Page 87 of Fate, Interrupted

The late afternoon. The police at the door.

The arithmetic arrives without drama. It’s entitlement. It’s the terrible, irrevocable possibility that I cannot now unthink.

She was unhappy.

She was drinking.

She got in her car.

My father spent twenty-five years grieving Grace. He’s built this operation around her loss, has shaped his sons around the absence of her, and has used her memory in this office more than once as evidence for how things are.

He loved her. Not just loved her—cherished her. I’m certain of that.

But he never knew her.

And now he’s sitting across the desk telling me that what I feel for Norah is an experiment that will run its course.

I look at him.

At the certainty in his face.

At the grief he carries like a credential.

The thing I want to say is right there. I can feel the shape of it, the words wanting out. It would not be kind. It would not be fair. I don’t have all the context, and I never will. But it would be true, or close enough to true, that the difference wouldn’t matter, and it would cost him something the way the word experiments cost me something.

But I don’t say it. I close my mouth and breathe through my nose until the worst of the urge passes.

Because some things, once said, cannot be taken back. And I have enough unresolvable things in my chest already without adding the look on my father’s face after I have used his dead wife against him.

He is still watching me.

“You will cut ties with Norah,” he says.

He isn’t making a suggestion or delivering a warning.

His voice is flat and even, the same voice that has closed conversations in this office for thirty years.

Resistance surges immediately, hard and instinctive, but I press down before it can surface. My hands are loose at my sides. My face is steady. None of what is happening inside me is available for inspection.

I hold his gaze for a moment.

“Do you hear me?”

Then I say, “I heard you.”

Two words. Flat. Responsive without agreeing. True without being a promise.

I turn and walk to the door. I’m almost out of the office when he speaks again.

“She was everything to me,” he says.

I stop. I don’t turn around.

“Your mother,” he says. “I want you to understand that. What it cost to lose her.”

The thing I won’t say presses against the back of my teeth one more time.

I stand there and think about what I almost know about the road she drove and the late afternoon and the cocktail on the counter, and grief, fury, and pity hit me all at once, tangled too tightly to separate.