I put the phone face-down and listen to the water running in the bathroom down the hall.
He responds in four minutes.
Jade, I was hoping you'd reach out. I'd love that. When works for you?
I stare at the message for a moment. Warm, easy, no hesitation. A man who has no idea what I'm about to hand him across a café table.
We settle on Thursday. I pick the place — a coffee shop two blocks from the Crawford estate, public and neutral, a place where nothing has to mean anything and either of us can leave without it being a scene. I tell Phoenix I'm meeting someone forcoffee. He asks who. I say a friend of Olive's. He accepts this and kisses me goodbye and I watch his car back out of the drive and feel the weight of a lie that is technically not a lie.
The café isbright and smells like espresso and the sweetness of almond croissants warming in the case by the door. I get there first and take a table near the window, facing the door, and order a latte I don't need and watch the street.
James arrives three minutes early.
He's wearing a dark jacket over a gray shirt, his silver-streaked hair neat, and he smiles when he spots me through the glass before he even opens the door. The smile from the BBQ, the smile of a man genuinely good at being in a room with people. He orders at the counter without looking at the menu, the reflex of someone who drinks the same thing everywhere, and crosses to my table.
"Jade." He sits across from me and wraps both hands around his cup. "I'm really glad you texted."
"Thanks for coming," I say.
And then I let him talk.
He asks about my writing first, which surprises me. Most people ask how I ended up in California, or how I know Phoenix, or what the Malibu house is like. James asks what I'm working on. I tell him about the manuscript, the fantasy romance, the half-elf scribe and the rebel leader. He asks real questions. What drew me to fantasy? Whether the book is going where I expected it to go or somewhere else entirely?
"Somewhere else entirely," I say. "It always does."
He laughs. "That's how you know it's alive."
He asks about Boston. I tell him about my MFA, the literary fiction professors who sneered at genre fiction, the small apartment I had in Allston with the radiator that clanged allwinter. He tells me he trained at Mass General, that he spent three years there before moving to his current practice. We talk about Boston as people do when they've both lived somewhere — the winters, the drivers, a city that is proud of how hard it is.
He actually listens, leaning forward, following the thread of what I'm saying instead of waiting for his turn. I understand in those twenty minutes why Sydney fell for him. Why Olive liked him. Why Nicholas has kept him close for thirty years.
I put my cup down.
"I need to tell you something," I say. "That's why I asked to meet."
He goes still. Not alarmed, not defensive. Just still.
"Okay," he says.
"My mother is Sydney Catalano."
The quiet holds for one second. Two. Then his face does something I don't have a word for. Not guilt, not shame. Something older. The expression of a man watching his own past rearrange itself into a shape he doesn't recognize. His hands don't move. His coffee cup sits exactly where he set it.
He laughs. Short, reflexive, a sound that has nothing to do with anything being funny. "That's not …” He stops. Picks up his coffee cup and sets it down again without drinking. "Sydney's daughter didn’t … " He stops again.
I wait.
He looks at me. Studies my face like a man trying to reconcile two things that won't. I watch him do the math. I watch the moment he makes the connections—the last name, Boston, that tilt of my head that Olive recognized from a doorway.
"How old are you," he says. His voice has gone quiet.
"Twenty-six."
He closes his eyes. Opens them. "Sydney told me—" He stops. His jaw tightens once. "She told me you didn't survive. That there were complications. That the baby didn't make it."
The café keeps going around us. The espresso machine hisses behind the counter. A woman at the next table laughs at something on her phone. Somewhere near the door a child is asking for a cookie.
I look at James Dupree across a small table in a California coffee shop and feel the floor shift under twenty-six years of my life.
