“What did you tell her?”
“That you were on calls. Because you were. You’re always on calls.” He took a drink, watching me over the bottle. “What are you doing, Ash?”
“Protecting the SEAS project. Richard contacted one of Charlie’s team members directly. Unauthorized. I’m locking it down.”
“OK. That sounds like a thing you should do. Does Charlie know?”
“She doesn’t need to worry about it right now.”
Shane set his beer down. Slowly. The way he did things when he wanted you to notice he was doing them.
“She doesn’t need to worry about it,” he repeated. Not a question. A tasting of the words, like he was checking them for something. “Because you’ve got it handled.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve also—what, restructured her project timeline?” He nodded toward the legal pad, which was facing him. I’d forgotten he could read upside down. Useless party trick that had been annoying me since childhood.
“I accelerated Phase Two to protect the data from?—”
“From Richard. Yeah. I got that.” Shane leaned back. Studied the ceiling for a moment, which was his way of gathering athought he was about to deliver whether you wanted it or not. “You remember when Dad used to rearrange Mom’s studio?”
I set down the beer.
“She’d be in the middle of a project and he’d come in and move her easels around because the light was better on the other wall, or he’d reorganize her supplies because his system was more efficient. And she’d come back and stand in the doorway and not say anything. You remember that? The not-saying-anything part?”
“That’s not what this is.”
“No?”
“Dad moved things to feel useful. I’m moving things because there’s an actual threat.”
“There was always an actual reason. The light was actually better. His system was actually more efficient. He was never wrong about the facts. He was wrong about the part where he didn’t ask.”
The words landed somewhere below my sternum and sat there, heavy and unwelcome. I took a drink of the beer I didn’t want.
“Charlie’s not Mom,” I said.
“No,” Shane said. “She’s not. Mom never called him on it.” He stood up. Took his beer. Paused at the door. “She’s out there reading on the couch, by the way. In your shirt. Looks happy. Might want to go be in the room while that’s still true.”
He left. I sat with the legal pad and the growing list and the cold knot in my stomach that I was choosing to interpret as concern about Richard and not as the thing Shane had just held up to the light.
She might see the amended filing. Of course she might—it was her project, her data, her grant. But I had to risk it. This wasn’t about credit. It was about making sure she had what she’d built this for. What she’d earned.
I went outto the couch. I sat with her for the rest of the afternoon. She leaned against me and read and I pretended to read and actually thought about load tolerances and threat vectors and the eleven-page report sitting in my email that I hadn’t finished processing.
Charlie set the table without being asked, and the twelve-seat dining table that had never been full had four people at one end and it looked?—
It looked like something.
Charlie caught my eye across the table during one of Shane’s stories and smiled at me. Not the careful smile. The real one. The one I’d seen for the first time on the terrace in Roatan when she’d told me about the octopus that had tried to steal her camera, and I’d thought: oh, that’s what she looks like when she’s not braced for something to happen.
I smiled back. Relief and grief at the same time. I didn’t understand how both could live in the same moment, but they did.
After dinner. After dishes. After Shane talked Charlie and Mia into a card game that lasted an hour and generated enough laughter to fill every room in the house. After Charlie fell asleep against my shoulder on the couch while Mia and Shane argued about scoring.
After I carried her upstairs and she made a soft sound against my neck but didn’t wake up. After I pulled the covers over her and stood in the doorway of my own bedroom and looked at a woman sleeping in my bed and felt something so large I couldn’t get my arms around it.
After all of that, I went back downstairs.
