جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 65

POV: JaxonElena's message came at eight forty-seven on a Sunday morning.I read it standing in my kitchen with coffee in my hand, still warm, going cold while I stood there.Your father wants to meet. Both of you. Together.I read it twice. Set my phone face down on the counter. Stood there.My father had never once asked to be in the same room with anyone I cared about. That wasn't how Richard Whitfield operated. He operated in separate rooms, separate conversations, the particular power of never letting the people in his life occupy the same space at the same time. Derek had existed in my life for three weeks before Richard visited and then Derek was gone mid-semester. Elena and I had been a unit for thirteen years before the divorce happened in separate meetings with separate lawyers and separate outcomes. He called me alone. He called my agent alone. He showed up at the complex and waited in the conference room and when I walked in it was just him and the room and whatever versio

POV: JaxonThree people at a table.My father performing the gracious host. Coffee ordered before we arrived, menus already open at our places, the particular hospitality of someone who wanted the room to feel like he was taking care of you.Me performing nothing. That was new. In every previous version of sitting across from Richard Whitfield I'd been running something the dutiful son, the focused quarterback, the managed version of myself that knew which edges to sand down before he saw them. Today I was just sitting. Eating the food when it arrived. Listening. Not building anything on top of it.Callum was doing something more precise than either of us. He was performing just enough to match the room without being managed by it. Present, engaged, polite in the specific way that didn't hand anything over. I watched him do it and thought about the fact that he'd had more practice than either of us at existing in rooms that hadn't been built for him.Richard talked.He was very good a

POV: JaxonWe sat for twenty minutes.Neither of us suggested leaving. Neither of us suggested staying. We just sat at the corner table with the cold food and the coffee that had been cold for longer and the Sunday morning doing its ordinary thing around us.A family came in and sat at the table Richard had walked past on his way out. A couple near the window was having the kind of conversation that existed below the ambient noise level, heads close, something private between them. A waiter cleared a table across the room with the efficient unhurried movement of someone in the middle of a long shift.Ordinary. All of it completely ordinary.I was trying to locate what I felt.This was harder than it should have been. I'd been feeling things with more precision lately the season had done that, or Callum had done that, or the combination of the season and Callum and the particular accumulation of moments that had required me to show up honestly had done that. But this particular feeling