CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Both — The Room

She spoke for forty minutes.

Simon sat beside her and did not interrupt and did not look at her while she spoke — he looked at his father, watching his father's face the way he watched things that mattered, for the information that existed beneath the surface of the response. His father's face was still in the processing way. He had the full weight of his attention on Mara and he did not move it for the forty minutes she spoke.

She said Adaeze's name first. She said it clearly and she said the age — twenty-two — and she said what Adaeze had wanted to be and she said what had happened and she traced it back to the Century City transaction the way you trace a river back to its source, following the water to the place it started.

She said Frederick's name. She said Daniel's name. She said what they had done with the specificity of someone who had read the files until they were memorized and then lived inside the consequences of them and had not confused the two things.

She said what Hayes had made of her grief. She said what she had become in the service of it and what she had done in this house and she did not flinch and she did not look away and she did not qualify the things that did not need qualifying.

She said what she had decided in a law office in Westwood. She said Voss's name. She said what she had provided and why and what it had cost her to provide it.

When she finished the room was very quiet.

Elder Brown had not moved. He was still in the same position — hands folded on the desk, face in the processing stillness — and he looked at her with an expression Simon could not read, which was unusual, because Simon had been reading his father's face for thirty-two years and had learned most of its languages.

"Emmanuel Cole," his father said. "You are his daughter."

"Yes," Mara said.

"I knew about the transaction," his father said. "I want you to know that I am telling you this because you told me the truth and I am going to tell you the truth in return." He looked at his hands briefly. "I didn't know about you or your sister. I knew about the transaction and I chose not to examine it closely and I moved on."

Mara looked at him.

"I'm telling you that," his father said, "because you should know the full accounting. Not just my sons. Me too."

The room held the three of them.

Simon looked at his father and felt, with sudden and unexpected force, something that was not grief and not anger — something older and more complicated, the feeling of watching a person do the hardest thing a person of his father's particular formation could do, which was to say me too in a room where the cost of saying it was real.

"What do you want," his father said to Mara. "Not what the investigation wants. Not what is going to happen legally. What do you want."

Mara was quiet for a moment.

"I wanted my sister back," she said. "That's what I wanted. Everything after that was what I did when I couldn't have what I wanted."

His father was quiet.

"And now," he said.

She looked at Simon, briefly. Then back at Elder Brown.

"Now I want to stop costing people things," she said. "I've been costing people things for four years and I'm tired of it. I'd like to stop."

The room was quiet.

Elder Brown looked at his son. Simon looked back.

"Leave us," his father said to Simon. "Come back in an hour."

Simon stood. He looked at Mara. She gave him a single, small nod — not reassurance exactly, but acknowledgment. The look of someone who knows what they've walked into and has decided it's where they need to be.

He left the room.

He sat in his father's kitchen for an hour and drank his father's coffee and did not think about what was happening in the study because thinking about it was not useful and he had learned, over thirty-two years, to be very selective about what he gave his attention to in the hours when he could not affect the outcome.

After fifty-three minutes his father opened the kitchen door.

He looked at Simon with the expression Simon associated with decisions that had been  made.

"Come back in," he said.