"You were on the federal task force when I was identified as a source."
"Yes." He paused. "I want to tell you that I didn't know, when I signed the report, that it was, that it wasn't, " He stopped. Started again. "I knew I had been identified. I knew I was a risk to the operation. Ramón Salas had, I was receiving payments. It had started small. It doesn't start large, that's not how it works." He looked at his hands. "When the request came for my protection, I delayed it. I told myself I was managing the timing. I told myself it would be handled through other channels." He was quiet for a moment. "I died before I did anything."
The room was very still.
"You delayed deliberately," I said.
"I delayed because I was afraid. Not the same thing, I know. But it's the truth." He looked up at me. "I have told myself every variation of that distinction for twenty-five years and it doesn't change what happened."
I looked at him, this old man with his permanent armchair and his assumed name and the weight of the thing he'd carried, and felt something that was not forgiveness and not rage but something more complicated than both: the specific exhaustion of understanding.
"My father," I said. "Daniel Callahan."
Something shifted in Fosse's expression. "He came to me," he said. "Four months before he disappeared."
"He knew about you."
"He'd found the financial records. The payments from Salas's estate." Fosse's hands tightened in his lap. "He wasn't, he didn't threaten me. He sat where you're sitting and told me whathe had found and said he needed to know what happened to his wife." He paused. "I told him."
"Everything."
"Everything I knew." He paused. "Which was not everything. I didn't know about Reyes. I didn't know what your mother had been doing for three years. I knew only what I had done and what I had failed to do." His voice was very flat now, not emotionless, something past emotion, something that had been worn down to its base. "He listened. He asked a few questions. Then he left."
"And then he disappeared," Dominic said.
"Six weeks later." Fosse looked at him. "He called me first. Three days before. He said Salas's people had started watching his apartment. He said he was going to run, not to hide from them, but to draw them away from his daughter." He stopped. "He knew you were in New Orleans by then. He'd been tracking the Salas operation for two years and he knew they'd set this up to get someone inside the Moreau household."
I felt the air change in the room.
"He knew," I said slowly. "He knew what the debt arrangement was."
"He suspected. He didn't have confirmation." Fosse met my eyes. "He called because he wanted me to know where he was going. In case." He paused. "He said he trusted me to do right by it eventually. I don't know why. I hadn't earned it."
"Where is he," I said.
* * *
The name of the town was a town in northern Mississippi I had never heard of. Fosse gave me an address, from memory, after twenty months of carrying it. He gave me a phone number too, a pre-paid number that Daniel Callahan had been using, that he had called twice in twenty months to confirm was still active.
"The last time I called was three weeks ago," Fosse said. "He answered."
I looked at the number on the paper.
I had spent four years not knowing where my father was. I had spent seven weeks in this city building the structure of something I thought I was doing for him and discovering that what I was doing was in fact for myself, and for my mother, and for a decision my mother had made before I was old enough to understand decisions. I had thought, in the back of the part of my mind I didn't examine often, that I might be building toward a body. Toward a grave. Toward the specific closure of a thing that could not be undone.
I was looking at a phone number that had been answered three weeks ago.
"Why didn't he contact me," I said.
Fosse was quiet for a moment. "He said, and I'm repeating this as he said it, I'm not offering it as justification, he said that you were safer not knowing where he was. That you had built something on your own and he didn't want to be the thing that brought the risk back to you." He paused. "He also said you were the most capable person he'd ever known and that you would find it when you were ready."
I looked at the number.
I thought: I'm going to have very significant things to say to you about this approach.
I thought: I'm also going to see you again.
I folded the paper carefully and put it in my pocket beside the earlier paper, beside the spot where the photograph of my mother had been before I gave it to Tran.