Chapter 38
VI
Here's something nobody tells you about getting back the thing you wanted most: it doesn't feel the way you think it will.
I thought there'd be one clean feeling. Relief.
Joy. Something that floods in and washes everything else out.
Instead, I'm sitting in a folding chair in a room that smells like burnt coffee, looking at my father's actual, living face, and I'm feeling all of it at once, every feeling pushing and shoving to get to the front.
I'm so happy, I could throw up. I'm so angry, I could throw up. I'm terrified this is a dream and I'll wake up back in my room with a photograph and a hole in my chest. I keep waiting for it to sort itself into something I can deal with, one problem at a time. It won't.
He's older. He's thinner. He's real. He's here. He's been here the whole time.
I don't know whether to climb into his lap like I'm six or walk out and never look back.
So I do the only thing I can manage. I sit. I grip my knees. And I wait for him to explain how the hell we got here.
Dad folds his hands on the table and starts at the beginning. I sit still and listen, which turns out to be really hard.
"I knew they were coming for me," he says. "A long time before they did."
His voice is older than I remember. Quieter. But it's his, the same voice that read to me at night and talked me down off a hundred ledges and later, after I was grown, called me every Sunday morning without fail.
"For about a year," he goes on, "I'd been building a case.
You know that part. You found the documents.
" A small nod toward me, toward the work I did to get here.
"What I didn't tell anyone, what I couldn't, was how far it went.
I thought, at first, it was Fischer and a handful of people around him.
Greedy men skimming. I was wrong. It went up.
Way up. Past the people you could name, to people you couldn't, people who never signed a thing and never will. "
The ceiling. The ones above Fischer. The ones we've been chasing.
"And once I understood how high it went," he says, "I understood something else.
That there was no version of this where I won.
Not by the rules. The rules belonged to them because they were written by them.
Every office I could have taken my concerns to, every person who could have done something, was either in their pocket or too scared to cross them.
I had the truth and nowhere to put it." He shrugs, his face covered in sadness.
"So I made a choice," my father says.
And here it comes. My stomach knows it's bad before he even says it.
"I knew if I stayed, they'd kill me, and the case would die with me. So I disappeared before they could. Not in a panic. I planned it. I chose the day.”
“But your records stop before you disappeared. I've lost whole nights to that gap, trying to work out what they did to you in those six weeks."
"Nothing was done to me. Those six weeks were the plan," he says. "The day I decided to disappear, I stopped writing anything down. Every hour I'd been putting into the case went into building the way out instead. A man who's about to vanish doesn't keep a diary of it."
Six weeks of silence from a man who documented everything. It was never a mystery. It was the escape, happening out of sight.
He holds my eyes. "I let them believe I broke. That the pressure won and I ran or worse. I let the whole city believe it. Because a dead, discredited man they've stopped watching can keep working like I did. On the other hand, a man still fighting in the open is just a target with a clock on him."
"Okay," I manage. My voice comes out wrong. "Okay. I understand that part."
I do understand it. That's the terrible thing. It's smart. It's so him.
"But," I say, and stop, because my throat has closed, and I have to force the rest of it out around the pain lodged here. "But you let me think you were dead."
He doesn't look away. I'll give him that. He takes it right in the face.
"Yes," he says.
"For years."
"Yes."
"Dad." The word breaks. "I buried you. Not in the ground, because there was nothing to bury, but I buried you anyway.
I made myself stop waiting for the phone to ring.
I taught myself how to live with a hole where you used to be.
Do you have any idea what that—" I stop.
Start again. "I lost everything after you were gone.
Everything. And the whole time you were—" I can't even finish it.
I gesture at the room, the cot, the hot plate, the years of him alive and breathing and choosing, every single day, not to tell me.
"I know," he says quietly.
"Then why."
And this is the part I've been bracing for since the second I sat down, the answer I both need and don't think I can survive.
"Because they would have used you," he says.
"Vi. Listen to me. The day they found out I was alive would be the day they came looking for the fastest way to make me stop.
And the fastest way to make a man like me stop is not to threaten him.
It's to threaten his daughter." His hands tighten on the table.
"A grieving girl with a dead father is no use to anyone.
There's nothing to pull. But a girl whose father is alive and hiding?
That girl is a hostage waiting to happen.
That girl is leverage. And the only way, the only goddamn way I could keep you out of their hands was to make sure you didn't know there was anything to give up. "
He let me grieve him to keep me safe. He weaponized my own broken heart, turned my grief into a wall he hid behind. It’s both the cruelest thing anyone has ever done to me and the most loving, the exact same act at the exact same time.
I am out of my chair before I know I've moved.
Well, not exactly. My body has come up off the seat halfway, and every muscle is screaming at me to get up, to get out, to walk out of this room and this building and not stop walking because the fury in me might eat me alive.
But I don't go anywhere.
I grip the edges of my chair and I lower myself back down, slow and shaking, because I have waited years for the chance to sit in this room, and I am not going to throw it away just because the truth hurts.
That's it, right there. Not the searching, not the fighting, but this. Sitting in a chair across from my father, who at the moment I both love and hate, and choosing to stick around and hear the rest of what he has to say.
"I'm angry," I tell him in a shaking voice. "I need you to know that. I'm not going to pretend I'm not. You can’t explain your way out of what those years did to me."
"I'm not trying to," he says.
"Okay.”
"I'd do it again," he says, and the gentleness in it guts me. "Every day of it. To keep you breathing, I'd do all of it again. That's not me asking you to forgive it. It's just the truth."
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Behind them, the tears I've been fighting finally win.
But I stay in the chair.
I stay.