"Sydney was in a hospital bed with a baby she'd decided to raise alone, and James would have tried to make contact in the days after. Not that night. But soon." Olive looks at me steadily. "Sydney made a decision. I don't know exactly what she told him. But I know Sydney, and I know he didn’t know about you existing.”
The air in the kitchen has changed pressure. I feel it in my ears, like the atmosphere before weather arrives.
"She told him the baby didn't survive," I say. It comes out flat, not a question.
Olive is quiet for a moment. “That’s what I figured.”
I sit with that. James getting a phone call or a voicemail or a text, being told the baby was gone. Carrying that for years. Thinking he'd lost a child rather than understanding he'd been kept from one. The face I couldn't read across the table finally makes sense now.
Outside the gardener has moved further along the wall, his shears catching the light. The roses he's working through are the deep red ones, the ones that were closed when I came here last time.
I think about James sayingmy mother used to grow peoniesto a vase of flowers he had no way of knowing I'd chosen. Past tense. His mother is gone. I have a grandmother I'll never meet and I don't even know her name.
"Did you know who I was when Phoenix brought me home," I say. "That first dinner."
"I suspected early," she says. "Your last name. A mannerism. How you stood in my doorway." She pauses. "I told Nicholas when I was certain."
"And you both decided to say nothing."
"We decided to let you find your own way in."
I turn that over.We decided.Nicholas decided. Olive went along with it, the same as she'd described going along with things before.
"Does Nicholas know about James," I say. "That I'm his daughter specifically?”
"Yes," Olive says. "He's known for a long time."
This lands differently than the rest of it. Everything else I've been absorbing has been about Sydney and Olive and history, events that happened before I existed or before I could understand them. But Nicholas knowing specifically, Nicholas who has sat across from me at his dinner table a dozen times.
I look at Olive. "I think I need to talk to James."
She nods slowly. "I think so too."
"I don't know what I'd say."
"You don't need to know yet." She picks up her mug. "You just need to start."
Outside the afternoon light has shifted, the gold going thin, the garden moving into softer blue. I've been here for two hours without noticing.
"Will you tell me if he asks about me," I say. "If he contacts you first."
"He already has," Olive says. "Twice." She meets my eyes. "I told him to wait."
I look at her and say, “thank you.”
She shakes her head once.
I pick up my tea, cold now, and drink it anyway.
5
JADE
Itext him on a Tuesday morning while Phoenix is in the shower.
I don't plan it that way. I'm sitting at the kitchen table with my coffee and my phone and Olive's number still open from the night before, and I scroll up to where she typed James's number into my contacts, and I open a new message before I can think about it long enough to stop.
Hi. This is Jade Catalano. We met at the Crawford estate last week. I'd like to get together if you're open to it.
