"That it would become something else." A pause. "Is it something else?"
I thought about the garden. The kitchen. The office. The building on Tchoupitoulas and the thirty seconds in the dark room that I had allowed myself and then put away and had not put away entirely.
"That's not the conversation we're having today," I said.
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. The first one. It cracked something open in the middle of my chest, that specific laugh, the one I had heard my whole life and had not heard for twenty months, my father's laugh at the edge of my patience.
"No," he said. "I suppose not." A pause. "Is he good to you?"
"Yes."
"All right." Simply. The way my father accepted facts he had already decided to accept.
* * *
They talked for another forty minutes.
About the federal investigation, he had been in contact with an agent he trusted from a previous case, had been feeding information carefully for months, had known the moment the drive was accessed because the agent had called him. Someone found it, the agent had said. A woman. He had known before I called.
About my mother. That part of the conversation was slower, with longer silences between the sentences, the particular rhythm of two people circling something carefully because it mattered too much to approach without care. He had known, since Fosse, that Margaret's death had not been an accident. He had known and had carried it and had not known what to do with carrying it in isolation, and Avery understood that isolation because it was the version of it I had been living for seven weeks, the knowledge without the person to hold it with.
"I was documenting it for three years," I said.
"I know." A pause. "I didn't know that when we were married. I never told me." A pause. "I was protecting me."
I thought: We both ended up with parents who protected us by not telling us things.
I thought: I wonder if that's the kind of pattern that repeats.
I said: "I was brave."
"Yes." His voice was very quiet. "I was the bravest person I've ever known. And I spent a long time being angry that I didn't tell me and I've arrived somewhere past the anger now." He paused. "I knew what I was doing. I made a choice. It's not mine to be angry about my choice."
I thought about the photograph. My mother laughing. Twenty-five years old and already in the middle of it.
"I have a photograph of me," I said. "With Reyes. From 1999. The federal agent took it as evidence but I said I'll get it back."
Silence on the line.
"I'd like to see it," my father said. His voice had something in it I recognized as the sound of someone being careful not to fall apart in front of an audience, even an audience of one.
"You will," I said. "When you come back."
"Avery..."
"The documentation is with federal authorities. The case is moving. Salas has been informed, indirectly, that his father's operations are being fully documented. His own involvement as of 2000 is in the record." I kept my voice even. "There is no longer a reason for you to be in Mississippi."
A long pause. "It's not that simple."
"I know it's not simple. I'm not saying it's simple. I'm saying there's no longer a reason." I paused. "I want you to come back. I'm saying that plainly. I want you to come back and I want to sit in the same room as you and I want to have the conversationswe didn't have for twenty months and I want to show you the photograph of your wife at twenty-five years old and I want..." I stopped. Found the edge of the thing. "I want you to meet the person who helped me find it."
Silence.
Then: "All right," my father said.
Just that. The same word Dominic used, the word that meant more than agreement.
"I'll need a few days," he said. "There are things to arrange."