this hour of the day.
“Dinner is at seven,” he said. “Atlas will be here. So will Foster. I want you to eat something. I want you to wear the navy dress because your mother liked you in navy. And I want you to remember, Eden, that this house has held bigger things than this one and we have come out the other side of all of them together.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
He walked to the door.
He paused with his hand on the frame.
He did not turn back to me when he said it.
“I love you, Eden. I have loved you since the second I knew you existed. I will not stop loving you no matter what you tell me on the other side of this. I want you to remember that the next time I ask the question.”
He left.
I sat in the chair and I stared at the fire until my eyes watered and my eyes did not water from the smoke.
Dinner was at seven.
Atlas arrived at 6:47 with Foster Marlowe.
I watched from the hallway as they walked into my father’s library with their coats still on, which meant whatever Foster had found was something they could not even take their coats off for.
The library door closed.
I stood in the hallway with my hand against the wainscoting and my heart doing the thing it had been doing for three days now, which was running ahead of me toward a finish line I could not see yet.
I heard my father’s voice through the door. Low. Steady. Asking questions in the particular cadence of a man who had been preparing to ask them for days.
I heard Atlas’s voice answering. Lower. Steadier still. The voice of a man who had been preparing the answers for weeks.
I heard Foster’s voice last, the gravel of it, the quiet certainty of a man who had just put a name on a desk in front of two men who needed it more than they needed air.
I could not make out the words.
I could only make out the shape of them.
The shape of them was: a name, on a desk, in front of three men.
A name that was not Atlas’s.
A name that was not mine.
A name that, when my father finally said it out loud at dinner, would be the name of the man who had decided that my life was a useful thing to break.
I leaned my forehead against the wall of the hallway and I closed my eyes.
In the kitchen behind me, Mrs. Harris was setting the table for dinner.
I could hear the small chime of silver against china.
The soft clink of a glass being placed. The specific weight of a Saturday evening at the compound being assembled, piece by piece, by a woman who had been assembling Saturday evenings here for thirty years.
The library door opened.
My father came out first.
Atlas came second.
Foster came last, and he caught my eye in the hallway and gave me a small nod that I was meant to read as: it is going to be all right. We have him.
Atlas walked past me without looking at me.
I did not look at him.
We held our faces.
In two and a half hours, we would be alone again.
In two and a half hours, my father would either say what he had asked me about in the library, or he would not say it.
I did not know yet which one I was hoping for.
I followed them into the dining room with my hand on the small graze along my collarbone and my chin up and the smell of applewood from the library still in my hair.