He nodded. “He was a good man. Not one to compromise. That’s not the Sullivan way. Cared too much and said too little.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Also the Sullivan way.”
“You weren’t around much, were you?” Morgan asked. Not in an accusing way, just a curious one.
“No,” he confirmed. “The life I was living at the time didn’t accommodate it. I didn’t know about him until he was already grown, and by then…” He looked at his bowl. “By then he’d already become who he was going to be without me. Maybe ifI’d known about him earlier, I could have prevented him from making the same mistakes I did.”
“What kind of mistakes?” Morgan asked quietly.
“Putting faith in the wrong people for the right reasons.”
She thought about the books and wondered how much of that Frank had experienced firsthand.
Shadow sat up and leaned against Frank’s leg, as if he’d sensed his pain and wanted to provide comfort.
Morgan cleared her throat and summoned the courage to ask the question she wasn’t sure she wanted answered. When you didn’t know, there was still possibility. “Is he dead?”
Frank’s eyes snapped up to hers. “You don’t know?”
Morgan shook her head. “I never met him. I don’t know anything about him, except for a box of things I found at the back of mom’s closet from before I was born. A photograph. A ticket stub. A four-leaf clover, pressed between the pages of a small diary.”
The diary had fit in the palm of her hand, and of the year’s worth of pages, only a handful of them had been filled in. It had been just enough to figure out that her parents had known each other for a very short time, and that she had been the unexpected result.
Frank studied her closely, then exhaled. “Things might have been different if he knew about you.”
She wanted to ask Frank more. Just like she’d asked her mother more. But she’d just found Frank, and she wasn’t ready to losehim yet by digging too deep. This was clearly a deeply personal subject for both of them.
“When I wrote you that letter a few years ago,” she said instead, “I didn’t expect you to write back.”
“I know.”
“Why did you?”
He was quiet long enough that she thought he might leave it unanswered. Then: “Because he was my son. And you are his daughter. And I’d already missed enough.”
She refilled both their bowls and sat back down, both content with silence and each other’s company. She appreciated that about him. Wondered what other traits she might have inherited from this man she barely knew and yet who felt like a kindred soul.
“You weren’t surprised to hear from me,” she said finally. “When I was put on leave.”
Frank met her eyes. “No.”
“You’ve been watching over me, haven’t you?”
“Keeping an eye on,” he said, with the faint precision of a man who chose his words carefully. “There’s a difference.”
She accepted that distinction. “Did you know Varro was coming after me?”
“I knew someone might,” he said. “Not who, and not when. When you started asking questions that made the wrong people uncomfortable, I understood what that could mean.”
“Because you’ve seen it before.”
“Because I’ve seen it before,” he confirmed.
She looked at him steadily. “Who are you, Frank? Or who were you?”
A long pause.
“I’m retired,” he said.
“From?”