"You're thinking it very loudly."
"That's my prerogative." But there was something in his voice, that almost-laugh, the one that surfaced more easily now than it had in the first weeks after his return, the one that told me he was finding his way back toward himself. "Have dinner with me tonight. Bring him if he's available."
"I'll ask."
"Don't ask. Tell him."
I did almost smile then. "Goodbye, Dad."
"Goodbye, kid."
I didn't correct it this time.
* * *
The thirty days had had a shape.
That was the thing I had not anticipated, that the aftermath would have a structure, that the resolution of a thing didn't mean the absence of a thing, that the space where the urgency had been would be filled with something else rather than nothing. I had expected the release of pressure to feel like emptiness. Instead it had felt like room.
Room to finish the acquisition report and start a new engagement, a referral from the Moreau Holdings connection, a financial analysis for a hospitality group that was straightforward and interesting in equal measure. Room to have dinner with my father twice a week in the apartment he had rented on Magazine Street, a small place above a bookshop that smelled of old paper and reminded me, he said, of the housethey'd had when I was very small. Room to call Cleo and tell my the full story, all of it, the parts that had been operational and the parts that hadn't, and to listen to Cleo's silence and then my very thorough assessment of several of Avery's recent choices, delivered with the precision of someone who had been waiting to deliver it for weeks.
Room, mostly, to understand what staying looked like when it was a choice I was making every day rather than a condition I had arrived in.
* * *
The apartment had changed in the way that spaces changed when the people in them stopped treating each other with managed distance. It was the same apartment, same rooms, same light, same river visible between the buildings from the kitchen window. But the architecture of the daily life inside it was different. I used the living room as if it were hers because it was hers now, in the way that spaces became yours when you stopped waiting for permission to occupy them. He used my name in the mornings, not Ms. Callahan, not the careful deployment of formality that had been the starting register, just Avery, the way people said the names of people they had become used to.
The coffee was still there every morning, still exactly right. I had started making his in return on the days I was up first. He drank it without comment, the way I had drunk his for seven weeks, as simple acknowledgment. You noticed. I notice that you noticed. This is what that looks like.
They were, I had concluded, very alike in a specific way that had nothing to do with personality and everything to do with the particular method of paying attention they had both developed from necessity. Two people who had learned to read rooms and read people and manage information carefully and who werenow, in the same space, reading each other, and finding, most of the time, that what they read was accurate.
It was the most honest situation I had ever been in with another person.
That, more than anything, was what staying felt like.
* * *
Tran called at eleven.
"The search warrant is the beginning of the visible phase," I said. "I want you to know that you may receive press contact. My advice is to not comment."
"I know how to not comment," I said.
"I know you do." A brief pause. "Your father's cooperation has been formally acknowledged in the investigative record. His name will be part of the public documentation when the case is filed." Another pause. "Margaret Callahan's name will also be in the record. As a primary source. I want you to know that."
I stood at the window. The river was doing what it always did. "Thank you."
"The fourth witness gave a deposition last week." Tran's voice was careful, the voice of someone delivering information that mattered and wanted it received correctly. "I was present at a meeting in February 2001 where the decision regarding your mother was discussed. I documented it at the time. My documentation corroborates Reyes's sworn testimony." A pause. "We have enough, Avery. I want you to know that. We have enough."
I held that.
We have enough. Twenty-five years of not enough. A federal task force that had collapsed and a lieutenant who had delayed and a woman who had spent three years building a record that had been buried and a man who had spent four years rebuildingit and then disappeared and a drive that had sat on a workbench in a building on Tchoupitoulas Street for seventeen years.
And now: enough.
"Thank you," I said again. It was insufficient but it was the word I had.
"Thank your mother," Tran said. And hung up.