Chapter 39
VI
For a while, nobody says anything. I cry and nobody in the room tries to stop me.
And somewhere in there, I can feel the guys.
Rogue is just behind my right shoulder. He hasn't said a word since I sat down and he hasn't moved, but I don't need to turn around to know where he is—steady, close, right there at my back.
At some point, his hand came to rest on the top rail of my chair, not on me, just on the chair, close enough that if I leaned back an inch, my shoulders would find him
Armen is against the far wall, arms crossed, perfectly still. He isn't watching my father. He's watching me. Not hovering, not fussing, just standing there being solid like he always is. If I fall apart, I already know, without thinking about it, that Armen will jump to catch me.
And downstairs, Sting is on the street with his eyes on every approach, making sure nothing and nobody out there gets near me while I do this. I can't see him. I don't need to. Knowing he's there steadies me as much as the two men in this room.
Three men. None of them touching me, except barely. None of them saying a thing. And I have never in my life felt so surrounded by people who have decided, without being asked, that I will not go through this alone.
It's the thing that lets me keep going.
I wipe my face and sit up straighter, and when I speak again, my voice is steadier than it should be.
"You should know what it was like," I tell my father. "On my end."
He goes very still. "Tell me."
So I do.
I tell him about the first weeks, when I still thought there'd been a mistake, when I called every number I had and knocked on every door and got nothing but people looking at me with that careful pity you give the daughter of a man who disgraced himself.
I tell him how the money went first, then the apartment, then the friends, one by one, the way people back away from someone whose bad luck might be catching.
I tell him about the night I realized I had nobody left to call, and how that was the night I stopped being the mayor's daughter and started being nobody.
I tell him how I ended up in the Rot. That I walked into a dead mall and joined a thing called the Hunt because I had run out of other options. It should have been the end of me.
His eyes fill, and he doesn't try to hide or wipe away the tears. He just lets me watch him, like he's decided the least he owes me is to feel the full weight of what his choice cost.
"I told myself you were strong," he says, his voice rough.
"I told myself, whatever happens, she's strong, she'll find a way through.
I used your strength to let myself off the hook.
I'm not proud of it." He swallows. "Looking at you now, I was right that you're strong. I just had no idea what I was asking you to live with.”
For a second, I can't speak.
"There's something I need," I finally say. "It's going to sound small, but… but it isn't."
He waits.
"The day they came to the house. There was a knock at the door, and you grabbed my shoulder, and you said, 'Whatever happens—' and you never finished it.
That's what I have of you from that day, Dad.
Two words. I've spent years trying to remember the rest, and there is no rest. The sentence just stops. "
My father closes his eyes. When he opens them, they're wet again, but his voice comes out steadier than mine.
“What I wanted to say was that whatever happens," he says, "whatever you hear about me, whatever they tell you I did, whatever it looks like, it will be me keeping you safe.
" He swallows. "That's the whole sentence.
There was a knock at the door, and I looked at you, and I couldn't get it out.
" His hands tighten on the table. "So I spent every day after that trying to make it true instead. "
All these years, I carried half a sentence around like a splinter I couldn't dig out of my finger. Now I have, and while Dad’s words don’t give me back any of those years, something that's been sitting open in me since that day finally, quietly, swings shut.
Then my father's gaze moves slowly, off me, and around the room, to Rogue's hand on the rail of my chair, and to Armen against the wall.
I watch him take this all in, this careful man who built a case by noticing what other people missed, and I see him understand what he's looking at, without a word.
"These men," he says, gesturing at Armen and Rogue.
"They're with me," I say. Simple as that.
He looks at Rogue for a long moment. Rogue looks back and gives him nothing, which is the right thing to give a father sizing up the men around his daughter.
"And the one downstairs?" my father asks.
"Him too."
I brace for it, whatever it's going to be. The judgment. The questions. The careful, mayoral disapproval. He's a father, and I just told him I basically belong to three men in a dead shopping mall, and I have no idea what the hell he’s going to say about that.
But he just nods, slowly, and looks back at me, and his eyes wet and steady at the same time.
"Good," he says. "I spent years sick about you being out there alone." His voice catches. "You're not alone."
"No," I say. "I'm not."
And there it is, the thing I came all this way to understand, except it turns out it isn't the thing I thought. I came here for him. For answers, for the truth, for the father I buried. And I'm getting all of that.
But the realization sitting in my chest right now isn't about him at all.
It's that I walked into this room as terrified as I've ever been, sat down across from the hardest conversation of my life, and didn't break.
Not because I'm strong, whatever my father wants to believe.
Because I'm held. Because there's a hand on my chair and a wall at my back and a man on the street, and every one of them decided my hardest day was theirs too.
My father lost everything trying to do this alone.
I don't have to.
That's the difference. That's the whole difference.
"Okay," I say, and breathe, and turn back to him. "Tell me the rest. Tell me what you found."