"And you said nothing."
He doesn't answer that with words. He holds my gaze and waits, which is its own answer. He made a decision to say nothing, and he's not going to apologize for that decision.
I turn away from him and move to the window. The coffee smell is stronger here, close to the tray on the credenza. I put my hand on the windowsill and look at the roses and breathe through the anger building in my chest.
He knew. He knew about James and the pregnancy and Sydney raising her alone, and he knew all of this before I brought her to this house for dinner and watched my mother ask her about her writing and watched her charm every person at the table. He watched all of it knowing.
I turn back from the window.
"Why did you invite James to the BBQ," I say.
Dad looks at me steadily. "I hadn't seen him in a while. I called him. It was a Sunday afternoon." A pause. "At the time, Jade wasn't supposed to come."
"Her plans changed.”
"Yes."
I look at my father across the desk. Sixty-two years old, straight-backed, the white shirt immaculate at eight in the morning, his hands folded on the closed file. I have spent my entire life learning to read this man and I still don’t know who he really is.
He could lie to me. He has before. But this feels like the truth. What he's describing requires him to have predicted that Jade's plans would fall through that specific afternoon. My father plans things, but he plans them around variables he can control.
"All right," I say.
Dad looks at me. "Is that all."
"For now."
He picks up his coffee. "She's good for you," he says, not looking at me. He says it flatly, like a man who has observed something long enough to be certain of it. "Whatever you're thinking about the rest of it, hold that alongside it."
I look at him. "That's an interesting thing to say."
"It's a true thing." He sets the cup down. "You've been different since she came into your life. Steadier. Less like me at your age." He meets my eyes. "I consider that an achievement."
I don't have an answer for that.
I leave the study and walk back through the house, past the marble foyer and the kitchen where Jade has sat across from Olive a dozen times in the months since the BBQ. The house is quiet around me. My footsteps on the tile are too loud.
My mother is in the garden when I come out the back. She's kneeling at the south wall with her shears, working through the roses, and she looks up when she hears the door.
"Phoenix." She pulls off one glove. "Come sit for a moment."
"I need to get back."
She reads the tension in my shoulders, the set of my jaw, everything I learned to control from my father that she learned to see through anyway. "Five minutes," she says.
I sit on the low wall across from her.
She doesn't ask what happened in the study. She pulls her other glove off and sets both of them on the stone beside her and looks at me with those calm gray eyes.
"He told you what he's willing to tell you," she says. Not a question.
"Yes."
"And the rest?"
"He filed it away."
"I don't know if he knew before you brought her home," Olive says. "I genuinely don’t, and I know your father better than anyone alive. If he looked into her early and found out who she was and said nothing, that's one thing. If he found out later and still said nothing, that's another." She pauses. "Either way he let it unfold without telling you. That I'm certain of."
