Chapter Eighteen
Ask Me Anything
Woodsmoke and old paper hung in the air of the house, and Thomas led them into a sitting room where the ivy outside had grown thick enough over one window to turn the morning light green and underwater, and Sienna understood, sitting down beside Damian on a couch that had clearly waited a long time for guests, that this was a room built for exactly one conversation and nothing else.
“Ask me anything,” Thomas said, taking the chair across from them, hands folded with a stillness that looked, for the first time, like it cost him something to hold.
“I won’t soften it. I’ve spent twelve years rehearsing a version of this that made me look better than I was, and I find, now that you’re actually sitting in front of me, I don’t have any interest left in giving you that version. ”
“Start with my mother.”
Thomas’s composure flickered, just once.
“Eleanor. I knew her before your father did — we grew up two estates apart, families that did business together the way families like ours always have. I loved her first. I want you to understand that plainly, because it matters to everything that came after it.” He looked down at his folded hands.
“She chose him. I don’t fault her for it.
He was steadier than I was, considerably better suited to the life she wanted, and I told myself I’d made my peace with it years before either of you were born. ”
“You hadn’t.”
“No.” Something raw moved across Thomas’s face.
“We found each other again, briefly, during a year your father was traveling for business more than he was home. I’ve spent every year since telling myself it was a mistake born of loneliness on both our parts.
I’ve spent the twelve years since the fire understanding it was considerably more than that, at least for me, and I suspect, though she never said so plainly, for her as well. ”
Sienna felt Damian go very still beside her, absorbing it the way he absorbed everything difficult — silently, completely, before allowing himself to react at all.
“Did he know,” Damian asked. “My father. Did he know I wasn’t his.”
“I don’t know.” Thomas met his eyes, steady despite the admission.
“I’ve turned that question over more times than any other, in twelve years of turning things over.
He never said so to me directly. But there were months, near the end, when he looked at you like he was looking for something he couldn’t quite locate, and I’ve never been able to decide whether that was grief for the business troubles consuming him, or the beginning of a suspicion he never lived long enough to confirm. ”
“The fire.”
Thomas’s jaw tightened, the first real crack in his composure since they’d walked in.
“That part I know considerably more clearly, and I find it’s the part I regret most completely.
” He rose, moving to the window, his back to them like the words came easier without their eyes on him directly.
“Your father had discovered irregularities in the business dealings I’d built alongside his — dealings I’d never told him the full shape of, because some of them were mine alone, built during the year Eleanor and I found our way back to each other, financed partly through channels I’d rather not have explained to a man who trusted me.
He confronted me three weeks before the fire.
I told him I’d fix it. I lied, because I didn’t yet know how, and men like the ones I owed money to don’t extend patience to lies for long. ”
“You’re saying the fire wasn’t Julian’s father.”
“I’m saying it was mine to answer for, whoever actually struck the match.
” Thomas turned back to face them, something devastated moving beneath the careful control.
“I’d borrowed considerably more than I could repay from men who don’t forgive slow payment, and I believe, though I’ve never had absolute proof, that the fire was a message meant for me, delivered to a house I’d stopped being welcome in months before, because your father had finally asked me to stay away from Eleanor and I hadn’t fully managed it.
I wasn’t there that night. I’ve spent twelve years believing that made me a coward rather than simply fortunate, and I’ve never once managed to feel the difference. ”
The room went very quiet, and Sienna watched Damian process it — not the flare of anger she might have expected, but something slower, more devastating, twelve years of a story he’d built his entire adult life around dissolving into something considerably more complicated than a family grudge with Julian’s father.
“You let me spend twelve years hating the wrong family.”
“I let the wrong family become an easier target than the true one, yes.” Thomas didn’t flinch from it.
“Julian’s father owed me considerably more than money by the time everything settled — old debts, old resentments, decades of a rivalry that predated either of our children.
When I disappeared, faking my death was simple enough, and letting the story settle around a grudge that already existed meant no one asked harder questions about a debt I’d rather no one ever traced back to me.
I let you build a war around a lie because the lie was safer than the truth, for both of us.
I’ve had twelve years to understand exactly how much that cost you, and I find the accounting only gets worse the longer I sit with it. ”
“Julian doesn’t know any of this.”
“No. Julian believes exactly what I built him to believe — that his father inherited a rivalry honestly, that reclaiming ground lost to your family is a birthright rather than an inherited delusion.” Something bleak moved through Thomas’s expression.
“I’ve spent years quietly funding his ambitions because watching him chase a war that was never truly his kept the real story buried considerably longer than it would have survived otherwise.
I’m not proud of that. I’m telling you regardless, because I promised you the truth this morning, and I find half-measures aren’t worth the breath they cost anymore. ”
Damian sat with it for a long moment, his hand finding Sienna’s without seeming to notice he’d done it, some old anchor reasserting itself without conscious thought.
“You used him,” Damian said finally. “The way you’re using me now, telling me all this exactly when it’s useful to you, exactly when Julian’s about to expose us both to reporters.”
