29. “Four AM”
“FOUR AM”
My father came in.
He walked into the kitchen.
He sat down at the long pine table.
“Mrs. Harris’s coffee or yours,” he said.
“Mine. I will make it.”
“Both.”
I made coffee.
I made it the way Mrs. Harris had taught me when I was eleven, with the small ritual of warming the cups first and pouring the water in slow careful pulses. I made three cups. I brought them to the table. I sat down between him and Atlas.
The clock on the kitchen wall said four sixteen a.m.
“Foster called me at midnight,” my father said.
He was looking at Atlas. “He told me what Sara had given you. He told me what was on the drive. He told me the eleven entries. He told me what you decided in the cab from National. He asked me what I wanted him to do. I told him I wanted him to call me. He called me. Then I drove.”
“You should not have driven.”
“Atlas. I drive when I drive. We are past the point of you telling me when to drive.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t sir me. Drink your coffee.”
He drank his.
He set the cup down.
He looked at Atlas the way he had looked at Atlas in the library on Saturday morning. Not angry. Not soft. The face of a man who had been a Marine and a senator and a husband and a father and was, at four sixteen a.m. in his daughter’s loft in Tribeca, the version of all four at once.
“Tell me,” he said.
Atlas told him.
He told him the same way he had told me. Boston. Edward Whittaker. The man at the firm who did not like Helena. The dinner conversations. The two-year channel. The eleven entries. Sara’s documentation. The plan to take it to the FBI.
He did not soften it.
He did not minimize his own connection.
He did not ask my father for anything.
When he finished, my father did not speak for almost a full minute.
He drank the rest of his coffee.
He put the cup down.
He looked at his hands on the table.
“Atlas.”
“Sir.”
“I have known Helena for fifteen years. I was at your wedding. I was at the christening of your son. I have been to your ex-wife’s house in Boston twice in the last six years.
I had her at the compound for Thanksgiving in 2019.
I know what she is and what she is not. She is not a person who would have done this knowingly.
She is also not a person whose dinner-table conversation I would have expected to find re-purposed in a senator’s opposition operation. ”
“No.”
“I have known you for twenty-five years. I was at your father’s funeral.
I gave you the eulogy I gave you at your mother’s funeral.
I have sat at the same table with you for twenty years.
I know what you are and what you are not.
You are not a person who would have done this knowingly.
You are also not a person who I am going to let take a hit for the dinner-table conversations of a woman you have been divorced from for ten years. ”
“Chip.”
“Hold on. I am not finished.”
He stood up.
He went to the kitchen window. He looked out at the river, which was beginning to get the very first gray of the day at its eastern edge.
“You did not know. You did not know because you did not have any reason to know. You stopped working with that firm ten years ago. You have not been in their offices since then. You have spoken to Helena twice a year about your son. You have been an honorable ex-husband and a good father and an even better friend, and you have had a series of men with leverage move pieces around behind your back. We will handle it. The way we will handle it is this. The package goes to the FBI. The package includes Helena as an unwitting source. We make the unwitting clear. The package includes Edward Whittaker as the recipient who passed material to a partner. We make Edward’s exposure clear.
The partner who actually moved it goes to the FBI as the principal.
Sara stays. Sara’s brother’s record stays sealed.
The Ardent operation collapses. Ardent retires.
By the end of the month, the entire matter is a footnote. ”
He turned back to us.
“Atlas. I have one demand.”
“Yes.”
“You will not resign my case files. You will not step back from this family. You will not write me a letter offering to step back. You will marry my daughter when she is ready. You will sit at my table on Sundays. You will be at the compound on Christmas. You will be at the lake in July. You will read at the boys’ funerals when I am gone. Are we clear.”
“We are clear.”
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“I love you. You are my brother. You have been my brother since you walked into my freshman seminar at Yale twenty-five years ago and corrected the professor on Gibbon. You will not be my brother any less because the woman you were married to a decade ago has been used by a man at her own husband’s firm. Are we clear.”
“We are clear.”
“Good.”
He sat back down.
He picked up his coffee.
He drank.
The river had begun to lighten at its edge.
I watched my father at the window for a long second.
I had grown up watching my father at windows.
He had stood at the window of our living room in Connecticut on the morning we got my mother’s diagnosis.
He had stood at the window of my dorm room at Yale the morning after my mother died.
He had stood at the window of the suite at the Pierre on Saturday night.
He stood at windows the way other men sat in chairs.
It was the way he thought.
I cried.
Quietly. The way I had cried in the suite at the Pierre. My father reached across the table and he put his hand on top of mine and he held it there.
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“You are all right.”
“I am all right.”
“You are going to marry him.”
“I am going to marry him.”
“Good. That is the only thing I needed to know tonight.”
He squeezed my hand.
He let it go.
He sat with us for another hour.
He drank a second cup of coffee. He ate half of the loaf of bread Mrs. Harris had sent home with me on Sunday. He told us a story about my mother and a fundraiser in 2002 that I had never heard before, and that I had not realized I was hungry to hear until I was hearing it.
We sat at the table the three of us in my mother’s loft at five a.m. and we ate bread and we drank coffee and my father told a story.
The light started at the eastern edge of the window.
He left at five twenty.
