Chapter 53
VI
The morning after we end Lydia Vance, I wake up in the Rot and absolutely nothing has changed.
I lie there a minute, waiting to feel different, because surely you're supposed to feel different the day after you bring down the most powerful person any of us ever touched.
But the ceiling over my bed has the same water stains.
The generators are humming their same two floors down.
Somebody's already arguing about the supply schedule out in the corridor, the way somebody is always arguing about the supply schedule.
The Rot doesn't know what we did. The Rot doesn't care.
I love it more than I can say.
Out there, I know, it's a different morning. Word comes into the Rot the way word always does, slow and secondhand, carried in on somebody's shift and passed hand to hand until it reaches me. And the word is good. The word is everything Vi-from-several-months-ago would never have believed.
Lydia Vance's name is everywhere now, in all the places she doesn't own.
The law firm that spent twenty years keeping her invisible is coming apart at the seams, lawyers tripping over each other to be the first one to cooperate.
The development companies, the shells, the men who signed, all of it dragged into daylight at once, too much and too loud for anyone to bury.
People in that bright living city are learning where their respectable neighbor's money came from.
And somewhere underneath all of it, quieter but realer to me than any of the rest, my father's name is being said out loud again, and this time nobody's saying he ran or broke or failed.
They're saying he was right.
It's going to take a long time. These things do.
There will be lawyers and delays and people who wriggle, and it won't bring Rothwell back, because nothing brings a place like Rothwell back.
But the lie is dead. The lie that my father was a disgrace, the lie that the city just fell, the lie that nobody did it on purpose.
That lie is over, and it's never coming back, and there's nothing Lydia Vance or anyone like her can do about it now.
And here's the strange, wonderful thing. I don't need to watch it happen.
A few months ago, I'd have been desperate for it, glued to every scrap of news, needing the whole world to see, needing someone official to finally say my father's name with the respect it deserves.
Now the world can do whatever it does out there.
In here, it's just another morning, and the supply schedule still needs sorting, and the ordinariness of that keeps me perfectly happy.
The Rot never once waited for the outside world to say it mattered.
It just decided it did. Took me long enough to learn I could do the same, that nobody was ever going to hand me a place to belong, so I stopped waiting and made one right here.
But the part I let myself sit with, alone, the part I turn over slow because it's almost too big to comprehend, is my father.
He's safe now.
Not safe-for-now, the way he's been for years, one bad day from a thug in a doorway, but truly fucking safe.
The person who spent years wanting him dead is finished, too busy drowning to send anyone after anyone.
The thing he ran from, the thing he buried himself alive to escape, the thing that cost us both everything, is gone.
He doesn't have to hide anymore. He gets to come up out of that room above the print shop and just be a person.
Be my father. Out loud, in the open, where I can actually have him.
Word's already moving back and forth between us. It’s careful still because old habits don't die overnight.
He says once the dust settles, he wants to see the Rot.
Wants to see where his daughter became what she is now.
I let him know to be sure to wear something he doesn't mind getting concrete dust on.
I think about that until my eyes sting. Then I let myself have a few of the tears I've been too busy to cry, just me and my water-stained ceiling. Then I'm done, because there's too much good waiting on the other side of my door to spend the morning in here.
When I finally get up, I do it as someone I wouldn't have recognized the day I first walked into this place.
The Runt who didn't know which corridor led where is gone.
Funny thing is, I didn't even notice the exact day she left.
What's standing in her place got her father's name back, took down a monster, and chose this dead mall full of dangerous people over a clean, safe, ordinary life.
I’d do it again without blinking. I'm home. It only took losing everything to find it.
I pull on my clothes and head out into the corridor, where the argument about the supply schedule is still going strong. The routine of it makes me smile.
One of the women from my hub shift falls into step beside me before I've gone twenty feet, the way people do when they've been dying to tell you something. "It's all anybody out there's talking about," she says, not bothering to hide how much she's enjoying it.
"Lydia fucking Vance. The law firm. Word is, they froze everything she's got overnight." She cuts me a look. "Word is, your dad's getting his name back, too."
"Word's right," I say.
She grins and heads off toward the hub, and that's the Rot for you. The biggest story in twenty years, handed over in a hallway between one chore and the next, and then everybody gets back to work.
The one person I want to find this morning isn't out there in the noise. She's right here, where she's been through every bit of it, the one who walked in beside me a lifetime ago, just as desperate, just as lost.
I go to find Mara.