CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Elder Brown and Mara — The Full Truth

He called her on Wednesday.

Not Simon — Elder Brown himself, from the Hancock Park number, at nine in the morning, while Simon was at the downtown office for the first time in two weeks and the estate was running its ordinary Wednesday rhythms around her.

"Come for lunch," he said. "Just you."

She went.

The garden in the Wednesday noon light was different from the night — larger, more deliberate, the November sun finding specific things to illuminate and leaving others in shadow. He was not in the garden this time. He was at the kitchen table with food already on it — simple, the food of a man who cooked for himself and had stopped performing hospitality for its own sake — and he gestured to the chair across from him.

She sat.

They ate for a few minutes in silence. Not the Simon-silence, which had a specific grammar and intent. The silence of two people who have already said the hardest things and are not in a hurry to fill the space after them.

"I want to tell you something," he said eventually. "About Frederick and Daniel."

She looked at him.

"Frederick was my most difficult son," he said. "From the beginning. Not in the way people mean when they say difficult — I don't mean he caused me trouble, though he did. I mean he was the son who was most like the parts of me I was least proud of. The parts that moved fast and didn't look back. The parts that decided what something was worth and acted on that decision without examining the cost." He looked at his lunch. "I saw myself in him and I overcorrected. I was too easy on him in the places I should have been harder because I was afraid that being hard on him was being hard on myself."

She listened.

"Daniel was easier," he said. "Easier to love, easier to manage, easier to worry about for different reasons. He was the one who needed someone to tell him what to do and would follow whoever told him most recently. I should have been more present for that. I wasn't."

He looked at her.

"I'm not telling you this to ask for your understanding," he said. "I'm telling you this because you sat in my study and told me the truth about my sons without softening it, and I think you deserve the truth about them from someone who knew them from before they were the things in your file."

She looked at him.

"They were also boys on a beach," she said quietly.

He looked at her. Something crossed his face — surprise, she thought, and then something deeper.

"Yes," he said. "They were boys on a beach." A pause. "How did you know that."

She told him about the drawer. The photograph. The two boys in the light off the Pacific coast.

He was quiet for a long time.

"Frederick was twelve in that photograph," he said. "We went to Santa Monica for Daniel's birthday. Frederick carried Daniel on his shoulders the whole way back from the water because Daniel's feet were sunburned and he wouldn't admit it and Frederick figured it out without being told." He looked at his hands. "He was that kind of boy. Before he became what he became. He was the kind who noticed the thing nobody said and did the thing about it without making it into a statement."

She sat across from the father of two dead men and held the weight of that and did not look away from it.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry for what I took from you. I need you to know that I know it wasn't only Frederick and Daniel I took. It was this." She gestured at the space between them. "All the versions of them that you still had. The boy on the beach. The one who carried his brother."

He looked at her for a long time.

"Yes," he said. "It was."

They sat with that. The kitchen held them. The November noon came through the window.

After a while he said: "The accounting. For your father. I've spoken to my lawyer. I want to do this correctly and I want it to come from me directly rather than through intermediaries." He looked at her. "I'll need to speak to Emmanuel Cole."

"He's in Riverside," she said. "I can give you a number."

"Please."

She wrote it on the notepad he pushed across the table. She wrote her father's name carefully, the letters of it, and thought about the last time she had seen him — three years ago, thin and reduced from what he had been, in the house in Riverside that was smaller than the house she had grown up in, sitting with the specific quality of a man who had lost his business and his daughter to illness and had not found a way to reassemble himself from those two losses.

She thought about what a phone call from Charles Brown might do in that house.

"He's not well," she said. "He's managing. But be gentle."

Elder Brown looked at the name on the notepad. "I know how to be gentle," he said. "I've simply not always chosen to be."

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

"I want Simon to be happy," he said. "I've driven him hard his whole life and I've built things into him that I'm proud of and things I'm not. But I want him to be happy." He looked at the notepad. "He hasn't been, since his mother. Not until—" He stopped. "He's been functional. He's been exceptional. He has not been happy."

She did not say anything.

"I think you know the end of that sentence," he said.

She looked at her hands.

"I don't know what's right," she said. "I don't know if there's a version of this that ends correctly given what I did. I'm not going to pretend I've resolved that."

"No," he said. "You shouldn't pretend that. It doesn't resolve. Some things don't resolve." He looked at the window. "They just become something you carry differently over time."

She thought about grief as fuel and grief as something else, the question she had been sitting with since Westwood. She thought about carrying something differently.

"Yes," she said.

He walked her to the door at two o'clock. On the front step, in the Hancock Park afternoon, he said: "Come back. When this is done — all of it, the investigation, Hayes, whatever Simon decides. Come back and have lunch again."

She looked at him.

"Alright," she said.

She walked to the car.

She thought, on the drive back, about what it meant that she had been given more than one true thing in a single afternoon — about boys on beaches and fathers who overcorrected and the specific, unexpected mercy of being seen completely by someone who had every reason to see you badly.

She thought about what Elder Brown had said: He has not been happy.

She thought about what she had told Simon in the amber room: That part was real.

She put her hand in her pocket and found the locket and held it without opening it and looked at the Los Angeles afternoon through the car window and understood, with the particular clarity of someone who has set down a four-year weight, that what came next was not going to be clean or simple or arranged the way she would have arranged it.

But it was going to be hers.

All of it — the accounting and the aftermath and whatever Simon decided in the two weeks his father had given him and whatever the federal investigation produced and whatever her father said when Charles Brown called him in Riverside — all of it was goi ng to be hers to carry.

Differently, maybe.

But hers.