He put his coat back on. He put the scarf back on. He put his shoes back on. He hugged me. He hugged Atlas, a quick hard hug that the two of them had not exchanged in years. He took the rest of his coffee in a paper cup and he went down the stairs.
I heard the wagon turn over on the street below.
I heard it pull away.
I closed the door.
I stood in the small hall of the loft with my forehead against the wood for a long minute.
The loft was very quiet.
The river was going from gray to pale silver. The first delivery trucks had begun on Hudson Street. The radiator clicked once. The cup of coffee my father had not finished sat on the kitchen table, half full.
I stayed at the door for one more minute.
I needed the minute.
Atlas came up behind me.
He did not say anything.
He put his hands on my shoulders. He turned me around. He took my face in both his hands. He looked at me.
His eyes were wet at the corners. I had not seen his eyes wet at the corners since the Pierre.
“Eden.”
“I know.”
“Eden.”
“I know.”
He kissed me.
He kissed me very softly.
He kissed me at the door of the loft with his hands still on my face and the loft still half dark and the kitchen light still on at the far end of the hall, and he kissed me the way a man kisses a woman who has just sat across from him and his best friend at four in the morning while everything that could have come between them was put on the table and not allowed to.
I led him back to the bedroom.
The bedroom was the bedroom.
The bed was the bed. The white sheets. The quilt. The pressed-tin ceiling I had spent six weeks counting at three in the morning.
I unbuttoned my robe and I let it fall.
He looked at me for a long moment.
“Eden.”
“Come here.”
He came.
He came in the slow careful way he came when he had decided that we had time.
He undressed in front of me without rushing.
He took his glasses off and folded them and put them in their case on the nightstand.
He took off his watch and put it face up beside the glasses.
He took off his shirt and his trousers and he laid them across the chair the way he always laid them.
I watched him do it.
I watched him do every small piece of the careful undressing.
It was the small ritual I had come to love most about him. The methodical settling. The way he came to bed the same way he did everything else — with attention.
He came to me.
He kissed me at my throat.
The hollow at the base of it. The line of my collarbone. The freckles below my ear. The soft place where my jaw met my hairline.
I made a small sound.
The sound I made when there was nobody on any street outside.
He laid me down on the bed. He laid himself down beside me.
He took his time. He did not rush. He kissed every freckle on my shoulder in the order he had been kissing them for the last two weeks.
He kissed the inside of my elbow. He kissed the small curve at the inside of my wrist. He kissed the back of my hand where my ring was.
“I love you,” he said into my skin.
“I know.”
“I love you, Eden.”
“I know.”
He moved over me.
I felt the weight of him settle. The smell of him. His hand at my hip, his other hand at the back of my neck, the small slow pressure of him pressing his forehead against mine for a long second before he moved.
“Look at me,” he said.
I looked.
His gray-green eyes in the half-dark.
“I am not going anywhere,” he said.
“I know.”
“Eden. I am not going anywhere.”
“Atlas.”
“I am here.”
“I know.”
He moved into me.
Slow. Slower than the boathouse. Slower than the loft on Saturday afternoon. Slower than any other time he had moved. The slow of a man who was not trying to give me an answer. The slow of a man who was telling me with his body that he had nothing left to take back.
I held his shoulders.
I held the back of his neck.
I held his face between my hands when he tipped his forehead to mine again, and I kissed him the whole way through, my mouth open against his, my breath against his breath, the small slow rhythm of the two of us moving together as if there was no other rhythm in any room anywhere in the world.
He said my name.
I said his.
He came into me with his hand cupped around the back of my head and his mouth against my temple and his whole body shaking very slightly with the long held thing he had been holding all day.
I came after him. Quietly. Almost soundless. The way I came when I was not trying to come, when the coming was not the point, when the point was the closeness and the closeness had taken me there anyway.
He stayed inside me.
He did not pull back.
He laid his weight against me and he let me hold him and he breathed against my throat for a long time without moving.
After a while he rolled onto his back.
He pulled me onto his chest. My ear against the steady slow drum of his heart.
His hand in my hair.
The first gray of dawn at the edge of the window.
We did not speak for a long time.
When I did speak, it was very soft.
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“That was not the kind of thing two people do who are still afraid of anything.”
“No.”
“Are you done being afraid.”
“Yes.”
“Forever.”
“Forever.”
I fell asleep on his chest.
I do not know how long I slept. I slept the way I slept when there was nothing left in the day for the next eight hours.
The phone woke me at eight oh four a.m.
I rolled. I picked it up off the nightstand. I read the screen.
A text from Aspen.
Eden. Hawk Mercer just bought the house next door to mine. The lake house. He’s standing in my yard.
I read it twice.
I lay back on Atlas’s chest. He was still asleep. His hand was still in my hair.
I started to laugh very quietly into the small hollow of his throat.
He stirred under me. He did not open his eyes.
“What.”
“Hawk.”
“Hawk what.”
“He bought the house next door to Aspen.”
He was quiet for a second. Then his arm came up around my shoulder and his mouth turned against the top of my head.
“Of course he did.”
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“This is going to be a problem.”
“This is going to be Aspen’s problem. Not ours. Go back to sleep.”
I went back to sleep.
The phone went silent on the nightstand.
The light came up at the window.