Page 138 of Wreckage and Rain

I'm going to take whatever name she gives me.

I'm going to wear it.

Chapter 38: Sit

Colt

The envelope's in the stack of mail Summer drops on the counter. Cream stock, his handwriting. I know it before I've picked it up. One card inside, one line, his fountain pen.

Come home and say it to my face. You owe me that much.

He signed it Dad. He hasn't signed anything "Dad" in twenty years. That's the part that gets me, and he knows it's the part that'll get me, which is why he did it. I read it twice. I put it down. I pick it back up. I don't owe him a thing. And I still feel compelled to get in the car. That's the whole sick problem with my father in one sentence. I know what he is and I still want him to call me back into the room. How does he even know where I'm living?

Summer comes in with two mugs, takes one look at my face, and stops.

"Who died."

"Nobody." I hand her the card.

She reads it twice. Sets a mug down by my hand, which is her telling me to drink something, and keeps the card.

"He wants you in Charleston," she says. "He wants to control the story."

"Yeah."

She watches me. Doesn't tell me what to do, because she never does. She just waits while I get there.

"I'm not going," I say. "I'm not getting on a plane so he can point at a chair and watch me sit in it." I pick up the phone. "Dom and my attorney want all of his calls to go to voicemail. I get it, and they're right." I turn it over in my hand. "But if I don't answer it once, on my terms, I'll be answering it in my head every day until the trial. I need to be the one who ends it." I look at her. "Stay?"

"I'm not going anywhere."

I put it on speaker so she can hear, and I call the number I swore I deleted.

He picks up on the second ring. "Colt." Like he's been sitting by the phone. Maybe he has.

"I got your card."

"Then you know what I'm asking." The voice is already low and warm, the one he saved for the rare day I did something right. "Come home. Sit down with me. We'll talk it through like men. The two of us, not through lawyers."

And there it is. My free hand's already come up, palm out, like I'm about to smooth something over, walk something back, like I've done in front of that man ten thousand times. I look at it like it belongs to somebody else. I put it down.

"We're not doing that," I say. "Summer is on the line. She stays."

A pause. "This is between you and me, son."

"No. It stopped being between you and me the day you hired her."

He lets that go by like he didn't hear it. "There's a road through this that doesn't end with my own son putting me in a cell. You haven't testified yet. What you gave them can be walked back. A young man, angry, his marriage in trouble, saying things he didn't mean. I can make it look like what it was. I can still protect you. I have always protected you."

And God help me, part of me leans toward it. Not the deal. Him. The voice on the phone right now is the one I spent my whole life trying to get out of him, the warm one, the one that calls me son like it means it, and I'm thirty seconds from a man who would hand me that if I'd just shut up and do what he says. I feel myself start to soften. Start to explain. Start to make it easy for him.

Summer's hand comes down on my knee. Doesn't squeeze, doesn't grab. Just sits there, warm and real.

I stop softening.

"You said I owe you." Summer nods at me, barely. "Here's what you get. The truth, since you want it so bad. You hired her. You put her on Tidewater, in my meetings, on my calendar, and don't tell me it was HR, because you've never let anything near me you didn't pick yourself. You knew what she was, you knew what she was doing to me. You knew what you were doing. You've done this since I was a kid. You dangle something and you watch me run at it, and what you dangle is always you. You, telling me I did good. I spent my whole life sprinting at that, and I ran so hard I didn't see my own wife disappear across the table from me."

He doesn't say anything. That quiet is him deciding which tool to pick up next.