"So you erased her," he said quietly. "To get me back."
"I protected — " Nathan stopped himself. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, a gesture so childish it winded Arthur. "I don't know. Maybe. Yes. Maybe I wanted — " He dropped his hands. "She was sick, Dad. She was dying and she wanted to come home, and I stood at that gate and I sent her away with a seven-year-old holding her hand, and I have not slept properly since. Is that what you want to hear?"
What Arthur wanted, in that moment, was to cross the room and strike his son. The fury was there — hot, unfamiliar, rising from some depth he had kept sealed for decades. His hands had curled into fists on the desk.
And beneath the fury, cold as groundwater: the wound of a father who had failed one child while grieving with the other. He had followed Caroline everywhere after Margaret died — Nathan was right. He had poured his grief into his daughter and left his son standing alone at nineteen, and Nathan had spent twenty-nine years trying to get back into a room whose door Arthur himself had closed without noticing.
"You were nineteen," Arthur said. His voice sounded old to his own ears. "And I left you alone with it. That's on me, Nathan. God help me, that's on me."
Nathan looked up, startled.
"But what you did to your sister — " Arthur stood. He came around the desk, slowly, and stood before his son's chair. "She died believing I wouldn't speak to her. She died seventeen days ago, and I missed her funeral, and a seven-year-old boy walked into my gala with dirt on his face because there was no one else left to bring him. That is on you."
"I know." Nathan's voice was barely a whisper. "I know it is."
Arthur looked down at his son — forty-eight, gray at the temples, weeping silently into his hands — and felt the fury drain out of him, leaving something heavier and harder to carry. He put his hand on Nathan's shoulder. It was the first time he had touched his son, he realized, in longer than he could remember.
"We'll sort the rest later," Arthur said. "The company. All of it. But hear me now: you are still my son. Don't mistake what I'm about to do with anything else."
Upstairs, a floorboard creaked — Lucas, awake. Arthur lifted his hand from Nathan's shoulder and went to the door, and did not look back.
Chapter 5: The Blue Stone
Morning came into the townhouse the way it always had, through the tall eastern windows and the gray light of the river, but Arthur woke to something he had not felt in years: the sound of someone else's breathing in the house.
He had moved Lucas from the sofa at two in the morning, carrying him with the stiff care of a man who had not lifted a child in decades. The boy had not woken. He had simply folded himself smaller against Arthur's shoulder and kept one fist closed around the ring, as if even in sleep he knew what he could not afford to lose.
Arthur stood in the doorway of the spare room and watched him now. The morning had worked its way down the bed. Lucas's cheek was smudged with something dark, his thin sweater ridden up at the side, and his closed hand rested near his mouth. The ring was still in it.
Arthur crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, gently as his weight allowed. "Lucas," he said. "I only want to look at it."
The boy's eyes opened at once. Arthur would learn that there was no half-waking with this child; he slept like an animal and woke the same way. He stared at Arthur for a long moment, then slowly opened his fist.
The ring lay in his palm. Oval blue sapphire in a plain silver setting. Arthur had not held it in eleven years, and his hands knew it before his mind did — the small dent on the underside of the band where Margaret's knuckle had worn it thin, the faint roughness at the shoulder of the stone.
"Grandma's," Lucas said quietly. "Mama said it was Grandma's."
"Yes." Arthur's voice came out rough. "I gave it to her. Your grandmother." He turned the ring in his fingers. "And then she gave it to your mama. On her twenty-first birthday."
He could see the room where it had happened, clear as if the day were running on a loop somewhere behind his eyes. Caroline's twenty-first birthday, June, the Connecticut house with the French doors open and the lawn going down green to the lake. Margaret had been thin by then — they all knew, though no one said it, that the heart was failing — but she had insisted on the whole ceremony. She'd had the ring cleaned. She'd put it in a small velvet box and made Arthur carry it downstairs like it was something dangerous.
"I wanted to give it to her at dinner," Margaret had said, "but I'll do it now, while I'm sitting down."
Caroline had knelt in front of her mother's chair and let Margaret slide the ring onto her finger. It was too big and slid sideways, and Caroline had laughed — that full, sudden laugh she had, the one that took her whole body — and Margaret had laughed too, and then Margaret had caught Arthur's eye over their daughter's head, and something passed between them that neither of them ever named. Two years later she was dead.
"You have her hands," Arthur said to Lucas, before he could stop himself. The boy's fingers were long and narrow, like Caroline's at that age, like Margaret's.
"Who?" Lucas asked.
"Your mama." Arthur held the ring out. Lucas took it back immediately and closed his fist around it again, and Arthur felt a brief, absurd envy of a seven-year-old's certainty about what was his.
Mrs. Doyle appeared in the doorway with the silent completeness that had always made Arthur suspect she materialized rather than walked. She was in her sixties, broad and graying, with the expression of a woman who had decided long ago to be disappointed by everyone and spare herself the suspense.
"The bath's ready," she said, to Lucas rather than Arthur. "And there are eggs. You can have them however you like, though I recommend scrambled, because the cook won't be in until Tuesday and I'm doing my best."
Lucas looked at Arthur as if asking permission. The look landed harder than Arthur expected.
"You heard Mrs. Doyle," Arthur said.
The boy slid off the bed, one hand still closed around the ring. At the doorway he stopped. "The other one," he said. "The man in the nice coat. Is he coming back?"
Arthur understood. Uncle Nathan. "Not today," he said. It was not quite a lie. "Mrs. Doyle will be with you all day."
Lucas nodded, gravely, like a small official accepting a briefing, and followed Mrs. Doyle down the hall.
Arthur remained on the edge of the spare bed. He heard the bathwater, the low murmur of Mrs. Doyle's voice — not unkind, which surprised him — and then the boy's laugh, thin and disbelieving, the laugh of a child who had not expected to be given anything.