“Tell me about your life,” I say. “Not the resume you let other men read. The parts that made you into the person who sat up in a chair down the hall so a stranger would feel safe.”
He smiles with one corner of his mouth. “You do go straight for the vein.”
“I don’t have patience for the long way around anymore.”
“Good,” he says, and takes his time forming the first sentence. “I’m the only son of a man who believed money was both medicine and proof. He made it in batches and measured it the way other men measure love. He was not cruel. He was…efficient. He thought if you could provide, you had done your job.”
“Was he wrong?” I ask.
“He wasn’t right enough,” Spencer says, tilting his head back and forth in a thinking gesture. “My mother knew the difference, and she made the house a happier space. A softer place. When she died, the house changed temperature. I went to boarding school to learn how to be a financial advisor.”
“And did you?”
“I learned to look like one.” He shrugs. “I came home in the summers and hid in the garage with the men who fixed the cars and other things we broke. I liked them. They told the truth about things because they were tired.”
“Tired people are honest,” I say. “They don’t have energy for the show.”
“Exactly.” He takes a breath. “And then I met a girl who worked in our kitchen. She laughed at me when I tried to help with the groceries and loaded two bags onto each arm like she was making a joke out of gravity. I asked her if she wanted to go to the county fair. She said she wasn’t a display.”
“Storm’s mother,” I say.
“Yes.” The word is fond and rueful and complicated. “She was the sharpest person in every room. She knew the weight of a name and how to use it to pry open doors that were supposed tostay closed. I told myself that meant she was brave. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it meant she was hungry in a way I didn’t understand.”
“What did your father do?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says simply. “He was a businessman with a trust fund. He didn’t believe in love. He advised me against marrying her. I married her anyway. I thought that would teach him something about wanting. It didn’t. It just gave him something new to ignore.”
“And you had Storm.”
Spencer’s face softens, the way the men do when they think I’m not looking. “We had a son who came into the world with his eyes open, like he didn’t trust us to run it right. He was small and furious and quiet about it in the loudest way imaginable. He loved the dog and the house keys and the way water sounds through pipes. He loved knives later, but that came honest. He needed edges so he could know where to stop.”
“What happened?” I ask, though I know pieces. I want his version. The version he can say now that his son is in a house where no one will weaponize a sentence.
“She wanted the family name without the family,” he says. “She wanted the money and the seat at the table that was meant for me. She wanted cameras that didn’t see anyone but her. When I told her no—slowly, carefully, with facts and patience—she heardnever.And she isn’t a woman who abides hearingnever.”
His fingers worry the handle of the mug. It’s the first restless gesture I’ve seen from him.
“She hired a man and told him to be thorough,” he says, voice light as if he’s telling me about the weather. “He was not. Storm heard us talking in the hallway afterward, but I didn’t know that until a few days ago. But back then I realized I could stay and fight her and teach my son to live in a war, or I could go and teach him that leaving is not the same as losing.”
“So you left,” I say.
“I left,” he confirms. “I took as little as I could carry and gave her as much as she wanted because—” He meets my eyes and lets me see the place where love was a wound and a cure. “—because money is easier to replace than a boy with his father still inside him. She kept the house and the name and all the things that don’t matter. I kept the part of my son that laughs and is kind.”
“You think she only wanted the money and power,” I say.
“I think she wanted to never be hungry again,” he says. “And she misdiagnosed the reason for the hunger.”
We sit with that. The house makes small morning noises. The marsh glitters like it forgot it was mud an hour ago and remembered it’s water now. Zeus snores a little.
Spencer sets his mug down and stands. It is not abrupt. He’s a man who doesn’t flee the table when it gets personal. He moves to the sink, rinses his cup, and comes back to rest his hands on the chair back.
“You are nothing like her,” he says. “You’re not interested in what a name buys. You are interested in what a nameprotects. Those are not the same things, and it makes you more than worthy of my son..”
My throat tightens. It annoys me and helps me in equal measure. “Sometimes I feel like I am a problem they keep choosing to have,” I say.
“You are a problem that makes them better,” he says, and although his eyes shine, there is no wobble in the words. “I am glad I get to see my son with someone who loves him and his friends enough to make them step boldly into rooms they’d rather watch from the edges. They’re destined to be the most powerful men there are in any room, and that’s a heavy burden to carry.”
“Thank you,” I manage, and it is not polite. It’s grateful.
