Page 25 of Take the Fall
I told him I’d rather do it over the phone. He could hear what I had to say down a line like anyone else.
I know you do.
And he hung up first. Again.
So: an afternoon cab, King Street going by, an address I hadn’t been allowed to have until a woman with a corner-office telephone manner texted it to me an hour ago. Even the address was discretion, handed down. I’d taken it anyway. The only way to get a hand on what was being done to me was to stand in the same room as the man doing it, and he’d made sure the room would be his.
My phone sat face-down on the seat beside me. I’d put it there so I’d stop checking it. Hawley had gone in to the station hours ago, pulled out the door by a call before the coffee was cold. I’d showered, stood around the kitchen a while, and then done the one thing left in the wreck that still had my own hand on it. Called my father.
I had a plan. It was not a complicated plan. I was going to walk in, say the things I’d come to say, and leave. I was going to stay upright and controlled and not give him one inch he hadn’t already taken, because the inch he hadn’t taken was the only leverage I had.
The Internal Affairs review was still running. Left alone, it might clear me, because somewhere in a room I’d never get into people were reading the actual file and could still reach the actual conclusion. That was the thing that needed protecting. The file. The clean running of it. The people attached to it who hadn’t asked to be.
One person in particular who hadn’t asked to be.
I hadn’t named it to myself in those terms before. I was naming it now, in the back of a cab with the city going past the window, because if I was walking into my father’s territory toput a stop to something, I should at least be honest with myself about what it was I was protecting.
The cab stopped at a light. A woman crossed in front of us with a coffee cup and a phone and the total indifference of a person who had somewhere specific to be. I watched her go. The light changed. The city moved on.
I’d made the call because I had to. Not because I thought I could beat him outright. Because the alternative was sitting in the apartment for another week while he moved the ground one degree at a time, and by the end of it I’d be standing in a spot I’d never agreed to and couldn’t get out of without having said one word to stop it. He had always been better at patience than I was. That had never been the argument I could win.
But today was not about winning.
Today was about being in the room. Making him look at me and understand that I knew what he was doing, and that whatever he thought was keeping me compliant: the suspension, the file, the hope it might still go my way without any intervention. That was no longer sufficient. He needed to pull back, and he needed to know that I knew what he was doing well enough to name it to his face, and if that was the only ground I came away with today, it was enough.
The cab pulled up. I paid through the app and got out.
There was no sign on the building. That was the point, the same way the suit was the point, and the address sent by an assistant was the point. None of it was for people who needed to be told. It was for people who already knew, and I had grown up knowing, and my knowing it was the concession I was making just by being here. I walked to the door and it opened before I reached it.
“Mr. Branford’s guest?” The man who opened it was probably forty, navy jacket, nothing in his face.
“Ryan Carlson.” My name. Not his.
He took it without a beat. “Right this way.”
The main room had the particular quiet of serious money at a table. Not empty. Occupied in a way that ate sound. Carpet, dark paneling, white linen, the kind of lighting that costs more than most people’s monthly take-home to achieve that look of not trying. Half a dozen tables, most of them with two men apiece in suits I recognized by cut without looking twice. The kind of room that had never needed to advertise what it was.
The private dining room was through a door at the back.
My father was already seated.
He always arrived first. First meant he’d chosen the chair with the sightline to the door. First meant the other person walked toward him. He stood when I came in, which he had not done in the last fifteen years, and I noted it, the standing, because he had not changed his habits for sentiment, which meant the standing was doing work.
“Ryan.”
“Father.”
I pulled out the opposite chair myself before anyone behind me could do it, and I sat without being invited, which was a small thing and meant nothing except that I meant it to mean something. He sat too. Whatever performance the standing had been, it was done.
He was sixty-one and looked fifty. Charcoal suit with that particular cut that comes from a man who has been measured by the same tailor since he was thirty and has never once needed to ask how much it costs. Silver hair, mostly now, parted the way it always had been. His hands were on the table and there was nothing anxious in them.
“You look tired,” he said.
“I didn’t come here to talk about how I look.”
“Noted.” He reached for the water carafe and poured his own glass. He’d already ordered something for the table and I didn’t move toward any of it. “I ordered for you as well. In case.”
“I’m not hungry.”
