That's the thing that nearly breaks me.
He doesn't stand up.
Doesn't come to meet me. Doesn't move at all.
He sits in that chair—his father's chair, probably, because everything on this ranch is inherited—and watches me walk across the yard the way he'd watch a deer walk into a clearing.
Patient. Still. Deciding.
I climb the porch steps.
My legs are shaking. My hands are shaking.
Everything is shaking except my voice, which I've been holding steady through sheer force of will since I turned onto the county road.
"Harlan."
His face does something I can't read. The name lands on him like a physical thing.
Nobody calls him that—he's Phantom to the world, the president, the title.
But I never called him Phantom.
He was always Harlan to me.
And saying it now, standing on this porch for the first time in twenty-one years, feels like pulling a pin out of a grenade.
"Marlena."
My name in his mouth.
I'd forgotten what that sounds like.
No—that's a lie.
I never forgot. I hear it in my sleep.
"She told you," I say.
"She told me."
"How long ago?"
"Yesterday." He leans forward. Elbows on his knees. Hands clasped. The posture of a man who's in control of everything except the thing that matters most. "She stood in my barn and told me she's my daughter. Mydaughter, Marlena. Twenty years old. Standing in my barn with my face and your hair and asking me?—"
His voice cracks. Just barely. A fracture in the granite that closes almost before I can register it.
"She asked me if I would have wanted her." He looks up at me.
The eyes I remember—pale, sharp, the eyes that used to look at me like I was the only thing in the room worth seeing.
They're not looking at me like that now.
They're looking at me like I'm the answer to a question he's been screaming into the void since yesterday. "She asked me if I would havewantedher. Like there was a world where the answer could be no."
"Harlan—"
"Get inside."
