"I want to meet him," my father said.
"I know." I paused. "He's in the office. He's been in the office since you arrived." I paused. "I think he's giving us space. And I think he's also, not entirely sure what to do with himself."
My father raised an eyebrow. It was a small movement, but I knew it, the eyebrow that meant that's interesting and also tell me more and also I am updating my model of this situation.
"He doesn't do uncertain well," I said. "He does it honestly. That's different."
My father looked at me for a long moment. The look he had always used when he was seeing me more clearly than I intended to be seen.
"All right," he said. He put down the cup. "Let's go."
* * *
I knocked on the office door.
Dominic opened it. He looked at my father and my father looked at him and there was a moment, a very specific moment, the kind that existed when two people who have been aware of each other for years were in the same room for the first time, where the air held the weight of all the background.
"Daniel Callahan," my father said.
"Dominic Moreau." He stepped back from the door. "Come in."
I went in too. I was not going to be excluded from this, they were not going to have a conversation about my circumstances and my choices in a room I wasn't in. I sat in the chair by thewindow. My father sat across from Dominic. Dominic sat behind the desk, not as a power position, I thought, but because it was where he sat when he was working through something difficult and needed the architecture of the familiar.
They were quiet for a moment. Two men who were both precise and both honest and both accustomed to managing rooms, finding the right approach to a room that neither of them managed.
My father spoke first. "You know what I was investigating."
"Yes."
"You know that investigation touched your family's operations."
"Yes."
"And you're aware that some of what I found..."
"Is in the federal record," Dominic said. "Yes. I'm aware." He held my father's gaze. "I want to be direct with you, Mr. Callahan. My family's history is what it is. I have spent twelve years building something that is not that history. I am not going to defend what my father did or what my grandfather did. I am also not going to apologize for it as if it were mine." He paused. "What I can tell you is what I have done. And I can tell you what I did when your daughter found what I found."
"Tell me," my father said.
He told him. All of it, not managed, not curated, the same direct account he had given me across the space of seven weeks. The arrangement, the household, the moment he understood that Salas had engineered it. The decision to tell Avery what he knew about 2001 when I found my mother's name. The building. The drive. Tran.
My father listened the way he had always listened, completely, without interrupting, with the specific quality of attention that I recognized as my own and had never known, until recently, was something I had inherited.
When Dominic finished, my father was quiet for a moment.
"You told me about my mother before you knew what I'd do with it," he said.
"Yes."
"That was a risk."
"Yes." Dominic held the older man's gaze. "It was also the right thing to do. I had a right to know. I was not going to be the second person who decided I didn't need the complete picture."
Something shifted in my father's expression, a very small shift, the kind that didn't mean agreement yet but meant point received.
"I told her you were good to me," my father said.
"I tried to be."