"I'll be here," I said.
* * *
I stayed on the bed for a while after I hung up. I wasn't processing anymore, or whatever part of me did that was working quietly underneath, the way it always did. I was just sitting with the fact of it: that my father's voice was stored in my ear again. That they had spoken. That he was coming back. That the thing that had been open since I was twenty-four was beginning, finally, to close.
I didn't cry. I noticed this the way I noticed my own data, not with judgment, just with attention. I was past crying, maybe. Or the relief was too structural for tears, too much a matter of architecture settling. You didn't cry when a wall was repaired. You just felt the solidity.
I got up.
I went to the office door and knocked twice.
Dominic opened it. He looked at me, one look, complete, taking in everything that was visible and some things that weren't.
"He's alive," I said. "He's coming back."
Something moved across Dominic's face, not surprise, because he had believed my when I believed it. Something morelike the expression of someone watching a weight be set down correctly.
"Good," he said.
I nodded.
I stood in the doorway for a moment longer than necessary, and neither of them moved, and the apartment held them in the way it had been holding them for weeks now, this place that had started as a transaction and had become something I didn't have the right word for, something that required a word I hadn't needed before.
"I'm hungry," I said finally. "Is there anything in the refrigerator."
He almost smiled. "There's enough."
"Good," I said. And I meant it for more than the food.
* * *
Chapter 26: The File
I found it on a Thursday afternoon, which was the kind of timing that made no accommodation for significance.
I had been working in the office -- my office now, though I had not quite managed to think of it in those terms without a small interior correction -- sorting through the last of the Moreau Holdings documentation before it went to the federal contact. Most of it was work I had already processed. This was the cataloguing stage: pulling files, confirming contents, making sure the chain of custody was clean.
The folder was in the bottom drawer of the left-hand cabinet, behind a set of property tax records from 2008.
It was thin. A manila folder with no label on the tab, which was itself a notation -- every other folder in this cabinet was labeled in Dominic's precise, economical handwriting. Unlabeled meant it had been placed here and not moved again.
I opened it.
Inside: four pages. A surveillance summary, dated March 2000. A photograph -- not the one I had found on the drive, but another one, taken from further away, my mother and a man I didn't recognize standing outside a building I would later identify as the federal courthouse on Poydras Street. A handwritten note on Moreau family letterhead, dated January 2001. Two months before my mother died.
The note was in an older hand than Dominic's. Victor Moreau Sr., I recognized from his signature. The text was brief:M.C. has made contact with Tran's office. I is further along than Salas believes. Decision required.
Decision required.
I sat with the folder open in my lap for a long time.
* * *
I heard Dominic come home at six.
I heard him move through the apartment in the way I had learned over these months -- the particular acoustic signature of a man who knew where everything was, who moved through space with the same economy he brought to everything. I heard him stop outside the office door.
I had not moved the file.