“That’s not unfair.” Thomas didn’t argue the point.
“I’d like to tell you the timing is coincidence, born of nothing but a father finally finding his courage.
I don’t think either of us would believe it, and I promised you honesty, not comfort.
” He sat back down, something old and tired settling over him.
“I am using this morning’s urgency as cover for a conversation I should have had with you a decade ago.
Both things can be true. I’d rather you know that than spend the next several years discovering it yourself and wondering what else I’ve shaped to serve me. ”
Something in Damian’s shoulders finally loosened, not into forgiveness, Sienna understood, but into something adjacent to it — the particular exhaustion of a man who’d rather have an ugly, complete truth than another carefully managed piece of one.
“The reporters,” Damian said. “What version reaches them.”
“The true one, mostly.” Thomas reached for a folder on the side table, already prepared, already written in the same careful hand Sienna recognized from the note in the hangar.
“A father who faked his death to protect a son who wasn’t his by blood, fleeing debts of his own making rather than an inherited feud.
It’s less flattering to me than the story Julian’s building.
I find that’s rather the point — a story that costs me something is considerably more believable than one that costs me nothing, and considerably harder for Julian to spin back around against you. ”
“And Julian himself.”
“Becomes, in this version, a young man who inherited his father’s grudge honestly and was never told the debt beneath it was mine, not his family’s alone.
” Thomas’s mouth thinned. “I won’t protect him from the consequences of what he’s done these past months — the threats, the men he’s sent to your house.
But I’d rather the world understand he inherited a lie same as you did, even if he wielded it more carelessly than you ever did yours. ”
Damian was quiet for a long moment, weighing it, and Sienna watched him arrive, slowly, at something that looked less like acceptance and more like a decision to stop fighting a truth that had already finished rearranging itself around him.
“Send it,” he said finally.
Thomas nodded once, already reaching for his phone, and the next several minutes passed in the low, businesslike register Sienna had come to recognize from Damian himself — a man doing difficult, necessary work with his hands steady even when nothing else about him was.
It was Sienna who finally broke the quiet once the calls had ended, the three of them sitting in the green underwater light with a version of the truth now loose in the world that none of them could fully call back.
“What happens to Julian now?”
“That,” Thomas said slowly, “depends considerably on what he does in the next few hours, once he understands the story he thought he controlled has already left his hands.” He looked between them, something grim settling into his expression.
“A cornered man who’s just lost his best leverage rarely chooses his next move carefully.
I’d suggest you both go home, and I’d suggest you go home prepared for whatever version of careless he decides to be. ”
They left within the hour, the ivy-covered house shrinking in the rearview mirror behind them, and Sienna watched Damian’s hands on the wheel, steadier now than they’d been on the drive out, though something in his face had changed in a way she suspected would take considerably longer than one morning to finish settling.
“How do you feel,” she asked, quietly.
“I don’t entirely know yet.” He glanced at her, something almost like a smile ghosting at the edge of his mouth despite everything.
“I spent twelve years certain of exactly who I was angry at and exactly why. I find I’ve lost that certainty somewhere in the last two hours, and I haven’t yet decided what to replace it with.
” His hand found hers over the console, holding on.
“I know I’m grateful you were in that room.
I don’t think I’d have believed a word of it, coming from him alone. ”
“You don’t have to know the rest of it today.”
“No.” He exhaled, something loosening fractionally in his shoulders. “Today I only need to get you home before Julian decides what kind of careless he’s going to be.”
“And after that?”
“After that, you’re leaving.” He said it without inflection, the same flat certainty he’d used calling Thomas that morning, and it took her a beat to understand he meant it literally — a plane, a country, a version of safety that didn’t include her standing anywhere near whatever came next.
“There’s a house outside Lisbon no one currently alive knows to associate with me.
I’ll have Mrs. Voss arrange it tonight, quietly.
You’ll be gone before Julian finishes deciding how careless he intends to be. ”
“You’re not asking me.”
“No.” He didn’t look at her when he said it, his eyes still on the road, both hands steady on the wheel in a way that told her exactly how much thought had already gone into a decision she was hearing for the first time.
“I’ve spent this entire morning listening to a man confess to twelve years of deciding things for people he loved because he’d convinced himself it was safer than asking.
I understand precisely how that sounds, coming from me, four hours later.
I’ve decided I don’t currently care how it sounds. ”
“That’s not your decision to make. Not alone.”
“It is today.” Something in his jaw set, immovable.
“You can be angry with me about it in Lisbon. I would very much rather you be angry and alive in Lisbon than furious that I asked and dead in that house, because I gave Julian one more variable to work with while I was busy respecting your right to argue with me about it.”
She opened her mouth to push back further, and didn’t get the chance.
His phone buzzed against the console before he’d finished the sentence, Mrs. Voss’s name lighting the screen, and something in the particular urgency of the ringtone told Sienna, before he’d even answered it, that Julian had already made his choice.