The line is quiet long enough that I check the screen. Still connected.
"They're moving forward," I say.
"I know.”
He says it as he says things when he's already processed them and arrived somewhere on the other side—flat, stripped down to the fact of it. He knew about March 12th. He always knew it was the gap and he's been sitting with it since Kahale's first visit.
"I need you to tell me everything," I say. "All of it. Before anyone else does."
A longer pause.
The fluorescent above me flickers once and steadies. My back is cold against the concrete pillar and the garage is very quiet, just the buzz of the lights and the distant sound of the city above us.
"Come to the house tonight," my father says. "Bring Jade."
The line goes dead.
I standin the parking garage for a while after he hangs up.
Bring Jade.
My father who parcels information in measured doses, who has spent thirty years deciding what people need to know and giving them exactly that and nothing else, who told me to keep Jade out of it back in September and again at various points since—my father just asked me to bring her.
She's been building her own picture from the pieces she could reach, fitting them together late at night, figuring out Torres without anyone telling her, sitting across from Jamesfor months and asking the right questions. My father has been watching her since the first dinner.
Him asking me to bring Jade means he's done managing the perimeter. It means the next conversation requires all of us in the room and he's not going to try to hold the edges anymore.
I push off the concrete pillar.
My jacket is cold where it pressed against the wall and my phone is warm in my hand and the garage is exactly as it was—the buzzing lights, the chemical smell of the cleaning crew's Thursday pass. I've been standing here for maybe eight minutes.
I call Jade.
She picks up on the second ring. "Hey."
"Are you home?"
"Just got in." A pause. She reads my voice like she always does, pulling the information out of the flat of it. "What happened?"
"The detective came back. My father wants us both at the house tonight." I keep my voice level. "I'll tell you everything on the drive.”
"Okay," she says after a long moment. "I'll be ready."
I hang up and walk back to my car.
24
PHOENIX
My father opens the door himself.
It's nine in the evening and the housekeeper finished an hour ago and he could have left the door unlatched and let us find our own way in. He didn't. He waited by the door instead, which means he heard the car in the circular drive and stood up from whatever he was doing and walked to the front of the house and waited. That's not something Nicholas Crawford does for routine visits.
He looks at Jade first.
Not at me—at her. Just a beat of eye contact in the yellow light of the porch lamp, long enough to be deliberate, short enough that she might almost mistake it for ordinary. I've been reading my father's face for thirty-two years and I know the difference between a look that includes someone and a look that acknowledges them. This is the second. He's not greeting her. He's telling her something without words—that she was asked here specifically, that she's not an extension of me tonight, that whatever gets said in the next hour is being said to her as much as to anyone else.
Jade holds his gaze. Her chin is level, her shoulders straight, and she meets him with the stillness she brings to things thatmatter. She doesn't smile and she doesn't deflect. She just looks back at him until he steps aside.
