Jade
The bedroom ceiling is white and high and the windows face the water.
There's never full dark in this room. Even at midnight the ocean throws light.
The moon off the surface, the distant glow of Malibu's coastline curving north.
It moves across the ceiling in slow pale shapes that I've spent enough nights watching to know by heart.
Phoenix falls asleep before midnight, one hand loose against my hip, his breathing evening out until it's slow and steady. I lie still and listen to the waves hitting the base of the bluff forty feet below us and don't close my eyes.
James Dupree.
My mother said that name once. I was sixteen and asking about my father for what she'd decided was the last time, and she was standing at the kitchen counter in Boston with both hands wrapped around a coffee mug.
Her knuckles were white against the ceramic.
He didn't deserve to know about you. He didn't deserve to be your father.
Then she'd put the mug in the sink and left the room and the subject had stayed closed for years.
I stare at the ceiling and go through everything I have.
The name first. James. Common enough that I'd filed it and moved on, told myself it meant nothing.
But Dupree was specific. Dupree was findable.
I'd never looked because looking would have meant wanting something my mother had decided I shouldn't want, and I had been, for most of my life, very good at not wanting things she'd closed off.
It had seemed, for a long time, like a reasonable arrangement.
My mind drifts back to his smile. I'm guessing you're Jade, he had said.
Easy and warm, no hesitation, a man who had no idea the ground was shifting under both of us.
I'd handed him a glass and smiled back and my pulse had been running at twice its normal speed for the entire forty minutes that followed.
My mother used to grow peonies. He'd said it to the flowers, not to me, a man making small talk over a vase.
I'd let it go in the moment. Now I took it back out.
His mother. My grandmother, possibly. A woman I would never meet who grew pale pink flowers in whatever yard she'd had, and here I was in California arranging the same flowers in someone else's kitchen without knowing why I'd reached for them at the farmer's market that morning.
My chest tightens. I press my hand flat against my sternum and breathe.
The detail I kept returning to was Nicholas at the gate.
He'd seen James coming up the driveway and crossed the lawn to meet him, which he doesn't do.
In the months I'd been coming to this house I had never once seen Nicholas Crawford walk toward someone.
People came to him. But he'd crossed the grass grinning, a grin I'd never seen on him before, and clapped James on the shoulder and laughed, and I'd read it as old friends and let it go.
I didn't let it go now.
Nicholas had known who I was before Phoenix ever brought me home.
I was certain of it. The BBQ and the way Olive had watched me all afternoon without once looking surprised.
Someone in that house had known for a long time and said nothing.
Both of them, probably. Watching me move through their house and family for months, watching me fall in love with their son, the whole time knowing what I didn’t.
Under the sheet Phoenix's hand shifts against my hip.
He makes a low sound, half asleep, and his arm pulls me slightly closer before going loose again.
His skin is warm. His heartbeat is slow against my back, steady and unbothered, the heartbeat of a man who doesn't know what is currently keeping his girlfriend rigid and awake at two in the morning.
I don't wake him.
I need to understand what I'm holding before I hand it to anyone else.
Even Phoenix. Especially Phoenix. He would go quiet, that stillness he gets when he's already three moves ahead, and then he would go to his father, and then whatever this is would become a Crawford problem.
It would get resolved, and somewhere in that process I would stop being the person making decisions about my own life and start being the person those decisions were being made for.
I have watched Nicholas manage things. I know what that looks like from the inside and I know what it costs the people who love him.
This stays mine until I know what it is.
I lie there until the ceiling shifts from black to gray. By then I'm certain. It doesn't feel like I expected, finally knowing. There's no relief in it. It just sits heavy, the weight of something that has been true your entire life.
Phoenix was up before seven. The coffee grinder, the soft knock of cabinet doors.
He moves through his mornings the same way every day.
I've learned the sounds by order. He came to the bedroom doorway, but I kept my breathing slow and even and my eyes closed, and after a moment I heard him move away.
The front door closed at seven forty-five.
I counted to ten. Then I got up.
The kitchen smelled like his coffee. I stood at the counter in yesterday's clothes with the cold tile under my bare feet and looked out at the Pacific, flat and colorless under the morning overcast, the water and the sky nearly the same shade of gray.
On mornings like this the ocean looks like something unfinished. Like whoever made it ran out of paint.
A call would give her room to move. I knew exactly how it would go.
Sydney Catalano, my mom, has been managing conversations for as long as I can remember.
She would act confused, then deflect every question with another question, then suddenly need to check something in another room.
She could stretch a phone call sideways until I'd lost track of what I'd originally asked, and by the time I found my way back to it she'd have invented three reasons why it wasn't worth asking.
She'd had years of practice keeping this particular door closed and she was very good at it.
I was not calling her.
I poured coffee I didn't need and stood at the counter and picked up my phone. Opened a new message to my mother's number. The cursor blinked in the empty text field.
Is James Dupree my father?
Five words. No ambiguity, no version of this she could mistake for something softer than what it was. I read it once. Then I pressed send before I could think about it longer and put the phone face-down on the counter and looked at the ocean.
The marine layer was already pulling back at the edges, a thin line of blue appearing at the horizon where the gray lifted.
A pelican moved along the waterline below the deck, low and unhurried, dipped once and came up with nothing and kept going.
I watched it until it rounded the point and disappeared.
My phone didn't move.
I drank my coffee. Rinsed the mug. Wiped down the counter that didn't need wiping.
Took my laptop to the kitchen table and opened it to the manuscript I hadn't touched in four days.
Forty thousand words of a fantasy kingdom and a woman who thought surviving was the same as living.
It had felt urgent and true two weeks ago.
Now it felt very far away from a Malibu kitchen on a Monday morning with an unanswered text sitting face-down on the counter six feet from my elbow.
I closed the laptop.
The marine layer finished burning off. The Pacific went from gray to green and then to the deep California blue that still surprises me sometimes, coming from Boston where the water is cold and dark and doesn't do that.
Phoenix had pointed it out once, early on.
Watch it change, it takes about an hour.
I'd thought he was humoring me but he'd been right.
I'd watched it change a dozen times since. It still worked.
I picked up the phone.
No reply.
Even I don't know would tell me something. My mother does not deal in uncertainty, and uncertainty about James Dupree would mean she'd spent years making sure she'd never have to answer this question and had somehow found herself answering it anyway.
The screen was blank.
I put the phone down, screen up, and stood at the kitchen window with my second cup of coffee going cold in my hands and thought about a man with silver at his temples who said my mother used to grow peonies to a vase of flowers he had no way of knowing I'd chosen.
I hadn't known I was missing something until he was standing six feet away from me holding a pack of beer and smiling like it was a perfectly ordinary Sunday.
That was the loneliest thought I'd had in years.