Chapter 92

[ 1,231 words ]

Katia’s POV

My father called ahead, which was how I knew it was serious.

David Kensington did not call ahead. He showed up at family events my mother had organised, at dinners that were really ambushes, and at the charity gala with his glass of something he nursed all evening and his habit of standing slightly outside whatever circle he was in. He arrived as part of a unit and departed the same way. He did not call ahead and ask, in a voice that was careful in a way his voice was not usually careful, whether he could come to my office on Thursday morning.

“Just me,” he said on the phone. “Not your mother p>

“Okay,” I said.

“Is that alright p>

“Yes, Dad. It’s alright p>

He arrived at ten past ten. Sam showed him in with the quiet professionalism she applied to everything, and he came through the door in his good coat, the one he wore for occasions, and looked around my office the way people looked at things they had heard about and were now seeing for the first time. The view, the space, and the particular quality of an office that said the person inside it had built something real.

He looked older than the last time I had seen him. Not dramatically, not the sudden ageing of illness or crisis, but the ordinary accumulation of time, the slow settling of a face into the lines it had been building toward for years. He looked like a man who had been carrying something for a long time and was tired of the weight of it.

He sat down across from my desk. He put his coat on his lap instead of on the back of the chair, which told me he hadn’t decided whether he was staying or how long this was going to take.

I waited.

“I’m not going to bring anyone for you to meet,” he said.

“I know p>

“That’s not why I’m here p>

“I know that too p>

He looked at his coat. At his hands on top of it. At the desk between us was its clean surface and its documents and the small framed photograph of Aiden in the far corner that he could probably see from where he was sitting.

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

His voice was different than I was used to. Not the voice he used at family events, the slightly too loud, slightly too cheerful voice of a man performing normalcy in a house where normalcy required performance. This was something underneath that. Quieter. Less finished.

“You don’t have to—” I started.

“I do.” He looked up. “Katia. I do.” He held my gaze with a directness I hadn’t seen from him in years. “I failed you. When you were twenty. When your mother – when we – I failed you. I chose peace over protection, and I’ve regretted it every single day since p>

The office was very quiet.

I had thought about this moment sometimes, not frequently, not with any urgency, but occasionally, in the way you thought about things that were unresolved and probably would stay that way. What I would say if he ever said it. Whether I would be angry or cold or simply done with it, the way I was done with things that had stopped being worth the energy.

I looked at my father. At the good coat on his lap and the tired lines of his face and the directness in his eyes that he was clearly finding difficult to sustain but was sustaining anyway.

“I know, Dad,” I said.

He exhaled. A long, slow exhale that seemed to have been waiting for those three words for a long time.

“I should have stood up to her,” he said. “When she told you to go. I should have—” He stopped. Started again. “You were pregnant and twenty years old and standing in your bathrobe, and I looked at the floor.” His jaw tightened. “I looked at the floor, Katia p>

“I know p>

“There’s no excuse for that p>

“No,” I said. “There isn’t p>

He nodded. He had not come here expecting absolution, and I was not going to offer it to him cheaply, because cheap absolution would have been an insult to both of us. What he had done — or not done — had cost me years. It had cost me a safety net at the moment I needed one most. It had sent me into the street at twenty with nothing, and it had shaped everything that came after, including the person I had become, including the particular kind of strength that grew specifically from knowing you had survived without anyone catching you.

I was not going to pretend that was nothing.

But I was also looking at a man who had carried the knowledge of it for six years, and that was its own kind of consequence.

“Come on,” I said.

I got up and went to the small kitchen area at the side of the office and put the kettle on. I heard him shift in his chair — surprised, I thought, by the movement and by the fact that I hadn’t dismissed him.

“How do you take it?” I said.

A pause. “Milk. No sugar p>

I made the tea. I brought it back and set it in front of him and sat down with my own, and we looked at each other across the desk with the particular quality of two people who had just said something difficult and were now inhabiting the space that came after it.

We didn’t say much. There wasn’t much to say yet — the apology had been made and received, and the accounting of it would take more than one morning in an office. But we sat with it together, which was more than we had managed in six years of family events and careful avoidances.

Twenty minutes, approximately. Long enough for the tea to be finished and for the particular silence between us to shift from uncomfortable to something closer to real.

He stood eventually. Put his coat back on. Looked at the photograph of Aiden on my desk.

“He looks like a happy child,” he said quietly.

“He is,” I said. “He’s extraordinary p>

He nodded. Something moved across his face that I chose not to name — the thing that happened when people thought about the time they had missed with a grandchild they had effectively refused to acknowledge. He didn’t ask to meet Aiden today. He understood, I thought, that he hadn’t earned that yet.

At the door he paused.

“Thank you,” he said. “For the tea. For—for letting me say it p>

“Thank you for coming to say it,” I said.

He left.

I listened to his footsteps down the corridor, the soft sound of the outer door, and the silence that followed.

Then I put my head down on the desk.

Not crying. Not quite. Just the specific, necessary heaviness of something that had been held for a long time being briefly, carefully, put down.

Sam appeared in the doorway thirty seconds later with a fresh cup of coffee, set it on the desk without a word, and went back out.

I sat up.

I drank the coffee.

Outside the window the city was going about its business with complete indifference.

I went back to work.

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