Chapter 6
I looked at him the way I had looked at him on the floor of his hallway an hour earlier, with the specific stillness of someone who has decided that he does not get a performance. Not triumph, not contempt, not the expression of a person enjoying a reversal. Just presence. Just eyes that were no longer on the floor.
My father crossed the hallway without hurrying and put his hands on my shoulders and looked at my face the way a man looks at his child when the damage is visible and the accounting has not yet begun.
Then he turned back to Arthur Sterling, and what happened after that was not mine to conduct.
Julian had gone to the far wall. My mother was in the living room doorway, both hands pressed together in front of her, looking at my father with an expression I did not have a clean name for, which was the expression of a woman who had made a long series of choices and was standing in the consequence of them.
Arthur Sterling set his whiskey glass on the hall table with the same deliberate click he had used earlier in the evening, and I understood that the gesture now meant something entirely different, because gestures borrow their meaning from the person making them and Arthur Sterling had just lost the authority that the gesture required.
My father's officers were already moving through the house with the documentation that had been prepared during the forty seconds of that phone call and the twelve minutes of coordinated response that followed it, and Arthur Sterling stood in the hallway of his estate and watched the assumptions his life had been built on produce, one by one, their accurate results.
My mother looked at me once from the living room doorway.
I looked back at her.
I did not say anything, because there was nothing I needed to say that the room had not already said, and because some accountings take longer than a single night, and because I had spent three years being careful not to take up too much space in this house and I had one final thing I needed to do before I left it, which was simply to stand there and not apologize for standing there.
May you like
My father put his arm around my shoulders.
We walked out through the front doors together, into the night air above the Sterling Estate, and behind us the chandelier burned on in the empty hallway and the umbrella stand stood in its corner and the small American flag my mother kept by the back steps moved in the cold air from the rotors still circling above the south tree line, patient and precise and already finished with waiting.
