"I looked up the Moreau name," he said. "After we talked."
"And?"
"And I spent two years investigating the network this man operates in. I have opinions."
"I'm sure you do."
A pause. "Are you going to tell me they're wrong?"
I thought about the drive. The building. The thirty seconds in the dark room that I had allowed myself and that I had been allowing myself, in small careful increments, ever since. I thought about I don't regret it, in case you needed it said and about coffee made the right way without asking and about the look on his face when I had told him I was not leaving.
"I'm going to tell you to wait until you meet him," I said.
My father was quiet for a moment. I could hear him thinking, the texture of his silence that I had grown up reading, that I had missed without naming for twenty months.
"All right," he said. "Three days."
"Three days," I said.
* * *
I told Dominic that evening.
I told him across the dinner table, there was food, there had been food since Fosse, since the drive, since the weight of the active emergency had lifted and been replaced by the weight of things actively resolving, and I had begun to notice that the eating together had stopped being something that happened because there was nowhere else to eat and had started being something that happened because they were both there.
"Three days," I said.
He was quiet for a moment. I watched him recalibrate, the specific recalibration of a man who was about to meet the father of someone he had kissed in a garden and then declined to name. It had a texture I had not seen on him before: something adjacent to uncertainty, which was an unusual thing to find in that face.
"I'll need to know what he knows," Dominic said. "About my family's history. About what he found in his investigation."
"He knows most of it." I paused. "He's not going to be neutral about you. I want to be honest about that. He spent two years building a case that touched the Moreau portfolio. He has history with the name."
"I know." He held my gaze steadily. "I'd rather have him honest than managed."
I looked at him.
"Yes," I said. "I know you would."
Another of those silences, the new kind, the kind with a different weight. I was beginning to understand that these silences were where they actually talked, the two of them, in the space between the sentences where neither of them had quite enough language for what they were moving toward and both of them were too careful to reach for language that didn't fit yet.
I was beginning to think that was all right.
That the language would come when it came, and that the structure would hold in the meantime because it was not made only of language, and that there was something to be said for two people who were both precise enough to wait for the right word rather than reach for the wrong one.
I cleared the table.
He washed up.
The city did what the city did outside the window, the river making its way to the Gulf in the dark, New Orleans settling into the version of itself that only existed after midnight, older, slower, the accumulated weight of everything that had happened here pressing gently down on everything that was happening now.
Three days.
* * *
Chapter 29: Daniel
He arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, which was not a day I would have chosen for something this significant but which was the day it happened regardless, and I was beginning to understand that the significant things rarely arrived on the days you would have chosen.