He sent it immediately, like he'd been holding it ready.
I looked at the address. Then at my phone's map. Then at my own feet, which were already tired.
Dominion Hall was twenty minutes on foot. I could walk it. I'd walked further in worse conditions and the cold didn't bother me the way it bothered people who hadn't grown up in the mountains.
But Tommy had saidI need you, and that was not a sentence that wanted a twenty-minute walk attached to it.
I flagged a cab on East Bay, which I had never done before in my life, not once, because cabs were not a thing people did in Caton's Chapel and I'd never lived anywhere else long enough to learn the habit. I stood on the curb with my arm out feeling slightly ridiculous until one actually stopped, which surprised me enough that I almost stepped back. I got in. I watched the meter the whole way there and told myself the tip money from tomorrow's shift would make up the difference, which was true, which was the kind of math I did automatically and probably always would.
The gate at Dominion Hall opened before the cab had fully stopped.
I paid, then stood on the drive and looked up at the enormous house.
It rose out of the Charleston dark the way things rose when they'd been built to stay. Stone and shadow and the warm amber of lit windows on multiple floors, Spanish moss in the live oaks hanging slow in the January cold. The kind of place that had absorbed enough history that it had stopped caring what you thought of it.
I'd never been anywhere like it.
I stood there a moment with my guitar on my back and my coat pulled close and I thought:this is the world he's in. Not the suite at The Palmetto Rose, which was beautiful and temporary. This. Permanent and certain and full of people I didn't know who did things I didn't understand.
The front door opened before I knocked.
A man with salt-and-pepper hair opened the door.
"Ms. Myers," he said.
I didn't ask how he knew my name.
"Tommy Dane," I said. "He asked me to come."
"Of course." He stepped back. "This way."
28
TOMMY
My father stood in the doorway of the suite. I stood inside it and the Atlantic was somewhere beyond the windows behind me and the world was holding still in that way it had been holding still since I'd opened the door.
He hadn't tried to come in.
I hadn't invited him.
He'd saidTommyin the voice I had not heard since I was eleven years old, and the voice had landed exactly where you'd expect a voice like that to land, which was somewhere I was going to have to spend a long time mapping. I had stood in the doorway and looked at him and said, very evenly,I need time.
He'd nodded.
That was the thing that did it, in a way I would have to work through later. The nod. The professionalof course you donod of a man who had practiced this scene in his head a thousand times and had known, going in, what the most likely outcome was.
He hadn't argued. He hadn't reached. He hadn't tried to make it a moment. He had nodded the way a soldier nodded at an order he didn't enjoy but understood. That nod had told mesomething I was not yet ready to say out loud, which was that the man had been in this room before. Not this room. But thiskindof room. With Wyatt. With Grant. He had been the man at the door of his sons' suites before. He had been turned away before. He had developed the muscle memory.
It wasn't his first delivery of this delivery.
I almost felt for him.
I didn't, exactly. The almost was as far as it got.
Underneath the man standing in the door of a suite at Dominion Hall in a snap-button shirt with his cuffs rolled twice, a boy was sitting on the edge of a bunk in Valentine, Texas, with his shoes still on, listening for a truck on the gravel that wasn't going to come. The boy wasn't ready to forgive anyone for anything. The boy was exactly the boy he'd been the morning the truck didn't come, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, and the long stretch of mornings and seasons and years that had followed. The boy was a piece of geology now, settled into the bedrock of me, and a man on a doorstep with a nod was not going to move him.
We didn't embrace.
