Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Kit
Bernice is Dad’s assistant. Just hearing her name is enough to send a chill through me so quickly that I barely register it before it takes hold.
Bernice only ever calls when my father needs something—when he’s too proud, too angry, or too busy to do it himself.
She’s his translator—from Connor Dempsey to the rest of us mortals.
She’s his cleaner, the woman who’s been managing the mess of his relationships for years with corporate efficiency and a forced maternal tone.
The day I got my period, it wasn’t him who showed up with the talk. It was Bernice—with a discreet bag, a detailed pamphlet, and a too-bright smile that said we’d pretend this was normal, just this once. He never mentioned it.
My father has never asked if I needed anything, just sends her to check that he hasn’t fucked it all up.
He’s afraid that one day he’ll wake up to the news that I died like Mom, and he didn’t prevent it.
Unless he needs something, of course. He expects me to solve his problems when Bernice can’t—or when music is involved.
Dad and I . . . well, we’ve always operated like two countries separated by an ocean of silence mediated by Switzerland—Bernice. Usually, I wouldn’t be worried about this call, but she’s at the hospital.
I grip the phone a little too tightly, press it to my ear, and try to steady my voice. “Bernice?”
“Kit, honey—” Her voice is lower than usual, practiced in its calm, that particular tone people use when they’re about to level a world and are trying not to make it hurt more than it has to. “It’s your father. He’s at Seattle Memorial . . . massive stroke.”
The world doesn’t end, but it shifts—too fast and too sudden.
It’s as if the floor lost its shape or the walls bent inward without warning.
Everything tilts so abruptly I swear the cello in the front window wobbles, and for a second, I can’t tell if the dizziness is real or emotional.
Something in my body tightens like it’s bracing for impact, only the impact’s already happened, and I’m standing in the aftershock.
“I—I don’t—was he at home?” I ask, though maybe that’s not really what I mean. Maybe that’s just the question that tumbles out when one’s brain short-circuits and our heart decides it’s no longer part of the conversation.
Because what do you even say when your dad has a stroke?
What if the man who’s always existed like some immovable pillar in the background suddenly disappears?
When you might lose the one person who was supposed to be your constant, even if he never quite learned how to love you in a way that didn’t feel like a business arrangement?
You say something, right? Anything. Even if it doesn’t make sense. Even if it’s not the thing you actually need to know.
“At the agency,” she says, calm and matter-of-fact, as if this is just another report, just another casualty at D&D Talent Agency. “He collapsed in his office. EMTs said it was fast.”
Fast. That’s how it happens, right? One minute you’re standing, and the next the record skips, the needle scratches across your life, and nothing sounds the same again. It’s just sudden—jarring. Like silence that used to be filled with music. But fast means dead, doesn’t it?
“Is he . . .” I don’t know what to ask because I probably don’t want to hear the answer. Not when the EMTs said it was quick.
“They’ve stabilized him,” she adds carefully. “But . . . there’s probably damage. Speech, motor function. We won’t know the full extent for days.”
My hand slides to the edge of the counter, gripping the wood until my fingers press into the ridges of the grain.
The pressure keeps me upright. The familiar texture keeps me from floating off into the panic that wants to rise, that wants to swallow me whole with every syllable that falls out of Bernice’s mouth like a controlled detonation.
My lungs are working too hard, and nothing feels right.
“He asked for you,” she says after a pause that might have lasted a lifetime. “When he could speak. He was trying to say something about ‘Kit and legacy.’”
Of course he was.
Even now, even here, what matters is the fucking legacy.
His artists. His image. His kingdom of carefully curated careers.
Not the daughter he hasn’t called in three days after a long fight because he wants me to take over his company.
He has new ideas, a client who needs a new musical image—whatever that means.
Not the fact that I exist outside of the agency. Just the name. The continuation of his fucking legacy.
“We’ll need someone to handle his affairs,” Bernice continues, and I can hear the gears already turning in her head, the meetings she’s setting up, the fires she’s planning to put out.
Everything with my help. “You’re the only one who knows music, who can convince these artists that whatever they’re doing is good, but it’d be better if they do it your way. ”
And there it is. The catch. The hook behind the call.
The favor within the crisis. Because I’ve always known music.
I’ve always been the one who could bridge the language of emotion and business, the one who could sell passion like a product.
I’ve always been the one he prepared—whether I wanted to be or not.
This isn’t about the news that my father is in the hospital or that he might be dying. Nope. It’s about his business. If she didn’t need me, I doubt she would’ve called me today.
I close my eyes and try to swallow the heat crawling up my throat, that old, familiar sting of being needed but never chosen.
I know what I should say. I should tell them I have too much going on, too many obligations, and too many unfinished pieces of my life stacked in the corners, waiting to be dealt with.
It’s as simple as telling them I can’t be the person they want me to be.
I won’t.
It’s impossible when I am the one who needs his love, his approval, and believes we can still be a family. Plus, he raised me with concertos and contracts. He built me from his ambition and my mother’s discipline, as if I were some composition he expected to play flawlessly.
And maybe I resented that. Maybe I still do.
But when things start to crack—when the tempo changes without warning—they all look at me like I’m the one who knows how to keep it from falling apart.
Like I’m the only one holding everything together while pretending the seams were never stressed in the first place.
Even if that’s true, this isn’t the time to talk about the future of his company. This is the time to get to him. Now. Before something else is taken. Before the silence grows louder. Before I lose the only parent I have left.
At least this is different from the time I lost Mom. She’d been sick for months, but no one really explained what that meant. They told me it would get worse before it got better. They said she was resting—she was getting better.
I believed them right up until the morning I found my father sitting at the kitchen table, staring into a coffee mug that had gone cold. He didn’t cry. He didn’t speak. He just sat there, shoulders stiff, hands still, and I knew what he was feeling before he said a word. He didn’t say her name.
He never has.
But he was there. He showed up while I sobbed after he told me Mom would never come back. And now it’s my turn.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I say, wondering if I should finally buy one of those cell phones Cleo and Dad insist I should carry around. “It’s for emergencies. What happens if I can’t find you?” They both say something similar every time.
Usually, I don’t care because there’s no reason to wait, but now . . . I see why I need it.
As I place the phone back in the cradle, Nina Simone’s voice fills the silence like smoke curling around everything I can’t hold. She doesn’t want us to misunderstand her, and I feel that deep in my soul, but I also know it’s too late.