"He doesn't say that easily."
"I know." A pause. "I'm aware of how careful he is. I didn't take it as something to work around. I took it as something to be worth."
My father looked at him for a long time. I sat by the window and watched it, this conversation about me, between two people who both knew me and both, in their different ways, had been trying to manage the distance between protecting me and respecting me, and had both gotten it wrong at least once, and were both, now, trying to do something different.
I thought: I am going to need to have further words with both of you about the general concept of managing things on my behalf.
I thought: But not today.
"My wife," my father said. The words came out quieter than everything before them, the register that meant the subject mattered more than his control of it. "Margaret. What I built, the documentation. You understand what that means. What I was doing."
"Yes," Dominic said. His voice had the careful quality, the one he used when he was being deliberate about something that could break. "I spent three years building a record in order to correct something that was wrong. I knew the risk. I chose it." He paused. "My work is part of the federal case. My name will be in the record as a primary source."
My father was quiet for a long time.
"Thank you," he said. "For what you did for my daughter."
Dominic nodded once. Clean. No addition.
Then my father turned to look at me, turning the way people turned when they had been managing not to look at something and had run out of reasons to keep managing.
"Avery," he said.
"I know," I said.
"I'm not sure you do."
"Then tell me."
He looked at me for a moment. The inventory look, the one from the doorway, the one that was taking in everything that had happened since the last time he had seen me, tallying the ways I was the same and the ways I wasn't.
"You're different," he said.
"Seven weeks will do that."
"More than seven weeks." He shook his head slightly. "You came here looking for something and you found something else and you didn't run from it. That's..." He stopped. "That's your mother. That's what I did."
I held that.
I thought about the photograph. My mother at twenty-five, laughing. I have a daughter. That's exactly why I'm not stopping.
"I'm going to get the photograph back from Tran," I said. "When I do, it's yours. If you want it."
My father looked at me. Something moved in his face, a fracture in the careful control, the second one I had heard from him since he answered the phone. "I want it," he said.
I nodded.
* * *
They stayed in the office for another hour. The conversation moved, from the federal case to the practical logistics of my father's return, the contact he had been maintaining, the things that needed to be handled before his name resurfaced in New Orleans. Dominic offered resources, not as charity, I understood, but as the practical extension of someone who operated in a city where knowing the right people was itself a form of currency, and who was choosing to spend that currency in a direction that had nothing strategic left in it.
My father accepted. Not easily, there was a quality to his acceptance that contained everything he had thought about Dominic Moreau for two years and was now revising in real time, but he accepted.
At some point the conversation became, without quite deciding to, simply conversation. My father asking about the Moreau Holdings structure and Dominic answering with the precision of someone who didn't mind being known. Dominic asking about the investigation and my father answering with the candor of someone who had been alone with it for too long. The specific ease of two people who were both used to managing rooms and had both, in this room, stopped managing.
I watched from the window. The light was late-afternoon by now, the particular gold that New Orleans did at five o'clock, throwing everything into relief, the desk, the bookshelves, the two men on opposite sides of a table who had in common, I thought, exactly one thing that mattered.
Me.