CHAPTER SEVEN
MERRITT
The mugshot surfaced on a Sunday, thirty-one years old and grainy, my father's face gaunt under fluorescent light, a booking number across his chest like a price tag.
Someone had dug it out of a county records database and posted it to a forum thread about the Bellamy scandal, and from there it traveled the way anything ugly travels online, fast and without context, until a tabloid aggregator ran it with the caption THE FATHER-IN-LAW BELLAMY AERONAUTICS DOESN'T WANT YOU TO SEE.
I called my father before I'd finished reading the article.
"I saw it," Mercer said, before I could say anything at all. His voice had the particular flatness it got when he was working hard to keep something else out of it. "Somebody sent it to your mother. She showed me."
"Dad, I'm so sorry."
"You're sorry. Merritt, I'm the one who put that photo in the world to begin with.
Thirty-one years old and stupid enough to think I could get away with something, and now it's following you around like a shadow you never earned.
" He paused, an old man's pause, tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
"I keep thinking I already paid for this.
Eleven months inside, everything after, the years it took to get your mother to trust me with the checkbook again.
And here it is again, hurting the one part of my life I actually did right by. "
"You didn't do anything to me, Dad. You did something to a court thirty-one years ago and you served the sentence they gave you."
"Doesn't stop people from looking at that photo and deciding what kind of family raised you."
"Let them decide whatever they want. Their decision doesn't change what's true.
" I sat down at the kitchen table, phone pressed hard against my ear, aware of how badly I wanted him to hear this the way I meant it rather than the way guilt would inevitably twist it once we hung up.
"You served your time. That's the whole transaction, as far as the law is concerned.
You don't owe anyone a second sentence just because a photo resurfaced at an inconvenient moment for my husband's company. "
"I owe you and Blythe more than I can ever pay back, and you know it."
"You've been paying it back every single day for twenty years, Dad.
Every dinner you made when Mom worked doubles.
Every time you drove three hours to see me at school even when the truck was barely running.
That's not a debt anymore. That's just who you are now.
" I kept my voice level, though it cost me something to do it.
"I need you to hear this the way I mean it.
Neither of us is dirty because of something you did before I was old enough to remember most of it.
You're allowed to have a past. I'm allowed to come from it.
Neither one of those things makes either of us something to be ashamed of. "
He was quiet for a long moment, long enough that I could hear my mother in the background asking if he was all right. "You sound like you've been thinking about this for a while," he finally said.
"I have. More this week than usual."
"Is Whitaker taking care of you through all this?"
I hesitated, and the hesitation told me something I wasn't ready to examine yet. "He's dealing with a lot right now. The company, Fenner, the contract."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know," I said. "He's trying."
He let that sit for a moment, and then, in the way he'd always known how to do, he changed the subject before either of us had to sit inside it any longer. "You still got that basil plant going, or did you kill it like the last one?"
"It's thriving, actually. I finally figured out I was overwatering it."
"Your mother's been overwatering hers for thirty years and it still won't die.
I think it's spite." He laughed, a real laugh, the first sound in the whole conversation that didn't have guilt threaded through it.
"Remember when you were about nine and you tried to grow tomatoes in a coffee can on the porch because you were convinced you could sell them to the neighbors? "
"I made four dollars."
"You made four dollars and spent every bit of it on candy from the gas station, and then complained your stomach hurt for two days. I told you selling tomatoes was supposed to teach you the value of a dollar, not the value of a stomachache."
"I remember you eating half my inventory before I could sell it."
"I paid for those. Fair market price." I could hear him smiling through the phone, and for a minute he sounded like my father again instead of a man auditioning for forgiveness. "You call your mother today?"
"Not yet. I will."
"Do. She worries more than she lets on." A pause, softer now. "I love you, Merritt Anne. Whatever else is true, that part never once needed proving."
"I love you too, Dad."
Blythe called an hour after I hung up with our father, already furious in the specific way she got furious on behalf of other people rather than herself.
"They should be putting out a statement," she said. "The Bellamys. Something defending Dad, defending you, telling everybody exactly where to shove their county records search."
"It's complicated, Blythe. The company's in the middle of a federal contract review. Anything they say gets picked apart for what it means about Fenner's situation."
"I don't care about Fenner's situation. Dad's photo is on some tabloid site right now next to a headline calling him something Bellamy Aeronautics doesn't want you to see, and nobody up there in your fancy world seems to think that's worth a single public sentence in his defense."
"Whitaker defended me privately. He told me directly that I have nothing to hide."
"Privately doesn't put anything back on the internet, Merritt. Privately doesn't take that photo down. Privately is easy. Privately doesn't cost him a single thing."
I didn't have an answer for that, not one I liked saying out loud, so I changed the subject to something easier, Blythe's job, our mother's garden, anything that let us hang up without either of us having to sit any longer in the space her question had opened.
But it stayed with me after the call ended, the way certain sentences do, lodging somewhere behind the ribs and refusing to leave quietly. Privately doesn't cost him a single thing.
I thought about Whitaker's face the night he told me I had nothing to hide, how completely I'd believed him, how completely I still believed he meant every word of it.
I thought about the mugshot circulating online with no public response from a company that employed a communications team of fourteen people, a team currently pouring every hour into managing Fenner's exposure and none, as far as I could tell, into managing mine.
I decided, that night, that I was allowed to hold both things at once.
My husband loved me and believed what he told me.
My husband was also, whether he'd admit it yet or not, treating the defense of my family as something that happened behind closed doors while the defense of his own name happened in front of cameras.
I didn't know yet what to do with that distinction. I only knew it existed now, sitting quietly beside the one I'd built my marriage on, and that the difference between the two was too clear to argue myself out of anymore.