Page 144 of In the Dark of the Past

“I know we said after, but I want to say one thing before after is fully underway.”

I looked at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For back then. For knowing your father’s evidence had irregularities and telling myself it was clerical. For being young and stupid and choosing what was easier over what was true.” His voice was steady, the way it was steady when he’d worked something through to the other side of it. “I can’t give you back what that cost. But I want you to know I know what it cost me. Not in the abstract.”

I’d known the apology was somewhere in him. I’d known it since the fight. Since he’d stood before me and looked at what he’d actually done and hadn’t tried to make it smaller. I’d been waiting without waiting, the way you waited for a thing you needed but were willing to leave on its own timeline.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve known for a while.”

“Is that enough?”

I thought about it honestly.

“It’s enough to stay,” I said. “Which is what I’m doing.”

He exhaled. Something in him that had been braced since long before the last three weeks eased out of the set it had been in.

We sat in my parents’ bedroom in the quiet of a house that had held a lot of grief and was now holding something else. Something new.

“I’m going to keep the house,” I said. It came out like a decision I’d just made, which it was. “I wasn’t sure before, but I am.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I might want to change some things in it, though. Make it mine rather than theirs.”

“That seems right.”

“And I’m going to need to build my practice,” I said.

I leaned my head back against the bed and looked at the ceiling of my parents’ room, taking in the water stain in the corner that had been there since I was ten, the light fixture my father had replaced the summer before he died as a way to make the room his after Mom’s death. All the ordinary sediment of a life lived in a house.

“She would have wanted to know it was finished,” I said. “That it worked.”

“I think she knows,” Finn said.

I wasn’t sure I believed that in the literal sense. But I understood what he meant. That some things were said to the dead not because the dead could hear them but because the living needed to say them. That telling her it was finished was a thing I needed to do, regardless of the metaphysics.

“Yeah,” I said.

We sat until the light had moved all the way to the wall.

Then Finn said, “Are you hungry?”

I considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.

“Yes,” I said. “Actually, yes.”

“I can make something,” he said. “In your kitchen. If you want to stay here tonight.”

I looked around the room. Took in the cedar chest, the envelope, the afternoon light that had finished its work and was going golden now, the way it went at the end of a fall day in this valley, low and special to this place.

“Yeah,” I said. “I want to stay here tonight.”

He stood and offered me his hand.

I took it.

The kitchen was the first room I’d started to make mine.