Chapter 11 #2
“Rex lives there,” I say. “It’s his house.”
Erick examines this carefully. “Does he have cookies?”
“The whole castle is made of cookies.”
His eyes go wide. He grabs the orange pen and adds battlements that are either crenellations or cookies or both, and then he draws a small round figure at the gate and points at it. “That’s me. I came to visit.”
“What does Rex do when you arrive?”
He considers. “He shares.” Said with the tone of someone describing a profound moral decision. “Because sharing is important. My dad says.”
We go back and forth like this, the story accumulating across pages.
Rex and Erick have a cookie feast. A meteor arrives (his contribution, announced with a sound effect).
I draw myself into the story at his insistence, he renders me as a tall stick figure with very long dark hair, and he gives me a superpower where I can defeat the meteor by drawing a picture of it and making it small.
“How does drawing make it small?” I ask.
He looks at me like the answer is completely obvious. “Because when you draw something, you’re in charge of it.”
I stop.
He picks up the orange pen and adds a sun to the corner.
There it is. Dropped in with casual authority by a small person who can’t be older than six and considers the matter fully settled: when you draw something, you’re in charge of it.
I have spent years standing on stages and convincing myself of almost exactly this thing, that if you can give fear a shape and a script you can manage it, and this small person just handed me back my own theory in eight words and moved on to adding sunshine.
“Where are your kids?”
He doesn’t look up from the drawing. Just drops it into the silence like it’s the most natural next thought.
“I don’t have any yet,” I say.
He processes this. “Why?”
“Just timing.”
He scrunches his nose. “What’s timing?”
I open my mouth. Close it. “It means I’m the right age to have kids but I don’t have any.”
He thinks about this very seriously. “I’m four,” he says. “I’m the right age to have a mom.” A beat. “But she died, so I don’t have one.”
The pen goes still in my fingers.
He says it the way he said the T. rex was orange, because it’s true and he’s worked it out and it seemed like something worth sharing.
No performance. No trembling lip. Just a fact he carries lightly, the way small children carry hard things before anyone has explained to them that they should put it down.
“Yeah?” My voice comes out steadier than I expected.
“Yeah. She’s in heaven.” He picks up the orange pen and adds a small stripe to Rex’s side. “My dad says.”
“My sister says that too.” The room is very quiet. The pen moves on paper and I keep my voice easy. “My mom and dad are both up there. Died when I was little.” I let it sit for a beat. “So they’re probably all up there together somewhere. Maybe they know each other.”
Erick looks up. He runs the probability with full seriousness.
“Maybe they’re having lunch,” he says.
“Maybe they are.”
He nods once, satisfied. Adds an orange juice glass to the story.
We stay like that until the story is finished, four pages of Rex and cookie castles and meteors and superpower-drawing and two kids in heaven having lunch together in the corner.
I let the heaven conversation settle somewhere quiet inside me, in the place where I keep things I don’t have words for yet.
The office door opens.
Patrick fills the frame the way he always does, that particular stillness, like the room adjusts its center of gravity to account for him.
“Daddy!” Erick holds the drawing up with both hands. “We made a whole story. And her mom and dad are in heaven like my mom so they’re probably having lunch together right now.”
Patrick goes very still.
His eyes move to me. Slow and careful. The look is not quite anger, it’s more layered, harder to read, and none of it is warm.
It’s the look of a man who knows exactly what his son knows and when, who has built a precise and careful architecture around this child’s grief and found, upon returning, that someone has been inside it.
I want to say: he started it. I was minding my business and the Milan email.
I don’t say it.
I do think it, extensively, while Patrick holds my gaze one beat too long.
“That’s great, buddy. Give Elena back her pens.”
Erick climbs down with ceremony, lines them up neatly on my desk, then holds up the T. rex page. “Can I keep the whole story?”
“It’s yours,” I say. “You made most of it.”
Patrick looks at me and I think, there it is, there’s the moment, in the story I’ve been writing in my head since approximately the second week of this job, this is chapter twelve, this is where he looks at me like that and it means something and we are about to have the conversation that changes everything, and I’m brave and ready and the timing is finally right.
In actual reality I’m a woman who can’t identify two of the six CC recipients on the Milan email and he is a man who has not smiled at me since I unbuttoned my dress in his office, and we are definitely not in chapter twelve.
“I’ll need you to push the design team meeting to six,” he says.
He takes Erick toward the elevator, one hand on his son’s shoulder.
Erick looks back at me over his shoulder and waves.
I wave back.
The elevator doors close.