22. Silas #2
The real problem is that I should have thought this through before I let it get this far. Before I let her matter this much without telling her what mattering meant.
On another level, I feel enraged, because he is completely certain he does.
And that certainty, the absolute confidence of a man who believes his experience of the world is comprehensive, cracks me open in a way I wasn’t expecting. Because looking at my father’s certainty that he is right about everything makes me think about my mother.
Not the version of her that Elias has been carrying for twenty-five years. The other version. The one that lived in the afternoon hours before my father came home from work.
It comes back to me—the looseness in her shoulders, the laugh that came from somewhere real, the version of herself when she wasn’t acting out the role her marriage required.
I was the right age to be with her in those hours: old enough to be company, young enough that nobody thought to send me elsewhere.
Logan was already trailing Elias through the daily business of running a company.
Henry was barely past toddling. It was only Grace and me in the afternoons, and I knew her in those hours the way my father never did.
The cocktail on the counter, before he was due home.
I noticed it the way children notice things, the way children absorb things—not analytically, just as part of the afternoon’s rhythm.
The drink appearing, then disappearing, her attention diverted away from me, the shoulders straightening as the clock moved toward his return.
The smile that arrived when the door opened, and how it wasn’t the same as the smile from the afternoon.
I noticed it then.
I have not let myself follow it to its conclusion until this exact moment, standing in my father’s office while he uses the word experiment, looking at a man who adored his wife so completely that he never once saw her.
A car accident, two miles from the house, on a road she had driven a thousand times.
The late afternoon. The police at the door.
The arithmetic arrives without drama. It’s entitlement. It’s the terrible, irrevocable possibility that I cannot now unthink.
She was unhappy.
She was drinking.
She got in her car.
My father spent twenty-five years grieving Grace. He’s built this operation around her loss, has shaped his sons around the absence of her, and has used her memory in this office more than once as evidence for how things are.
He loved her. Not just loved her—cherished her. I’m certain of that.
But he never knew her.
And now he’s sitting across the desk telling me that what I feel for Norah is an experiment that will run its course.
I look at him.
At the certainty in his face.
At the grief he carries like a credential.
The thing I want to say is right there. I can feel the shape of it, the words wanting out.
It would not be kind. It would not be fair.
I don’t have all the context, and I never will.
But it would be true, or close enough to true, that the difference wouldn’t matter, and it would cost him something the way the word experiments cost me something.
But I don’t say it. I close my mouth and breathe through my nose until the worst of the urge passes.
Because some things, once said, cannot be taken back. And I have enough unresolvable things in my chest already without adding the look on my father’s face after I have used his dead wife against him.
He is still watching me.
“You will cut ties with Norah,” he says.
He isn’t making a suggestion or delivering a warning.
His voice is flat and even, the same voice that has closed conversations in this office for thirty years.
Resistance surges immediately, hard and instinctive, but I press down before it can surface. My hands are loose at my sides. My face is steady. None of what is happening inside me is available for inspection.
I hold his gaze for a moment.
“Do you hear me?”
Then I say, “I heard you.”
Two words. Flat. Responsive without agreeing. True without being a promise.
I turn and walk to the door. I’m almost out of the office when he speaks again.
“She was everything to me,” he says.
I stop. I don’t turn around.
“Your mother,” he says. “I want you to understand that. What it cost to lose her.”
The thing I won’t say presses against the back of my teeth one more time.
I stand there and think about what I almost know about the road she drove and the late afternoon and the cocktail on the counter, and grief, fury, and pity hit me all at once, tangled too tightly to separate.
“I know you loved her,” I say.
It is the truest thing I can say that is also safe.
I go through the door and pull it shut behind me.
The stairs rattle under my boots on the way down, the warehouse floor opening up around me. I walk through it without stopping, out the side door, and across the gravel lot to my truck.
I get in and close the door.
The lot is still at this hour, the day’s last deliveries done, the crew filtering toward the parking area. Someone calls something across the yard. A van engine turns over somewhere behind the building. The ordinary sounds of an operation winding toward close.
Elias’s order sits on my chest. It weighs on me precisely because Elias has spent my entire life expecting obedience.
I heard you.
Not: I’ll do it. Or: you’re right.
Just: I heard you. The minimum. The thing that gets me out of the room without a lie and without confrontation, and without saying the thing about Grace.
The lot empties around me slowly.
Somewhere in the building behind me, my father is still in his office, looking out over the yard that he built around the loss of a woman he loved completely and never fully knew. Norah is miles away in a rowhouse above a city that is becoming less safe for wolves by the week.
My mother’s life sits beside my father’s order in my head. He said she was everything to him as if loving her meant he understood everything about her.
Sorry, Dad. It doesn’t come anywhere close.
The lot is empty now. I’m staring at an order I already know how I’m handling.