CHAPTER 50
Sebastian
For twelve years I ran a company that spanned four continents and never once learned how to boil an egg.
I know this now because Theo told me, on a Tuesday, with the flat contempt only a three-year-old can summon.
“It’s green,” he said, poking the yolk. “You did it wrong.” He was right.
I’d done it wrong. I did most things wrong that first month in Paris, in the narrow apartment two streets from Maison Cendre where I’d traded a forty-room house for four rooms and a kettle that screamed, and I found (this is the part I could never have explained to the man I used to be) that I did not mind being wrong out loud in front of my son.
I had learned, at last, how to be wrong. It was, it turned out, the only skill that had ever mattered.
I’d stepped back. Not resigned (Ada had been clear that martyrdom was just arrogance in a hair shirt) but stepped back, handed the machine to people who wanted to run it, kept a seat and lost the throne.
My days now had holes in them, and into the holes came ordinary things.
The walk to the boulangerie where Theo insisted on carrying the bread and dropped it exactly once per outing.
The market on Sundays where Ada taught me to smell a melon and I pretended to be worse at it than I was, just to watch her mouth go crooked with the effort of not laughing.
The bath that flooded. The lion phase, which was total, which was everywhere, which meant the apartment filled slowly with drawings of lions until they papered the fridge and the hallway and, once, the inside of my briefcase.
Ada and I were careful with each other, and the care was its own kind of tenderness.
We did not rush. Four years is a long fall and we were climbing back up hand over hand, testing each hold.
But there were mornings now when she leaned into me at the counter, coffee in both hands, the copper of her hair still sleep-wild, and let her weight rest against my chest for the length of a breath.
And I had learned to receive that breath the way a starving man receives bread.
Slowly. Gratefully. Without grabbing. Some nights she fell asleep on the sofa against my shoulder with a stack of formula cards sliding off her lap, and I would sit unmoving for an hour so as not to wake her, my arm gone numb, the happiest I had ever been in my life.
I did not have him yet. I knew that. Ada had said it once, low and even, the truest thing anyone ever handed me: You don’t get him because he has your eyes.
You get to earn him. Ask your son how that feels.
So I earned him in the only currency he took: time, and patience, and never once flinching when he called me Sebastian in that careful, guarded way, the way you name a guest.
It was a Thursday. Rain on the atelier skylight, the whole room smelling of iris and cut stems and the wax Ada used to fix her blotters.
Theo had commandeered the big worktable, up on his knees on a stool, tongue between his teeth, working a lion into being with a green crayon because green was the correct color for lions that week.
I sat across from him doing nothing important, some paperwork I’d stopped reading, watching the small furious concentration of him, the copper head bent, the steel-grey eyes, my eyes, God help me, the one thing I’d given him that he couldn’t refuse.
“His name is Gaston,” Theo announced, of the lion.
“Gaston is a good name,” I said.
He added a mane. Ferocious. Then, without slowing, without lifting his head, without any of the ceremony I had privately begged the universe for across four hundred sleepless nights:
“Papa,” Theo said, “does Gaston have a crown or a hat?”
The crayon kept moving. He hadn’t even looked up.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I tried again.
“A crown,” I managed. “Kings get crowns.”
“Okay,” he said, satisfied, and drew one, and the whole ordinary Thursday went on exactly as it had been, rain and iris and a green lion getting a crown, as though the floor of my chest had not just given way, as though my son had not just handed me the one word I had spent four years learning I did not deserve and would spend the rest of my life trying to.
Papa. Not looking up. As if it had always been mine. As if it were the most natural thing in the world to call me that, as if there had never been a gala or a banner or a woman in white, as if I had been here the whole time carrying the bread and getting the eggs wrong.
I put my head down on the atelier table, there among the blotters and the stems, and I wept (the Blade of Vale Group, undone at last, not by a takeover or a threat or a loss, but by a boy naming his lion), and I did not care who saw.
Ada saw. She was in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and when I lifted my ruined face to hers she was not laughing at me. Her green eyes had gone bright and spilling, and watching the two of us there among the stems, she finally let herself cry too, four years late, and exactly on time.