Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter 15: Sunday

My mother had a way of setting a table that was, in itself, a form of interrogation.

The good china meant I am taking this seriously. The candles meant I want to see his face. The garden roses, freshly cut, meant I have been thinking about tonight since Tuesday.

Sebastian walked in beside me, took one look at the table, and said quietly: “She started planning this before we left Monterey.”

“Before we left Monterey,” I confirmed.

The alertness that moved across his face was the most unguarded I had seen him outside of our own house. Good. It would do him good.

My father opened the door. The two of them stood in the threshold in a silence that had entire decades folded inside it. Then my father extended his hand. Sebastian looked at it for one beat — barely perceptible, a man deciding — and took it.

My mother appeared behind my father and dissolved the weight of the moment entirely by saying: “You must be Sebastian. Come in, the roast has been resting twenty minutes and your timing is perfect.”

Sebastian blinked.

I had watched this man dismantle his father in a Monterey study without raising his voice. I had never seen him wrong-footed until this moment.

My mother had that effect.

Dinner began carefully, the way dinners do when everyone at the table is intelligent enough to know the real conversation is coming and disciplined enough not to rush it. My mother asked Sebastian about his work — not the scandal, not Nolan, the actual work — and he answered honestly, which was the right call. My father cooked and said very little, the culinary equivalent of a sideways apology.

It was over the second glass of wine that my mother set down her fork, folded her hands, and looked at Sebastian with the calm, complete attention of a woman who had decided the surface conversation was finished.

“What are you going to do,” she said, “to make sure my daughter’s life doesn’t get buried under everything that came with your name?”

The table went quiet.

I opened my mouth.

“Mira,” my mother said pleasantly. “I’m asking your husband.”

Sebastian looked at my mother for a long moment. Then: “I’m not going to protect what she built. Mira doesn’t need protection — she needs me not to be another obstacle she has to work around.” A pause. “She is not a supporting character in the Calloway story. She is the person I spent three years making excuses to be in the same room as. I’m done making excuses.”

My mother looked at him. Picked up her wine. Looked at my father. “You could learn something from that.”

My father had the expression of a man who knew the correct response was no response at all.

After dinner my mother took Sebastian into the garden. She did this with people she considered worth the garden — it had happened twice in my entire life that I could remember. I watched through the kitchen window while my father and I cleared the table, the two figures moving slowly between the rose beds, my mother’s voice carrying faintly but not clearly.

“She likes him,” my father said.

“She’s interrogating him in the roses,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s how she likes people.”

We drove home at ten. Four miles from Atherton I asked what she’d said to him.

Sebastian was quiet for a moment. Then: “She said if I ever make you cry in a way that isn’t worth crying about she will make my life extremely difficult in ways that are entirely legal and considerably worse than illegal ones would be.”

“That sounds right.”

“She also said —” He paused. Something shifting in his voice. “She said you used to make lists as a teenager of everything you wanted your life to look like. That you were very specific. That you crossed nearly everything off by twenty eight.” He glanced at me. “And that the one thing you never put on any list was the thing most obvious to everyone watching.”

Something moved in my chest. Slow and complicated.

“What thing?” I asked. Though I already knew.

“That you wanted someone who would show up without being asked.”

The road curved. The ocean appeared briefly between the trees, a flash of dark water, and disappeared again.

“She had no right to tell you that,” I said.

“No,” Sebastian agreed.

“She’ll do it again.”

“Almost certainly.”

I looked at the dark rushing past outside my window. “Drive faster. I want to go home.”

The word arrived without warning — home — from somewhere that had apparently already decided where that was.

Sebastian’s hand found mine on the console.

He drove faster.

They were three miles from Atherton when his phone lit up on the dashboard. He glanced at it. His hand tightened on mine — just slightly, just briefly — and then he turned it face down.

“What did it say?” I asked.

Silence.

“Sebastian.”

“Julian Reyes posted bail an hour ago.” His voice was very even. “And he was seen twenty minutes ago at the entrance to this road.”

The car was absolutely quiet.

Outside the trees pressed close on both sides, the dark between them absolute. The next turn half a mile ahead.

And in the rearview mirror, a single pair of headlights appeared.

Keeping pace.

Exactly.