I told him that I was not uninformed. That I had never been uninformed, that I had spent twenty months in a state of not-knowing that was not the same as uninformed, that I had been operating on incomplete data in a situation with real stakes and that the incompleteness had been imposed on my by someone who had decided I couldn't handle the complete picture.
I told him that I had found the drive. That I had found Reyes's files. That I had found the photograph and the notes and the sworn testimony and that I knew everything now, what my mother had done, how I had died, who had made the decision and why, and that I had found all of it myself, which I was not saying as a point of pride but as evidence that I could have handled knowing it earlier, that treating my like someone to be protected rather than someone to be trusted had not served either of them.
I said: "You have always known I was capable. You told Fosse that. You knew it and you still decided for me."
Silence on the line.
Then my father said: "You're right."
I hadn't expected that. I had expected a defense, an explanation, the explanation that Fosse had already given me, that it was for my safety, that the surveillance, that the risk. I had expected to have to argue through the explanation before arriving at the acknowledgment.
"You're right," he said again. "I made a decision that wasn't mine to make. I told myself it was protection. It was also, I was afraid of what you would do if you knew. Afraid you would come looking. Afraid..." He stopped. "I underestimated you. I've been doing it your whole life and I know better and I still did it."
I sat with that.
"I know why," I said. "I'm not asking you to explain why. I'm asking you to understand that it had a cost."
"I understand," he said. "I've been sitting with the cost for twenty months."
I believed him.
I breathed.
"All right," I said. "Now tell me what you know."
* * *
He knew most of it.
He had spent two years building the financial picture before he disappeared, and he had gone to Fosse at the end of those two years because Fosse was the last piece of the chain he hadn't been able to close. Fosse had given him what I had gotten from Fosse, the task force, the payments, the deliberate delay in Margaret's protection, and my father had sat in that Metairie living room and listened to the story of his wife's death told by the man who had been paid to allow it, and then he had thanked him and driven home and spent three days deciding what to do.
On the fourth day he had noticed the surveillance.
He had understood immediately that the timeline had accelerated, that Salas's network had tracked the financial investigation to him and had decided he was a risk. He had packed a single bag and called Fosse and given him the address and the number and told him to hold it, and then he had driven north and not stopped.
"I knew about the Reyes connection," he said. "I knew Thomas had been building the case. I didn't know where the documentation was, I spent a year trying to find it before I disappeared. I thought it was gone." A pause. "Where did you find it?"
I told him. Tchoupitoulas. The padlock. The box on the workbench.
I heard him exhale slowly. "He was careful," my father said. "He always was."
"He left it for Dominic's father," I said. "There was a note. He knew the building was going to be acquired."
"He trusted the Moreaus. The elder Dominic, your father trusted him too, as much as you can trust anyone in that city." He paused. "What about the son?"
I looked at the closed door of the room. The apartment quiet around me.
"I trust him," I said.
A longer pause than I expected.
"That's not something you say easily," my father said.
"No."
"Avery." His voice had shifted slightly, the tone I associated with him choosing words carefully because the wrong ones would land badly. "I arranged the debt because I needed you somewhere safe. Somewhere with resources. I knew the Moreau household would be, I knew you would be protected there." He stopped. "I didn't anticipate."
"What."