Chapter 28
TOMMY
My father stood in the doorway of the suite. I stood inside it and the Atlantic was somewhere beyond the windows behind me and the world was holding still in that way it had been holding still since I'd opened the door.
He hadn't tried to come in.
I hadn't invited him.
He'd said Tommy in the voice I had not heard since I was eleven years old, and the voice had landed exactly where you'd expect a voice like that to land, which was somewhere I was going to have to spend a long time mapping.
I had stood in the doorway and looked at him and said, very evenly, I need time.
He'd nodded.
That was the thing that did it, in a way I would have to work through later. The nod. The professional of course you do nod of a man who had practiced this scene in his head a thousand times and had known, going in, what the most likely outcome was.
He hadn't argued. He hadn't reached. He hadn't tried to make it a moment.
He had nodded the way a soldier nodded at an order he didn't enjoy but understood.
That nod had told me something I was not yet ready to say out loud, which was that the man had been in this room before.
Not this room. But this kind of room. With Wyatt.
With Grant. He had been the man at the door of his sons' suites before.
He had been turned away before. He had developed the muscle memory.
It wasn't his first delivery of this delivery.
I almost felt for him.
I didn't, exactly. The almost was as far as it got.
Underneath the man standing in the door of a suite at Dominion Hall in a snap-button shirt with his cuffs rolled twice, a boy was sitting on the edge of a bunk in Valentine, Texas, with his shoes still on, listening for a truck on the gravel that wasn't going to come.
The boy wasn't ready to forgive anyone for anything.
The boy was exactly the boy he'd been the morning the truck didn't come, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, and the long stretch of mornings and seasons and years that had followed.
The boy was a piece of geology now, settled into the bedrock of me, and a man on a doorstep with a nod was not going to move him.
We didn't embrace.
We didn't touch.
We stood three feet apart and looked at each other for what felt like a long minute and was probably ten seconds. My father said the next thing, which was the thing he'd come to say, the thing he'd risked the doorstep for.
"Craine came to your hotel again."
"He did."
"We know what he said."
I tilted my head.
"How?"
"That's a longer conversation than tonight allows."
I didn't push. He'd known I wouldn't. He'd been counting on it.
"You're standing here," I said, "because of Craine."
"In part."
"In part."
He looked at me, steady.
"There's also—" he started.
"Don't."
He stopped.
I drew in one slow breath through my nose and let it out the same way and tried to sound like a man whose interior was not, at that moment, in three different rooms at once.
"You said your piece on Craine. Say the rest of it. Then, I'd like to be alone."
He nodded again. That same nod.
"Tommy. The others in this house. Lucas. Ryker. Atlas. The men you haven't met yet."
He held my eye.
"They're your brothers, son. Half-brothers. But brothers."
The room did its thing.
The thing was a small physical thing—a slight downward shift in my balance, a recalibration of where my weight was on the floor, the way a man's body responded to information that hadn't yet reached his face.
Brothers. Half-brothers. The men in the foyer. The man on the chaise with Lexi Montgomery in his lap. The architecture of Dominion Hall, with its corridor of vaguely related portraits and its viper called family and its butler who knew my measurements before I'd given them to him.
The line had been engineered.
I'd known it had been engineered.
I had not known, until this second, what the engineering had been for.
"What?"
It came out flat. I hadn't planned for it to come out flat.
It had come out flat because the rest of the questions—how, when, who is their mother, who are their mothers, how many, how old, how long have they known and not told me—were going to need an interior I wasn't currently in possession of, and the body had decided to ration what it spent the words on while the mind caught up.
My father held very still.
"There's a lot to unpack there," he said.
"I imagine."
"I owe you an explanation. All of it. The whole story. When there's time."
"When there's time?"
"Tommy."
"All right."
He took half a breath. He didn't move from the doorway.
"Dominion Hall," he said. "And everything in it. Everything that comes with it." He swallowed once. "It's yours. And theirs. It's been built to protect you. All of you. That's the whole point of it, son. That's the only point of it."
The room did its thing again.
I kept my face level. I'd been raised on level. The unit had built me on level. The level was a thing I could keep up under almost any operational pressure, and what was happening to me right now qualified as operational pressure of a flavor I had not previously sampled.
I didn't speak.
He didn't push.
He stood in the doorway and watched me, and after a long second he did the thing I had not expected.
He went quiet.
He stopped delivering. He stood there with his hands at his sides and let me have the room.
He understood, in a way I was going to have to think about later, that the bombshell was bigger than the bombshell.
That what he'd just said wasn't a piece of information.
It was a structural reset of every piece of information I'd believed about my own life, and a structural reset of that magnitude wasn't a thing a man could carry in real time in front of a stranger who happened to be his father.
He gave me the silence.
It was a kind of grace.
After what felt like a long time, he said:
"Take the night, son. Think it through. We'll talk when you're ready."
I nodded. Once.
He held my eye for another moment.
