Julian nodded, because there was nothing else to say, and sat with them until the nurses came — an hour, doing nothing, saying little, being, for once, present in a room where he was not the most important person in it.
The stock closed down again the next day. He didn't check.
Chapter 18 — Home
The hospital discharged Samuel Okafor on a Thursday, into rain, and Amara decided the rain was wrong for it and made everyone wait under the awning until it stopped, because her father was coming home and coming home deserved weather that behaved.
The apartment wasn't big — Diane's place, the one with the good light and the kitchen that always smelled faintly of spices — but Amara had spent three days making it bigger on the inside. She'd cleared a corner for the cot, but Samuel said, "The couch is fine, and anyway I'm going to sit in the kitchen like a normal person," so the cot went back to the closet and the kitchen became the hospital of his recovery, which is to say the place where everything important happened.
The music box was on the shelf above the stove. It had been her mother's — a small wooden thing with a ballerina that had lost one arm — and Amara had played it every night of the five years like a prayer. Now she wound it on the first evening, and the tinny waltz filled the kitchen, and Samuel closed his eyes and said, "I remember this. In the — the room, I would hum it when I couldn't sleep. I thought I'd made it up."
"You didn't," Amara said. "It was here the whole time."
That was the week the spy game reversed.
For five years it had gone one direction: Samuel, before he disappeared, crouching beside a small girl at the kitchen table, whispering Russian words like secrets. *Shpion. Opasno. Begi.* Spy. Danger. Run. He'd made it a game because the truth — that he worked in rooms where men said things that got people killed — was too heavy for a child. She'd learned Russian the way other children learned jump-rope rhymes.
Now she sat across from him, her father thin and trembling and learning to be a person again, and she taught him the five years he'd missed.
"So 'no cap' means no lie," she explained, very seriously, peeling carrots into the sink. "And 'it's giving' means — like, if the soup is good, it's giving dinner."
Samuel repeated it in his careful, rusted English: "It is giving dinner." He looked so solemn saying it that Diane, at the stove, laughed until she cried, and then cried without the laugh, and Amara pretended not to notice because some things you let happen.
He'd missed slang, and music, and the way the neighborhood had changed. He'd missed her first day of middle school, her losing a tooth, the year she sold forty-seven bracelets in one afternoon at the market and came home with her pockets jingling like a pirate. She told him all of it — not in order, not neatly, in the avalanche way of a child who has been saving up a father for five years — and he listened like a man being given water.
The small domestic healings stacked up like plates. The morning Samuel walked to the corner store alone and came back with the right change and stood in the doorway grinning like he'd conquered something. The afternoon he helped Diane fix the cabinet hinge, his hands shaking but sure, the two of them working in a silence that had twelve years of history in it. The evening Amara found him in her room looking at her bracelet stand — the little wooden box of bracelets she sold at the market — and he picked one up, a blue-and-silver one, and tied it around his own wrist, and said, "For luck. Your mother would have wanted me to have luck."
"You don't need luck," Amara said. "You have me."
The visitors came, because they were that kind of family now — the kind people came to. Detective Bell, with a plant he clearly regretted buying. Agent Cole, who stayed for tea and told Amara, very formally, that the Bureau owed her a debt, which made Amara feel strange and important and a little embarrassed all at once.
And Julian Cross.
He came on a Sunday, in a plain car, no entourage — Theo Marsh stayed downstairs, which Amara knew because she'd seen him from the window and he'd waved. Julian brought nothing in his hands, which Amara thought was odd for a rich man, until he sat at the kitchen table and said to her, "Your father tells me you play."
"The music box isn't — I mean, I don't really —"
"The camp," Julian said gently. "The music camp. The one you circled in the brochure last year and didn't ask your aunt about because it cost too much."
Amara stared. "How did you —"
"Diane told me," he said. "It's handled. Tuition, the good violin, all of it. Don't argue; I've been told by experts that billionaires need hobbies, and mine is going to be making sure you get to play."
She cried then — she, who hadn't cried through any of it, not the van, not the warehouse, not the hospital — and Samuel put his arm around her, and Diane turned very quickly back to the stove.
Before he left, Julian asked Diane to walk him downstairs. Amara watched from the window. She couldn't hear what they said, but she saw Diane's hand go to her mouth, and then saw her aunt laugh — the real one, the one that shook her shoulders — and Julian handed her an envelope, and when Diane came back up she was holding a signed lease.
"A shop," Diane said, dazed. "On Mill Street. A real shop, with a sign and everything."
"What will you call it?" Samuel asked.
Diane looked at Amara. Amara looked at the envelope. Printed in clean type at the top of the lease, under the address, someone — Julian, in his careful, unfamiliar handwriting — had written a suggestion.
"'Diane's Corner,'" Amara read aloud.