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Luke looks at me across two cold coffees.
“But Alistair said the job is staying in the room.”
“It is. And fear is what keeps you in it. Confidence leaves – confidence always has somewhere better to be. Fear stays up reading forum threads at 02:00.” I watch that land where I aimed it. “You’ve been staying in the room since before they exist, Luke. You just keep calling it a leak in your focus.”
“Terror as a qualification,” he says.
“It’s the only one that matters.”
He doesn’t smile, not quite. But something behind his face relaxes, and he turns his hand over under mine so our palms are together, and that’s the vow, witnessed by two cold coffees.
Father calls on Thursday.
I know why before I answer, because there is exactly one way he hears about anything within seventy-two hours, and her name is Sloane Kensington.
My cousin works in crisis management. For whom is the crisis and for whom is the management has never truly been established. At Max’s wedding, she offered to patch a blind spot in the security perimeter with a satellite feed borrowed from “a friend in the Mossad.” Two years before that, at the gala, she tanked a shipping conglomerate’s stock using what she cheerfully described as “our friends in St. Petersburg.” When I eventually pointed out that those two friendships are, geopolitically speaking, in some tension, she looked at me with genuine pity and said, “Preston. I don’t have sides. I have coverage.”
And that’s the thing people get wrong about Sloane. She’s not a sympathizer. Sympathy is a position, and positions are liabilities. My cousin is politically agnostic the way weather is politically agnostic: she happens to everyone, on schedule, regardless of ideology, and afterward the governments involved issue statements. One Thanksgiving I asked her, directly, whether she attends meetings of the Illuminati, and she said “No,” checked her watch, and then abruptly left without saying another word.
Nobody knows how she knows things. Jax’s theory is satellites. Max ran a probability model and concluded, chillingly, “human sources at scale.” My theory is simpler: information is frightened of Sloane, and reports to her voluntarily, to get ahead of it.
So when my phone rings on Thursday and the screen says FATHER, I already know the chain of custody. Julio asked on Sunday. By Monday, Sloane knew – from where? Satellites? Her Russian connections? – and by Wednesday she had briefed Costa Rica, presumably via a channel that requires a codename and a chapel.
“Preston.” No preamble. Behind him I can hear Costa Rica doing its evening business – insects, ice in a glass, and Captain Beaky delivering what sounds like a formal address to the troops. “How is Luke?”
“He’s–” I consider the York answer, which is fine, and skip it. “He’s been better.”
“Mm.” A pause. My father has never been good at pauses; he used to buy his way out of them. This one he sits in, all the way through. “I’m not calling to ask what happened. Sloane gave me the shape of it, and it was enough. And I’m not calling to offer anything, before you brace – no lawyers, no cheques, nobody needs to be ruined. Miguel made me write that down before I dialed.” Paper rustles, actually rustles, he really wrote it down. “I’m calling to say one thing, and then I’m going to let you go.”
“Okay.”
“I’m here, son. For both of you. Whatever that’s worth from a man who took too many years to learn it – whatever you need, I’ll be there, for the both of you.”
I look across the room at Luke, who is pretending to read a journal and listening intently.
“That’s worth a lot,” I say, and my voice does something un-York-like, and my father, God bless the renovated version of him, pretends not to hear it.
“Good. Kiss the babies through the belly. Miguel says the same but with more ceremony. Beaky–” a squawk, a scuffle, the line goes briefly feathered “–Beaky has no message apart from violence. Goodnight son.”
He hangs up. No cheque. No lawyers. No solution. Just a man staying on the table.
It’s the least expensive gift my father has ever given me, and it probably means the most of any of them.
The parenting class is held in a community-centre room in Park Slope with worn linoleum floors, a circle of folding chairs, and a whiteboard that says WELCOME, GROWING FAMILIES! in handwriting so cheerful it should be regulated. Our instructor, a woman named Amber, introduces herself with serene authority; she has watched hundreds of competent adults be defeated by a diaper, and it shows. She hands each couple a baby.
A practice baby. Lifelike weight, lifelike heft, a speaker where its opinions live, and – she says this with genuine pride – an internal sensor array that logs everything. Head support. Feeding intervals. Response times. “The data doesn’t lie,” she says, beaming, and I feel Luke, beside me, fall in love with the doll on principle and then immediately distrust it as a colleague.
Between us, we have saved a number of actual human lives that I won’t cite because it sounds like bragging. I mention it only so posterity understands what happens next.
Luke holds the doll like a football. Confident, one-armed, tucked against his ribs – textbook, apparently, for a man carrying a football. Amber adjusts him with two fingers and the words “It’s not a rugby situation, it’s a baby, Dr. Silva.” I hold it like a bomb: both hands, elbows locked, walking at a pace best described as processional. Amber adjusts me too. “It’s also not a state funeral. You’re not in mourning.”
We take it home for the week. This is the take-home module of the course, and it’s pass or fail.
Day one, the doll cries at 01:00, 03:20, and 05:15, and we handle it in shifts with the crisp efficiency of two experienced medical professionals, and over breakfast we congratulate each other in the smug voices of people who have mistaken the first kilometre of a marathon for the finish.
Day three, I am sleeping in the bathtub. This was a deliberate choice, in the way that retreat is a choice available to defeated armies. The bathtub is porcelain, cold, and quiet, and I had a pillow, and the acoustics of a nineteenth-century brownstone mean the tub is the sole location on three floors where the doll’s 02:00 aria arrives pre-muffled. Luke found me there at dawn. He didn’t say anything. He got in the tub too. We slept four glorious minutes.
Day five, I come downstairs to find Luke – trauma attending, calmest hands in the borough – sitting across the table from the doll, which is propped in a salad bowl, staring at it with red-rimmed eyes, saying, “I know your settings are wrong. I know it. Prove it.” Later that evening he says, very quietly, to no one, “There are medications, and other ways,” and I pretend, for the good of our marriage and his medical licence, not to have heard him threaten to sedate a piece of plastic.
