Disappeared on a mission he couldn't talk about, into a world he couldn't explain, leaving behind a wife who would eventually forget his name and sons who would scatter like seeds from a dead tree. We'd grieved him—not publicly, not with funerals or ceremonies, because there was no body and no confirmation, just the growing certainty of absence that eventually calcified into the shape of death.
And he was alive. Here. In the same city where I'd eaten breakfast and ridden a horse and made love to a woman and had dinner with people who were, apparently, my family.
"Whenever you're ready," Wyatt said, "you can see him."
I didn't answer. Couldn't.
I sat in the leather chair in the salon of Dominion Hall, holding a glass of stolen tequila, and tried to find a single thought that would stay still long enough to be useful.
My father was alive.
The man who'd saida horse can see a man's soul.The man who'd watched me white-knuckle every ride and shaken his head and named me for a general who wouldn't quit. The man I missed every day was alive, and had been alive, and was here.
The tequila sat in my glass, amber in the low light.
The room was quiet.
Wyatt was watching me with the patient, steady expression of a brother who'd been where I was sitting and knew there was nothing to say that would make the landing softer.
What to do now?
I had no idea.
No idea how to be a man with a living father when I'd been a man without one for so long. No idea how to reconcile the grief I'd carried—the real, bone-deep grief of a son who'd lost the person who'd shaped him—with the impossible fact that the loss had been, in some way, a lie. No idea what I'd say when I walked into a room and saw the face I'd been looking for in the faces of strangers all evening.
The tequila was getting warm in my hand.
I drank it. Set the glass down.
Wyatt was still watching.
"Yeah," I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "I'm going to need a minute."
Wyatt nodded. He understood. He'd had his own minute. His own version of this chair and this room and this glass and this silence.
I sat in it. Let it hold me. Not the way the dinner had held me—warm, noisy, full of people. This was different. The silence of something fundamental rearranging itself. Tectonic. The kind of shift that left the landscape unrecognizable when it was done.
My father was alive.
The tequila was gone. The glass was empty. The room was quiet.
What to do now?
I sat in the silence, and I didn't have an answer.
25
LOUISA
Grant had been inside for twenty minutes.
I knew because I'd stopped checking after the first five, which meant I'd been checking, which was something I acknowledged without judgment and set down.
He was with his brother. Whatever was happening inside that house was significant in the way that only certain conversations were—the kind that rearranged the architecture of a person, that left them different on the other side in ways that couldn't be fully anticipated from the outside.
I stayed at the table. Drank my bourbon. Let the evening do what it was doing, which was deepening into the Charleston dark that came after the last of the harbor light had gone and the candles had taken over entirely—warm, contained, amber against the stone of the patio and the dark of the water beyond.
The copper-haired woman—Sophie—had found a seat at the far end of the table between Vivienne and Sloane, who had absorbed her with the practiced ease of women who understood that sometimes a person needed to be folded into the group without ceremony. I could hear her laugh from where I sat—genuine, warm, the laugh of someone who was relieved to be somewhere that asked nothing complicated of her at this particular moment.