"I'm sorry," he said. "For all of it."
He waited.
He was waiting for something. A reaction. A word. Anything I might give him that he could carry with him out of the doorway and into whatever room he was going back to in this house I had now learned belonged to me as much as it belonged to him.
I didn't give him anything.
It wasn't cruelty. It was that I didn't have anything to give. The interior was empty. The interior had been spent on Rebecca this morning and on Craine this afternoon and now on this, and there was nothing left in the cupboard, and pretending there was would have been worse than honest emptiness.
He waited another long second.
Then he turned.
He walked away down the carpeted hallway.
Some part of me, the part that wasn't the boy and wasn't the man and was just the animal underneath both of them, wanted to step out into the hall and grab him by the arm and tell him don't leave again, not ever, you don't get to leave again, and the part of me that was the boy wanted that even harder, and the part of me that was the man I'd built on top of both of them held the door frame and watched him go.
He turned the corner.
He was gone.
I closed the door.
I leaned my back against it.
I closed my eyes.
I let out one long breath, and it came out shaped like a sound, the kind of sound that was not crying and not laughing and not speech, just a body unloading a small part of what a body could carry before something gave.
My phone buzzed on the bedside table.
I crossed the room and looked at it.
Rebecca's text from earlier. I choked. I froze.
I walked off the stage after one song. I'm such a loser.
I'd missed it by something like an hour, and I'd missed it because I'd been on the doorstep of a man I hadn't seen in twenty-some years, and I had not heard the buzz, which was a thing I had never failed to do before in my life as an operator and a thing I would have to think about later, in some calmer hour.
I read it once.
I read it twice.
I felt for her—real feeling, clean and direct, the kind that arrived underneath all the other feelings that had been running through me for the last sixteen hours.
I felt for her, and I was not surprised.
The big stage had found the place she'd been hollowed by the morning, the way big stages did to people who'd been hollowed by anything that day, and the not-surprised in me was not the not-surprised of disappointment—it was the not-surprised of a man who had been built to read the people in his life and had read this one accurately.
I should have called her.
I didn't.
I texted her. I think I texted her something. I don't remember the exact words. I'm sorry, sweetheart. Are you home? Or something close to it. Whatever I sent, the conversation went where it went, and the place it went, two minutes later, was Rebecca Lynn. Come here. I need you.
I would have to think about that later, too.
I had not asked for anyone in twenty years.
She came.
The cab dropped her in the drive and the butler brought her in.
I came down the staircase.
She turned.
Her face did the thing.
I did not crumple. The soldier in me, the one Bratton had sent down the long hallway alone, the one who had stood on rooftops in Southeast Asia and slabs of sandstone in Utah and across hotel rooms from deputy directors of the FBI without his face moving by a single muscle—he was the only piece of me that was still operational, and he held me upright down the staircase and across the marble.
I didn't crumple into her arms.
It was very close.
I took her hand instead.
"Come on," I said. "Let’s go out back."
She didn't ask why.
She let me lead her past the parlor and down a corridor I hadn't been down yet and out through a set of French doors onto a wide stone terrace, and then down a flight of brick steps to the lawn, and across the lawn toward the pier the lawn led to.
The night was cold. The grass crunched faintly under our boots.
Somewhere, up at the house, the windows were warm with the lights. Somewhere, out across the back lawn, the harbor was a flat, wide darkness with the running lights of small craft moving slow against the far shore.
The pier was lit by low landscape lights.
A yacht was moored at the end of it.
It was big. Big the way Dominion Hall was big—not gaudy, just of a different scale. Eighty feet, at least. Polished dark hull. Lit deck. The kind of vessel that lived in marinas where the slips were named on plaques.
Rebecca slowed.
She looked at it.
Her hand was in mine and the cold was on her cheeks and she had been crying somewhere tonight—I could see it in the slightly puffed line of her lower lid, in the way the wind found that small wetness and reddened it—and she looked at the yacht and let out a small sound that was almost amused.
"I wonder who that belongs to," she said.
I laughed.
It came out wrong. It came out the way laughs came out of men whose interiors had walked off the cliff and who were standing on the lip of the cliff still pretending they were standing on a porch. It came out a little crazy. I heard it and didn't care.
"I think it belongs to me," I said.
She turned and looked at me.
"What?"
I opened my mouth to explain the thing I did not yet have language for.
The yacht exploded.
My primal instinct gave me time for exactly two thoughts.
The first was get her down.
The second was that I was already moving and I was not going to be fast enough.
The shockwave hit us before the sound. A hot, hard wall of pressure that came across the lawn and across the pier and into our chests like a hand the size of the world.
My arm was around her and we were going backwards.
The air around us was a roaring orange. The ground came up sideways.
The only thing I felt with any clarity, in the half second before everything else stopped, was her body against mine, and the absence of her grip on my hand because the wave had taken our hands apart.
I wished that I had told her, one more time, that I loved her.
Then, the dark took us.