Page 70 of Take the Fall
Then the quiet changed. I felt it change. I’ve spent enough years next to him to feel the air shift before he speaks.
I made myself ask it.
“Where were you,” I said. “Six days. And don’t make it a joke. I need the serious answer.”
He didn’t answer right away. His hand found mine on his knee and held it, and I let him, and I waited.
“When they hurt you,” he said finally, “I came apart. On the sidewalk. I wasn’t proud of how I did it.” He breathed. “But it wasn’t about the secret, Luke.”
“Then what.”
“That it was my father. That the men who put you on the ground were sent by my father, and that as long as he had reach, he could do it again, and worse, and I’d never see it coming because I’d never believe it of him until it was you in a box.” His hand gripped mine. “And I could not, I could not, stand in a future where I let that man near you a second time because I was too stupid to cut him off.”
“So you ran.”
“So I worked.” He pulled back and looked at me, and there was something in his face I hadn’t seen before, something settled and a little frightening. “I had a choice to make. Between you, your safety, the people at our division, and my father and whatever he thinks he’s owed. It wasn’t a hard choice. It just took that long to accomplish it properly, and I didn’t want you anywhere near it while I did, because if it went wrong I wanted it landing on me and nobody else.”
A cold thing started up under my ribs that had nothing to do with the bruising.
“Ryan. What did you do.”
He told me.
He told me he’d gone to his father’s office. Alone, unannounced, and sat down across from the man and got him talking, and recorded every word of it. The transfer. Whitfield. The men in the laneway. All of it, in his father’s own voice, on a phone in his breast pocket.
I went cold all the way through.
“You sat in a room with him alone and baited him into a confession? Are you insane?” I heard my own voice go flat and careful, the voice I use when I’m holding something down.
“He was never going to hurt me. Not really. I’m the heir. I was, anyway.” A grim flick of a smile. “The most valuable thing in that building to him. He’d sooner cut off his own hand.”
“You didn’t know that for certain.”
He held my eyes. “Luke. I grew up reading that man to survive dinner. I know his moves the way you know an interview room. I was never in danger. I promise you that.”
I wanted to be angry. Part of me was, a hot useless part, the part that had spent six days not knowing if he was alive. But under it was the other thing, the thing I didn’t have a clean name for, watching this man who flinched from being cared for, who’d spent his whole life being managed and handled, walk into theone room in the world built to break him and walk back out with the man in his pocket.
“And then,” he said, “I ended it. Legally. All of it, my side.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I signed it all away.” He said it lightly and it didn’t land lightly. “The trust. The estate. The inheritance, the board seat they’d kept warm for me, the name. I had a lawyer draw it up, filed it the morning I walked in. It’s irrevocable. There’s no version where I’m a Branford anymore, not a cent of it, not a share, nothing he can leave me and nothing he can dangle. A man can’t be forced to inherit. So I made sure I never could.”
I sat back.
“Ryan.”
“I know.”
“That’s... Do you understand what you...” I scrubbed a hand down my face. “That’s everything. That’s your whole life,” I didn’t even have the shape of the numbers. I’d never let myself think about the shape of the numbers.
“I walked away from all of it.” Calm. Certain. “And the recording’s the lock on the door. If he ever moves on me, on you, on anyone at 51, I put the whole thing in front of people who hate him so much, they will shred his reputation and name to pieces. It won’t put him in a cell, my lawyer’s clear on that, he’s too careful, the money stops at names that aren’t names. But it ends him in every room that ever mattered to him. He knows it. He understood it before I left. He’s not going to touch us. He can’t afford to.”
“He could change his mind.” The wary thing wouldn’t let go of me. “Men like that. They wait. You said it yourself, he’s patient. In a year, in five...”
“He won’t. Let me tell you how I know.” Ryan’s voice went flat, the way it does when he’s carrying something that could cut him on the way out. “A few days ago my uncle came round and toldme my father was dying. Bad heart. Two surgeries, more coming, not long left. And I believed it, Luke. I lay awake doing the arithmetic on how much time the man had. I grieved him. Some stupid kid part of me grieved the bastard.” His jaw worked. “And when I confronted him in that office, he told me he’d made the whole thing up. Sent David to say it, as a test, to see whether I could still be reeled in by it. He’s not sick. He faked his own deathbed to find out if I’d come running.”
I didn’t have a thing to say to that, it was just fucked up.
