She nods once, like that confirms something she’d already guessed.
“But then everything fell apart,” she says. “And that’s the part I can’t make sense of. If the alliance mattered that much, why did it all go bad so quickly?”
Because men like our fathers don’t really believe in alliances. They believe in advantage. The second that changes, the language changes too.
I don’t say all of that.
I say, “Because those arrangements only work until someone sees a better option.”
She looks down at the table. “That sounds like them.”
She looks at me for a second, then says, “Did you always know you’d end up fighting him?”
I know who she means.
“No.”
“When did you know?”
I think about that before I answer.
“When I was young, I thought I wanted his approval,” I say. “By the time I was old enough to do something useful, I was done with that.”
She studies my face, and I can almost see her deciding whether to ask more. She doesn’t.
Instead she says, “You really don’t hesitate, do you?”
“About what?”
“Violence.”
The word sits there between us.
I don’t dodge it. “No.”
She nods slowly, as if she already knew that and just needed to hear me say it. “That should bother me more than it does.”
I look at her sitting there in my kitchen, wearing my shirt, hair still damp, talking to me like this after everything, and for one stupid second I think how easily I could get used to it. Her at this table. The children somewhere in the next room. The whole thing close enough to touch if I were the kind of man who believed wanting something made it possible.
I shut that thought down immediately. She doesn’t belong in my life like that. And I don’t get to imagine otherwise.
She looks at the clock again. “I really do have to go.”
“I know.”
Her phone rings before either of us moves. She reaches for it without looking, distracted, already half out of her chair. Then she sees the screen.
Everything changes in her face.
She answers immediately. “Hello?”
I’m standing before I realize I’ve moved.
She doesn’t hear me. She’s listening now, and all the color is draining out of her so fast it doesn’t look real.
“No,” she says. Quietly. “No, where are they?”
My stomach drops.