004 The Number That Changed My Mind

Christabel

"You did what."

My father had the decency to look uncomfortable, standing in the kitchen of our apartment with his coat still on, keys still in his hand, like he hadn't fully committed to being home yet.

"I called their office," he said. "This morning. I wanted to know when we could talk."

"Dad, I told you last night I needed time to think about it. I did not tell you to call anyone."

"Christabel." He set his keys down on the counter, too carefully, the way you set something down when your hands aren't steady. "There isn't time to think about it. That's the part you don't understand yet."

"Then explain it to me. Actually explain it, not the version where you pat my hand and tell me not to worry." I crossed my arms because if I didn't hold onto something I was going to start shaking, and I was so tired of shaking, I had been shaking for eleven days straight and my body was starting to feel like a stranger's. "What is actually going on with the shop."

He didn't answer right away. He went to the drawer where he kept the mail, the one I wasn't supposed to touch because he said it stressed me out, and he pulled out a folder thick with envelopes, and he put it on the table between us like he was laying down a losing hand of cards.

"Open it," he said.

I opened it.

I am not good with numbers the way my father is, or was, before the numbers all started pointing the same direction, but even I understood what I was looking at. Overdue notices. A loan against the shop I didn't know existed. A second loan against that loan. A letter from the bank with a date circled in red, twelve days away, that used words like default and seizure of assets like they were nothing, like they weren't about to take the only thing my father had spent thirty years building with his own two hands.

"How long," I said quietly.

"A year and a half. Maybe two."

"You didn't tell me."

"You were planning a wedding, Christabel. You were happy. I wasn't going to hand you this on top of everything else." His voice cracked on the word happy, like it hurt him to say it now, past tense, gone. "And then Gabriel."

"Don't."

"I have to say it. Then Gabriel died, and I thought, at least I don't have to burden her with the shop too, at least she has one less thing, and then Beatrix Vettel walks up to me at my future son in law's funeral and offers to make all of this disappear."

"By marrying me off like it's the seventeen hundreds."

"I know how it sounds."

"Do you?" My voice came out sharper than I meant, sharp enough that he flinched, and I hated myself a little for it, but I couldn't stop. "Dad, he blames me. Sebastian. I don't even know the man and I could see it on his face at the funeral, he looked at me like I was something that had been tracked into the house on someone's shoe. You want me to marry that."

"I want you to have a future that doesn't collapse in twelve days."

"I want a lot of things too. I wanted to get married three weeks from now to a man who's dead. Nobody's handing out what I want."

The silence after that was the kind that has weight to it, the kind you can feel pressing on your chest. My father sat down at the table, slow, like his knees had finally decided they'd had enough, and he put his head in his hands, and I watched my father, who had never once in my life let me see him cry, not through the divorce, not through the worst years of the shop, come apart quietly at our kitchen table.

"I'm not asking you to save me," he said, muffled through his fingers. "I would rather lose the shop, lose everything, than watch you sell yourself to fix my mistakes. I mean that, Christabel. I called them this morning because I was scared and I panicked and it was wrong of me, and I'll call back and tell them no."

"Dad."

"I'll figure something else out. I always do."

But I had seen the folder. I had seen the number circled in red, and I had done the math in my head without meaning to, the way you can't stop yourself from finishing a sentence someone starts, and there was no version of the next twelve days where he figured something else out, not with a debt that size, not with a bank that had clearly run out of patience a long time before I ever knew there was anything to be patient about.

I thought about Gabriel, laughing at something stupid, gone. I thought about my father's hands shaking as he handed me that folder, thirty years of work about to disappear because he'd spent too much of it protecting me from things I should have known. I thought about a cold, unreadable man at a funeral who hadn't looked at me once, and how I was apparently about to become his problem, or he was about to become mine.

"Call them back," I said.

My father looked up, hope and horror fighting on his face in equal measure. "Christabel, no, I just said—"

"Call them back," I said again, steadier this time, because someone in that kitchen needed to sound like they had a plan, even if it was a lie. "Tell them I'll do it."

My phone buzzed on the counter before he could answer. A text, from a number I didn't recognize, no name attached, just seven words that made the folder on the table suddenly feel very small compared to whatever was coming next.

We need to discuss terms. Tonight. Alone.