32. Catalina
Chapter thirty-two
Catalina
It’s a hundred and fifty yards from my porch to my father’s, and I’ve walked it maybe ten thousand times, and I have never had to make myself do it.
I cross the blue yard carrying three words I have never let myself need.
My father is in the chair worn to his shape, boots on the rail, coffee at his elbow. He spent twenty years on the bench and another lifetime preparing to look unsurprised when his daughter finally asks for help.
“I need help.”
It comes out rougher than I mean it, because the words have never been used. “I made a mess, Dad. I’ve been making it for months. I hid it, and I made it worse, and this is not one I can fix on my own.”
He doesn’t move for a second. Then he nods, slow, a man taking a verdict he’s been braced for, and says what hits me worse than kindness would have.
“I know, m’ija. I’ve been waiting for you to come and tell me.”
So I sit in the other chair, the one that’s been empty since my mother stopped coming out here in the evenings, and I tell him.
All of it. Not the managed shape I handed him at my counter weeks ago, the one with the center cut out.
The whole thing. Sebastian. The review. The part where I thought I could carry it alone and quiet.
The part where somewhere in the post-holes I fell for the placement, the hockey player, the felony, the whole beautiful disaster of him, and cut him loose five days ago to save this ranch.
I don’t dress up my share of it. My father put that in me before I could walk. You do not duck it. I took the bet. I raised the stakes. I bet his table and Diaz’s without telling either of them, then made the cowardly choice to cover it. Every bad piece of it has my name on it.
I lay it all out on a retired judge’s porch the way you’d lay out a case you know you’re going to lose, and I wait for the sentence.
He’s quiet a long time. Long enough that the light goes and the first bat comes out over the yard.
“You want to know what I’d tell you,” he says finally, “if I were a better father and a worse judge.” He turns the cold coffee in his hands and doesn’t drink it.
“I’d tell you this is mine. That you learned it here.
You spent your whole childhood watching me carry the county home in my head every night and never set one piece of it down where your mother could reach it, and you took a look at that and decided it was what strong was.
” A beat. “I taught you to stand between everything you love and the weather. Taught it so well you did it to me.”
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say to a thing that lands that square.
“So I’m not going to sit here and tell you what you did wrong.
You ran that ledger harder than I ever could.
” He sets the cup down. And here’s my father, sixty-eight, bad hip, his robes a few years behind him now, and something comes into his face I haven’t seen since I was a girl watching him leave for a trial that mattered.
“You want to keep telling me what you did wrong. Or you want to help me take that son of a bitch apart.”
Then my dad asks what I should have asked before I removed Finn.
“The full tape from the lot. Did his lawyer ever get it?”
“I don’t know.” The answer tastes like another failure. I made a decision about Finn’s freedom without asking what Finn was doing to protect it.
My father reaches for his phone, then stops. “Call him first. It’s his case.”
So I do.
Finn answers on the second ring. Neither of us says hello.
“I know how Sebastian used the review,” I say. “And I think his firm has the rest of the tape.”
“Marcus is already on it.” His voice is rough, controlled. “The preservation demand went out before I packed. The civil case is still open, so they have to produce the file or explain where it went.”
He didn’t wait for me to rescue him. He didn’t swing at the man who hurt us. He hired the right fight and stayed in it.
“Tell me what you need from me.”
The question catches where the one in the barn caught, except this time I answer. “Authorization to speak with Marcus, and every record he can share. I’ll handle the county contract. You handle your case. We share what connects them, and neither of us decides for the other.”
A beat of silence. “Yeah, Catt. That’s how this should have gone.”
Marcus joins the call. My father asks about the injured man’s civil claim, the chain of custody, and which firm had access to the original recording. Sebastian’s firm sits in the answer to every question.
The hospital bill and the man whose life changed under Finn’s hands didn’t vanish when the criminal case moved into intervention. Marcus expects a settlement even if the full tape changes the leverage. Finn has already told him the last hit remains his.
Marcus is careful about what the footage can do. It may restore the beginning. It cannot erase the final hit. “I know,” Finn says. “I’m not asking it to.”
I never asked. I called the not-asking strength.
It was never strength. Everyone who loves me has been saying the same thing, and I couldn’t hear it because I built my whole self out of being the one who sees everything first.
I’m not doing this to get him back. I don’t get to think that far. I cut him clean and cruel on purpose, called him a good worker to his face, and a man doesn’t come back through the dark toward a woman who did that to him. I wouldn’t ask him to. This isn’t a door I’m opening for Finn.
It’s a door I’m opening for me. To stop being the hollow thing that cuts the real one loose to keep the paperwork clean. To fight for what’s mine the honest way, whether or not there’s anybody left standing at the end of it to fight beside.
But God help me, watching my father write something on the back of an envelope in the block letters he’s used my whole life. If it works. If they take Sebastian’s weapon out of his hand and turn it around, and the ranch is still standing when the dust comes down.
Then maybe I have earned the one trip I want: to stand in front of a man I wronged and hand him the truth I was too much a coward to give him the first time.
Not to be forgiven. Just to quit lying.
By noon the next day, Finn and Marcus are forcing production through the civil case while my father, county counsel, and I prepare the contract response. Ramón is informed through counsel and recuses from any new order involving Finn. For the first time, nobody is carrying the entire fight alone.
It doesn’t come down the second you let somebody else take a corner.
That’s just one more place I was wrong, all those years I stood under it alone, calling the weight of it mine.