I heard the knock and opened the door and there was my father.
He was thinner than I remembered. Not dramatically, the way people get thinner when they have been living alone in a small town in Mississippi for twenty months without anyone to cook for or eat with, the specific thinning of a life reduced to its functional components. His hair was more gray than I had left it. He was wearing the kind of clothes a man buys when he needs clothes and is not thinking about what they say, jeans, a dark shirt, a jacket he had probably owned for years.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
Then I stepped forward and he put his arms around me and I let him, and I stayed there for longer than I usually stayed in that kind of contact because I had twenty months to make up for and I was going to allow myself the twenty months.
"Hey, kid," he said into my hair. His voice was rough.
"Don't call me that," I said.
He made the sound that was almost a laugh. "No. I suppose not."
They stood there for another moment.
Then I stepped back and he looked at me, really looked, the way a person looks after an absence that was long enough to require inventory. I held still for it.
"You look like your mother," he said.
"I know," I said. "Come in."
* * *
I had made coffee, which was a practical thing to do and also something to do with my hands in the hour before he arrived. He sat at the dining room table and wrapped both hands around the cup and looked at the apartment with the specific attention of a man who had spent two years building a picture of the Moreau household from the outside and was now sitting inside it.
"It's different from what I expected," he said.
"What did you expect?"
"Something more..." He paused. "More fortified."
"It's fortified," I said. "You just can't see it."
He looked at me. "How much of that is you?"
I thought about it honestly. "Some. Not all." I paused. "He has good instincts."
My father was quiet for a moment. His hands were around the cup, his eyes on the room. I had spent my whole life reading him, reading the quality of his silences the way I now read everyone's silences, and this one had the texture of a man organizing what he wanted to say before he said it.
"I read the acquisition report," he said.
I looked at him. "Tran gave it to you?"
"I have my own contacts. It's been filed as part of the federal documentation." He paused. "It's good work. Thorough." He looked at me steadily. "You found the gap in the fourth layer."
"Yes."
"He didn't tell you it was there."
"No. I found it."
"And you told him what you found."
"Yes."
He was quiet for another moment. I understood what he was doing, not challenging me, exactly. Building a picture from the picture, the same way I did, the same way he had always done. I had always known I came by it honestly.