CHAPTER TEN
Kael — What My Father Made Me
I grew up believing my father was a businessman, in the way that children believe whatever the adults around them are willing to perform convincingly enough.
He had offices. He had meetings. He had a house on the water that he called a reward for hard work, and I was fourteen before I understood that the hard work in question had nothing to do with anything I could have explained to a teacher.
I found out the way most children of men like my father find out — by accident, by a conversation I wasn’t supposed to overhear, by the specific silence that fell over a room whenever certain names came up.
“You don’t have to tell me all of this tonight,” Nadia said, watching my face with an attention I wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of. “I said I wanted the whole story. I didn’t say you had to give it to me like a confession.”
“It is a confession,” I said. “I’d rather you have the real one than a version I’ve softened for you.”
She didn’t argue that, so I kept going.
By the time I was twenty, I understood exactly what Meridian Assurance was, and I understood, with the specific clarity of a young man trying to prove himself to a father who measured worth in usefulness, that the fastest way to earn my father’s approval was to make myself useful to it.
I’m not going to tell you I didn’t want that approval.
I wanted it badly enough to become someone I’m still working out how to live inside of.
I did work for him. Not the worst of it — I want to say that clearly, because I’ve spent four years deciding exactly how much of that sentence is true and how much is the kind of lie you tell yourself to keep functioning.
I moved money. I read ledgers. I made introductions between men who should never have been introduced to each other, and I told myself, every single time, that I was one step removed from the part that actually hurt people.
“And my mother,” Nadia said quietly. “Did you know her?”
“I was seventeen when she disappeared. I knew her as a name in my father’s rage, mostly — the woman who’d taken something from him and vanished with it, the failure his people couldn’t fix.
I didn’t understand yet what my father did to people who failed him.
I found out three years later, when a man who’d been assigned to find her and came back empty-handed disappeared himself, and nobody in my family ever spoke his name again. ”
I watched that land on her. I’d expected fear, or disgust, and what I got instead was something more complicated — a kind of grim recognition, like she was filling in the shape of a threat she’d been sensing her whole life without ever having its outline.
“My father died four years ago,” I said.
“Heart, not violence, which felt like an insult given everything he’d done to arrange other men’s deaths.
And in the process of settling what he left behind, I found his files on your mother.
Complete files. Everything he knew, everything his people had tracked, right up until the day the trail went cold nine years after she disappeared — the same year she died in what everyone believed was an accident. ”
“But you didn’t believe it.”
“I didn’t want to believe it,” I said, which was the truest thing I’d said all night.
“Because if it wasn’t an accident, it meant whoever inherited my father’s business had picked up exactly where he left off, and the daughter of the woman who’d humiliated him for a decade was still out there, unprotected, with a target on her that predated her entire adult life. ”
“So you decided to be my protection. Without asking.”
“I decided,” I said carefully, because this was the part I’d rehearsed least, the part where the story stopped being about my father and started being only about me, “that I couldn’t undo what my family had done to yours.
I couldn’t give your mother back the nine years she lost, or the life she should have had.
But I could make sure whoever came looking for you next found someone standing in the way.
I told myself that was enough. I told myself it didn’t need your permission, because permission would have meant explaining who I was, and I was certain — I’m still not entirely sure I was wrong — that the moment you knew my name, you’d never let me close enough to actually keep you safe. ”
Nadia was quiet for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice had lost some of the sharp edge it had carried into the room, replaced by something more exhausted and more honest.
“You don’t get to decide that for me,” she said. “Even if you were right. Especially if you were right. That’s not protection, Kael. That’s just control with a better excuse.”
It was the first time she’d said my name. I felt it land somewhere I wasn’t prepared to defend.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve known it for a while. I didn’t have a better answer, so I kept doing the wrong one.”
She didn’t forgive me. I want to be honest about that, in whatever record of this exists — she stood up, and she told me she needed time, and she left the storage unit without looking back, and I let her go because it was the first time in four years I’d actually let her decide something about us without me deciding it for her first.
It felt like losing her. It also, for the first time, felt like the beginning of something that might actually be earned instead of stolen.