Breakfast with Ghost

Chapter 3

Elena — First Person

I have always been a good liar.

It is a skill built over years of Sunday morning at the Hart family table, where the unspoken rules were as fixed as the seating arrangement: My Dad at the head of the table,my mum to his left, my younger brother Daniel across from me. We were a family who communicated in subtext. In carefully placed silences. In the things we did not say because saying them will require us to examine them,simply my fathers rule.

                               So after returning from the Whitmor Gala, which took almost 2 hours ride I was so tried,my mum gave me a look from her book,the one that meant she had been waiting, not for me exactly, but for what I had to say about the Gala.

I smiled,And said it was fine that was what she wanted to hear.

I went to bed and stared at the ceiling for four hours trying to cozy myself to sleep.

The morning came anyway,as morning do regardless of whether you have slept, I came downstairs to find both my parents already at the table. My mother with her coffee and her cold face and my father with his newspaper and the particular set to his jaw that meant something had snagged in his mind overnight and he had not yet decided what to do with it.

I took my seat. I poured orange juice. I was completely fine.

I repeated this to myself in my mind. Until my Dad folded his newspaper and said, without looking up: “ the Whitmore event. How was it?.”

“Exactly what you'd expect,” I said. “expensive,loud,and full of people performing rehearsed conversation.  

My mother made a sound that was almost a laugh.

“Anyone interesting?” my Dad asked with a cold voice still not looking up. Which was how I knew it was not a casual question. My Dad rearly asked casual questions. He asked questions he already knew the shape of the answer ,and watched to see how close you came.

“Not particularly.” I replied. 

That was my Frist lie of the morning. It settled into the room easily, the way practised lies always do.

My father finally looked up. His eyes the same dark brown as mine,which i had always considered either a gift or an inconvenience depending on how transparent I needed to be.his eyes moved across my face the way he read contracts.  Looking for the clauses that I was lying. 

I gave him nothing. I just sipped my juice.

He nodded apparently satisfied and returned to his newspaper. And then, in a tone of a man who had been saving something:” I heard Reginald Ashford was there.”

My juice glass was half way to my mouth. I set it down.

“Was he,” I said.

“His son too,apparently. The heir.” My father said the word the heir the way other people said disease.”Adrian Ashford. Twenty- nine years old and already running half the family's legitimate operations. The other half being what they've always been.” then he took a pause. The pause of a man who had made this speech many times, internally and otherwise. Then he said 

“Thieves.”

My mum  turned a  page in the newspaper in her hand,she remained silent.

I said nothing. I looked at my plate and thought about grey eyes and a voice that was low and unhurried and had no business of being a thief.

I pressed my thumbnail into my palm under the table.

“They have no business being at events like that,”my father continued,with the steady certainty of a man whose anger  had aged into commitment  ."That family has spent thirty years building on the foundation they stole. Everything Reginald has,he has it because of what he took from mine.From your grandfather, from this family.” He looked at me directly.

“I understood that look.”

I had understood it since I was seven years old when I found my father sitting alone in his study late at night with a glass of whisky and a look on his face I had no name for then.i understood the weight of it,the way it had shaped everything he chose, everything he protected against, the careful perimeter he had drawn like a man who had been robbed once and lived ever since In the shadow of that memory.

I understood my father's war. I believed in it the way you believe in whether,not because I wanted to choose it but because it had always been there and I  had simply never stood up to question it. 

I excused myself after breakfast. I went upstairs, I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the wall and thought with the particular awareness that comes  from a sleep shortage and unwanted clarity,about a man who looked at me like l was a problem he found genuinely interesting.

I stopped.

Then I started again.

That was when I decided I needed to do something with my hands to get the thought out of my mind.

My mum had asked me weeks ago to sort through the books in the guest room she was recognising,as she did every summer , moving  things between rooms in a way that never seemed to result in anything being thrown away, to her old things mattered and were important. I pulled the bookshelf toward me and began taking things down in stacks,ordering them, giving my brain the simple task of categorizing so it would stop thinking of what happened at the gala.

A journal was in the third sack.

Old,the spine soft with age,my mother's careful handwriting on the inside cover , the handwriting she had used,before years of typing had loosened it into something more different. I just set it aside without opening it. It was private,it was hers, I was not a person who read other people's private things.

Then a photograph fell out.

It landed face-up on the floor between my feet and I looked at it before I had a chance to decide not to.

Two people. Young, a garden somewhere, summer,golden light.Both of them laughing at something just outside the picture.

My mother in her mid twenties. Her face open in a way I had almost never seen her .unguarded, Bright.

And the man beside her.

His arm not quite touching hers but angled toward her the way people angle toward warmth without admitting that is what they are doing.

I did not recognise him at first. Then I did.

— ✦ —

I turned the photograph over with hands that had became very careful.

On the back,in my mother's handwriting, the old handwriting, a careful kind, two words and a year.

Reginald Ashford. 1993.

I sat on the floor of the guest room for a long time without moving.

Outside I could hear my parents downstairs. My father's voice, low and steady. My mother quite answers. The ordinary sounds of a Sunday morning in a house I had grown up believing I understood completely.

I looked at the photograph again. At my mother's laughing face. At the man beside her,younger,lighter,his expression entirely without the coldness I had been raised to assign his name .

At the way she was leaning almost faintly, without intention towards him.

Before the war. Before the betrayal. Before everything.

Everything I thought I knew about this story had just developed a crack wide enough to fall through.