We're both quiet.
I think about a seven-year-old asking what the pink flowers were and accepting her non-answer.
"Thank you," I say.
"I remember other things about her," he says. "Small things. Things she probably never mentioned to you." A pause. "I'd like to tell you them. If you'll let me."
I stand at the counter for a moment and look out the window and not really wanting to talk about my mom anymore.
"Tell me another one," I lie.
He tellsme about her laugh.
Not the polite one, or the social one she used at work and with strangers. The real one, the one that came out when something caught her off guard. James describes it as half-laugh half-exhale, like she hadn't meant to find it funny.
I know exactly the sound he means. I've heard it my entire life. I just never had words for it until now.
By the time we hang up I'm sitting with my cold tea and my book still open on my laptop two pages from the end.
I set the phone down.
I sit there for a long time, not writing, not moving, just sitting with the specific weight of what just happened. I think about what Sydney keeps to herself. How much of her I know and how much is still filed away somewhere.
But my thoughts turn to my manuscript. I pull the laptop toward me and find my place. I finish the sentence I started three hours ago and then I write the next one and the one after that. Two pages later I type the last line and I sit back in my chair and look at what I've done.
The book is finished and I think about the peonies again.That’s not nothing.
Before closing my laptop, I send the book to Olive.
34
JADE
The consent agreement lands on a Tuesday.
Phoenix tells me over dinner. Thirty-eight million are recovered, twenty-four gone permanently into the settlement structure. The empire is half what it was a year ago. He says it plainly, no softening, as he's been telling me things since the fight. I listen and ask the questions I actually want answered and he answers them without mincing his words.
After dinner I sit at the kitchen table while he cleans up and think about sixty-two million frozen in March and thirty-eight of it coming back and twenty-four of it just gone. Numbers that would have meant nothing to me a year ago. Now I know exactly what they represent—which partnerships, which funds, which twelve-year relationships dissolved into acceptable collateral damage.
I open my laptop and look at the restructured summary Phoenix printed for me last week. The Crawford Group that exists now is leaner, differently organized, less dependent on the offshore structures Nicholas built over the years. Phoenix's name is on things his father's never was. That's new. It happened quietly, in the margins of the siege, while I wasreading forum posts at midnight and writing around the edges of everything.
I close the laptop. Phoenix finishes the dishes and comes to the table and sits across from me.
"Is it enough?" I ask. This is the same question I asked him the night of the Harwick dissolution. He knows what I mean.
"It's different," he says. "Not smaller. Different." He looks at me. "I think I like it better."
I look at him. This man, who came home months ago from a meeting where twelve years of business dissolved and sat down and told me the actual number. He learned to be honest with me slowly, unevenly, over a year of late nights.
"Me too," I say.
Before I write to James,I first send an email to Donna in Tennessee. I've been drafting it in my head since Phoenix took the documents to the police, but have been putting it off for two weeks. I wasn’t sure what to say or how much to explain.
I decide to keep it simple. The documents found the right people. They're being used as they should be.
I hit send and close the laptop and make tea and when I open it again, twenty minutes later, she's already replied.
I'm glad they found the right people. I've had them long enough.
