9. Imogen
Imogen
By breakfast Ashton’s behaving like the hallway never occurred, and I want to put a plate through a window.
It isn’t that he was cruel last night. People get cruel, it happens, I’ve survived worse with less. It’s how good he is at the cleanup. He’s at the kitchen counter with his coffee and that glass wall he keeps where a face goes, and he tells me good morning like I’m a vendor he’s decided to renew.
“Morning,” I say back, matching him degree for degree, which is to say cold enough to keep food.
Luke’s eyes track between us over his cereal, because kids that age are barometers, they feel the pressure drop before anyone says a word. “You two are being weird.”
“We’re not,” Ashton and I answer in the same breath, and that’s worse than any silence. Luke returns to his cereal looking entirely unconvinced and slightly pleased, like he’s tucked the moment away to use on us later.
“You said it at the same time,” he points out.
“Eat your cereal,” Ashton says.
“That’s what weird people say.”
Neither of us answers that, but Luke does eat his cereal.
It’s after the dishes, after I’ve got Luke parked with a workbook, that I find Ashton at the long dining table glaring at a stack of paper like it insulted his mother. The pages are everywhere, marked up in three colors, a coffee gone cold and forgotten at his elbow.
“You’re going to rupture something,” I say, passing behind him.
Then I catch the heading on the top sheet.
Investor walk-through. Site tour. And underneath, what are supposed to be talking points but are just numbers, ranks of them, square footage and projected returns and figures with too many zeros to mean anything to a human being.
I stop. There’s no version of me that walks past this.
“This is a catastrophe.”
“It’s the financials.” He doesn’t raise his head.
“It’s a ransom note made of math. You’re going to lead a group of people around a building you built with your own ambition and read them a tax document?”
“They’re investors. The tax document is what they came for.”
“They came for a reason to give you their money and look smart doing it.” I drop into the chair across from him, no invitation, which is a thing I keep doing in this man’s house.
“The numbers are what they repeat to their partners afterward. What actually makes them sign is the feeling you let them in on something the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to yet.
So let them in. Why this stretch of coast. Why the water.
What you saw out here that everybody else drove past.”
He lifts his eyes to me. For a moment the cold’s gone and he’s just listening, his attention moving over my face like I’ve handed him something he didn’t expect to get from the tutor, and that undoes me worse than the coldness ever could, a warm line drawn straight down the back of my neck.
“What I saw,” he echoes.
“You bought a piece of coast nobody else wanted. There was a reason you wanted it. Open with that, then hit them with all the money stuff once they’re already halfway across the table.
” I tap the page twice. “Right now you’re opening with the part that makes grown adults sneak a look at their phones. ”
The corner of his mouth moves. It’s the leading edge of a real smile, the first one ever. I get to watch the whole thing start, but then I also get to watch the exact instant he registers it and kills it, like I’ve caught him with a hand in a till.
“There it is.”
“There’s what?”
“You almost smiled. At me. In full daylight. I’d like that entered into the record.”
“I don’t smile during prep.”
“You’re permitted to, though. I checked. Both pages of the manifesto, no clause against it.” I set my chin in my hand and settle in. “Go on. Attempt one. I’ll avert my eyes if it helps, like letting a skittish animal back into the wild.”
“You’re enjoying yourself.”
“I’m having the time of my life.”
He nearly goes again, his jaw working against it, and the discovery that I can drag this carved-from-rock man’s face to the brink of an expression it doesn’t want sends a spark through me, low and bright and entirely unwise.
“Tell me about the coast,” I say. “Not the pitch version. The real one. Why here?”
He’s quiet for a second, and I think he’s going to shut the door on it the way he shuts every other door, but then he doesn’t.
“I drove past it four years ago. Middle of winter, nothing out here but the site and the water. Everybody else looked at it and saw weather damage and access problems and a permit nightmare.” He turns his coffee mug a quarter turn.
“I looked at it and thought, whoever builds here first wins. So I came back.”
“That’s the opening,” I tell him.
“That’s not a pitch. That’s just what happened.”
“That’s exactly why it’s the opening.”
He looks at the page, then back at me. “You’re going to make me say it out loud to a room full of people, aren’t you.”
“With feeling.”
“I don’t do feeling.”
“You do. You’re just bad at letting anyone see it.” I slide the top sheet back across the table to him. “Start there. Everything else follows.”
“I had someone tell me once,” he says, and I know it’s escaped ahead of his consent because the line of his jaw goes hard the second it’s loose, irritated at his own mouth for the leak.
“Never let them see you want it. The instant they know you want the deal, the deal’s already gone.
You sit down like you could stand up and walk out without losing a night’s sleep. ”
“Huh.” I take him in, this man who’s run his whole life on one inherited sentence. “Whoever fed you that never wanted anything badly enough to be bad at hiding it. Must be a peaceful way to live.”
He doesn’t answer. The light goes out of his eyes and a shut door takes its place. It looks like I’ve found the wire again, the same one from the kitchen, the one that hums every time I get a hand near whatever he buries under the suits and the rules.
My phone buzzes against the wood. The screen says Dad, and my stomach drops through the floor the way it has since I was a teenager.
“I have to take this.” I’m on my feet before I’ve finished the sentence, turning my back to him, crossing toward the wall of windows but not out of the room. I keep my voice down. “Hi, Dad.”
“There she is.” Harrison Rutledge pours into my ear, warm across the top, the warning thrumming underneath it, the exact voice he uses right before he reaches into my life and rearranges the furniture.
“You’ve gone quiet on me. I had to learn from Margaret that you’d taken a tutoring job. Tutoring.”
“It’s good money. It’s flexible. It’s getting me to the end of the program.”
“For whom?”
“A family.”
“For whom, Imogen.” Not a question anymore, the warmth peeling back. “You do not move into the home of people I’ve never heard of. Tell me it isn’t anyone I’d disapprove of.”
And there it is, the entire reason I’ve kept my days off his desk since the week I turned eighteen, the speed of the man, how little distance he needs to get from how are you to give me the name so I can decide whether to permit it.
I press my thumbnail hard into the side of my finger and I keep my voice loose and easy, the muscle I built my whole life around.
“It’s nobody, Dad. Just a family. Two kids, aggressively normal, the most boring people alive.” The lie slides out smooth and broken-in. “You wouldn’t know them.”
“Imogen.”
“I have to go, Dad. I’m in the middle of a session.”
“We’re not done.”
“I know. I’ll call you later.” I hang up before he can tell me what later means to him, which is immediately and on his terms.
I feel it before I see it, the weight of someone’s whole attention landing on the back of my neck.
When I turn, Ashton’s watching me. Not faking interest in the papers, not half in the room, all of him, every bit of his attention fixed on me and the phone and the word nobody I just said out loud in front of him.
“Two kids,” he says.
“Aggressively normal,” I say back.
“Most boring people alive.”
“That’s what I said.”
He doesn’t say anything at all. He just holds my eyes, and somehow his silence is louder than anything he could have said.