Jade
The drive to Phoenix’s parents’ house takes forty minutes. I know what I'm going to say. I've known since last night when Phoenix told me about the timestamp. I don't need to rehearse it. I just need to get there.
The gates open when I pull up, which means Olive was watching for me.
The circular drive is quiet, just James's car and Olive's and the gardener's truck parked along the far wall.
I sit in my car for a moment after I turn off the engine.
The jasmine is strong today, coming through the cracked window, that thick sweet smell I've come to associate with this place, with all of those Sunday afternoons.
It's a beautiful morning. That feels beside the point.
Olive opens the door before I knock.
She looks at me for a moment, long enough to read my face.
She steps back to let me in. The foyer smells like coffee.
The roses on the entry table are white and fresh, their petals fully open.
The house is quiet like it usually gets on weekday mornings when Nicholas is at the office and there's no lunch being assembled and no voices coming from the kitchen.
Just the tick of the hallway clock and the sound of my own footsteps on the tile.
“James is in the garden,” Olive says. She doesn't ask why I'm here or what I plan to say or whether this is a good idea. She just gestures toward the back of the house and disappears, closing the door behind her with a soft click.
James is at the far end of the south wall, crouched over one of the rose beds with a pair of shears. He looks up when he hears me and flashes a smile.
I don't smile back. He straightens up, sets the shears down on the stone wall and tries to read my face.
“Good to see you—“ he starts to say.
"I know about Richard," I interrupt. "I know you found out two years ago. I know you said nothing."
The garden goes quiet. There’s a bird somewhere in the jasmine. I hear the distant sound of traffic from the road below the estate. James looks at me and doesn't try to deny anything.
"How much do you know?" he asks.
"Enough."
James nods slowly. Looks at the rose bed, then back at me. "Then you probably have questions."
"I have one. Why?”
James doesn't fold. I came here expecting guilt and contrition, and instead he looks me straight in the eye and makes his case.
Finding out his money was tangled up in Richard's network wasn't simple.
The investment vehicle was buried three layers deep in a structure built specifically to hide its origins, and getting himself out without tipping Richard off took months of careful, quiet work.
Going to Nicholas with half-finished information, here's a name and a connection and here's everything I don't know yet, would have handed Nicholas something he couldn't act on.
In James's view that was more dangerous than waiting until he had the full picture to give him.
James says all of this evenly, without apology, like a man presenting evidence.
And the thing is, he's not wrong. Not about the mechanics of it.
I can follow his logic and it holds up, the calculus of a smart man moving carefully through a situation with real stakes and incomplete information.
He genuinely believed he was protecting Nicholas.
I let him finish. I wait until I'm sure he's done.
Then I say, "I'm not talking about the logistics."
James goes still.
"I'm talking about the BBQ," I say. "I'm talking about four months of Sunday lunches and craft beer and asking about my manuscript like a man with nothing on his conscience. I'm talking about two years of choosing to be in that house, at that table, knowing what you knew."
He doesn't look away. I'll give him that. He holds my gaze and takes it.
"I know," he says.
"That's not an explanation."
"No," he says. "It's not."
He looks at the garden for a moment. At the roses Olive has been tending for years. When he looks back at me his face has changed. The defensiveness is gone.
"I was afraid," he says.
I wait.
"Not of Richard. Not of what Nicholas would do when he found out.
" He pauses. "I was afraid that this would be the one he couldn't forgive.
We've survived a lot, Nicholas and I. Things that should have ended it and didn't. I miscalculated badly enough that he could have walked away from me more than once and he didn't." He looks at his hands.
"I was afraid that sitting on this for two years would be the thing that finally broke it. That I'd look across the table one day and he’d look at me in a different way.”
The bird goes quiet. Somewhere inside the house a cabinet door closes.
"So, you kept coming over?” I question.
"I wanted to warn him," he says. "I thought if I could get the information clean enough, I could hand it to him properly. Give him something he could actually use."
I look at James and he doesn’t look away. He just stands there in the garden with his hands loose at his sides, holding my gaze.
The thing about James is that he doesn't give up. That's what keeps making this harder. He made a wrong call and he knows it.
But I’m angry. I want to be clear about that.
I'm angry that I liked him. That over the last four months I built something in my head about who he is. I liked him and I was starting to trust him.
The part that makes me angriest is that I understand that this was a frightened man's bad calculation.
"Tell Nicholas yourself," I say. "Before Phoenix does."
He gives me a slight nod.
“Today. I mean it,” I add.
I look at him for a moment longer. He's standing in the middle of this garden with dirt on his hands and he looks exactly like what he is, a good man who made a bad call.
That's the part I can't shake. The questions were real.
All of it was real and none of it was clean and I don't know what to do with that yet.
"I don't know what we are to each other," I say. "I've been leaving it unnamed and that's been fine. But whatever it is, I can't build it on you deciding what I can handle. That's not how this works. You don’t know me.”
His eyes are wet at the corners. He doesn't blink it away and he doesn't look down.
"I understand," he says.
I turn and walk back up the path.
I call Phoenix from outside the garden gate. The afternoon sun is warm on my face and the jasmine is thick in the air and none of it matches what's sitting in my chest.
He picks up on the first ring. "How'd it go?"
"Tell your father," I say.
A beat. He hears everything in the flatness of it. "Are you okay?"
"Yes," I say. We both know that's only partly true. “I’ll be home in an hour.”