I would have words about the method. Significant words. But I was going to let myself have, first, the version of this that was just, relief. The version that didn't require analysis or management or structure. The version that was simply my father being alive and my being twenty minutes away from calling him.
I let myself have it for the length of three blocks.
Then I put it away, carefully, somewhere I could find it again.
There was still work to do.
* * *
Chapter 25: The Call
I asked for an hour and Dominic gave me two.
He went to the office when they got back and closed the door, not all the way, the way he always left it, but most of the way. Enough. I took my phone and the paper with the number and went to my room and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at what I had written down and thought about the fact that my father was on the other end of it.
I had imagined this moment. Not often, I was disciplined about the things I let myself imagine, because imagination was a form of hope and hope was a form of exposure, and I had learned early that exposure was something to manage. But I had imagined it in the particular way that unavoidable things insert themselves anyway, at the edges, late at night or in the moment before sleep: my father's voice. What I would say first. Whether there would be a first thing at all, or whether it would be one of those moments where the language system shuts down entirely and you just make a sound and the other person understands.
I had thought about that for twenty months.
I had not thought about being angry.
I was angry. I had realized it in the car, coming back over the bridge, when the first wave of relief had settled enough for what was underneath it to become visible. He had known. He had known what Salas had built, had known the arrangement was designed to put me inside this household, had known and had not warned me and had not trusted me with the informationand had instead made a unilateral decision that I was safer not knowing.
The most capable person he had ever known.
And he had treated me like someone who needed to be protected from the truth of my own situation.
I breathed through that for a while. Then I dialed.
* * *
It rang four times.
I had prepared myself for voicemail, for a recorded voice, generic, no name, the infrastructure of a man living without a name, and was building the sentence I would leave when the line picked up and someone said: "Yes."
One word. Careful. The voice of a person who did not answer unknown numbers with their name.
"It's Avery," I said.
Silence.
Not the silence of a bad connection, the silence of a person who has been holding a breath for twenty months and has just been told they can release it. I could hear it, the quality of the silence, and I had to close my eyes for a moment because hearing it was almost too much after the work it had taken to get here.
"Avery." His voice broke on the second syllable. Just slightly, a fracture in the control, the kind my father had always been meticulous about maintaining. He had been meticulous about it my entire life, in the way of someone who had learned early that visible emotion was a vulnerability, and hearing it break on my name did something to the inside of my chest that I was not going to examine in detail.
"I'm in New Orleans," I said. "I'm at the Moreau apartment. I've been here for seven weeks." I paused. "I know you know that."
"Avery..."
"I want to say some things first," I said. "And I want you to let me say them before you explain anything."
A pause. Then: "All right."
* * *
I said them.
I said them calmly, because I was not someone who expressed anger at volume, I expressed it precisely, with the specific architecture of someone who had learned that precision was more effective than noise. I told him that I understood the reasoning. I told him I understood that he had been watching the Salas operation long enough to see the mechanism and that he had made a calculation about my safety and had made it alone, without my input, without my knowledge, and that the calculation had been predicated on the assumption that I was better off uninformed.