I look at James and he doesn’t look away. He just stands there in the garden with his hands loose at his sides, holding my gaze.
The thing about James is that he doesn't give up. That's what keeps making this harder. He made a wrong call and he knows it.
But I’m angry. I want to be clear about that.
I'm angry that I liked him. That over the last four months I built something in my head about who he is. I liked him and I was starting to trust him.
The part that makes me angriest is that I understand that this was a frightened man's bad calculation.
"Tell Nicholas yourself," I say. "Before Phoenix does."
He gives me a slight nod.
“Today. I mean it,” I add.
I look at him for a moment longer. He's standing in the middle of this garden with dirt on his hands and he looks exactly like what he is, a good man who made a bad call. That's the part I can't shake. The questions were real. All of it was real and none of it was clean and I don't know what to do with that yet.
"I don't know what we are to each other," I say. "I've been leaving it unnamed and that's been fine. But whatever it is, I can't build it on you deciding what I can handle. That's not how this works. You don’t know me.”
His eyes are wet at the corners. He doesn't blink it away and he doesn't look down.
"I understand," he says.
I turn and walk back up the path.
I call Phoenix from outside the garden gate. The afternoon sun is warm on my face and the jasmine is thick in the air and none of it matches what's sitting in my chest.
He picks up on the first ring. "How'd it go?"
"Tell your father," I say.
A beat. He hears everything in the flatness of it. "Are you okay?"
"Yes," I say. We both know that's only partly true. “I’ll be home in an hour.”
20
PHOENIX
My father knows before James says a word.
I watch it happen from the chair by the window. James comes through the study door, my father behind the desk, and the two of them looking at each other for one beat too long before anything is said. Thirty years of knowing a person does that. You stop needing the words. My father’s face changes, just barely, and I know this is not going to be a business conversation
James sits down without waiting to be invited.
"How long?" my father says.
"Two years."
Dad nods once. Sets his pen down on the desk with a precise click. And then he starts talking.
He doesn't raise his voice. That's the thing about Nicholas Crawford. He never raises his voice, not in thirty years of difficult conversations, not in boardrooms, or courtrooms, or the back seats of cars on the way to airports. He uses volume the way other men use silence, as a form of control, and what comes out now is quiet and precise and absolutely devastating. He says specific things. Things a man says when he's been turning them over at three in the morning for longer than anyone knew,polishing them down to their sharpest edges, waiting for the moment he'd finally have cause to use them.
I don't repeat what he says. Some of it isn't mine to repeat.
James sits through it. Doesn't flinch, doesn't apologize, doesn't fold. When my father finishes James looks at him across the desk and says, quietly, "Are you done?"
Dad looks at him.
