Chapter 243: Can I call her?
Seb looked at the road ahead.
He had prepared for this. Had rehearsed it in the way he rehearsed things that needed to be managed. A version of the truth that a Nine-year-old could receive.
Something that would not frighten her, confuse her, or leave marks that would need explaining later.
"You remember I told you," he said carefully. "Your mother is still angry with Daddy. She needed some space. But you can see her whenever you want, my love. Whenever you call her, she will answer."
Seren considered this.
He could see her processing it in the rearview mirror, the particular expression of a child who is measuring an answer against some internal standard it cannot yet fully articulate.
"Is she going to come back?" Seren asked.
"You will always be able to see her," Seb said. Which was not the same thing. Which Seren, at Nine, would not yet parse as not the same thing.
She nodded. Returned to the window.
The villa was quiet when they arrived.
Seb had not been back to it in days. It held the particular air of spaces that had been well-lived in and then abruptly vacated, not abandoned, but paused.
Seren went immediately to her room to deposit the stuffed animal and check the status of things she had been away from, in the thorough and proprietorial way of children reasserting ownership over their territory.
Seb went to the kitchen.
He filled a pot with water. Found the noodles. Found the jar the specific jar, the right brand, the one with the red label that Seren preferred and Amara had always kept stocked in the cabinet, a habit Seb had maintained without examining why.
He stood at the stove.
The water took time to boil, and he stood there watching it in the way you watched things when your mind needed something simple to fix on. The small bubbles formed at the bottom before they had the energy to reach the surface. The steam begins at the edges.
He thought about it before.
There was a specific time before that he kept returning to, not a day or a moment exactly, but a period.
A texture of time. When the business was good, and Seren was younger, and Amara was in the house, and the problems, such as they were, had the manageable quality of problems that could be solved with money or energy or both.
When he had been, in some provisional and probably undeserving way, happy.
He knew what he had done with it.
Knew how he had held that happiness in the way you held something you didn’t fully believe you had earned, with an agitation underneath the having of it, a constant low-level fear that it would be taken, a resulting tendency to clutch instead of simply hold.
He had clutched Amara.
Had held Seren at the cost of the woman Seren called Mummy.
And now stood at a stove making noodles with the jar sauce in a flat that still smelled faintly of a life that had moved on without him.
"Daddy!"
Seren, from her room. The tone of someone who had discovered something that required immediate reporting.
"What?"
"My fish is still alive! I thought it might have died while I was in hospital!"
He exhaled.
"Of course it’s still alive," he called back. "I fed it."
A pause.
"You did?"
"Every day."
Another pause. Longer this time. The pause of a child revising something.
"Thank you, Daddy," she said. Softly. The voice she used when she meant it completely.
Seb looked at the boiling water. "You’re welcome, princess," he said.
They ate the noodles at the kitchen table.
Seren had opinions about them. This batch was slightly better than last time. The noodles themselves were cooked correctly. The jar sauce was the right jar sauce, but perhaps a little more next time.
Seb ate and listened and made the sounds of a man who was present, who was here, who had decided that the table and the noodles and the child across from him were the whole world for the length of this meal.
Then Seren looked at him with the expression that preceded the next held question.
"Will your secretary be joining us?"
The question landed with the specific accuracy of something innocent. Seb looked at her. Made sure nothing showed.
"No," he said. Evenly. "She won’t," Seb said nothing.
"I didn’t like her," Seren said. Equally informative. Then returned to her noodles with the complete finality of someone who had said what they came to say and was done with the subject.
"She won’t be coming anymore," Seb said.
Seren nodded. Satisfied.
"Good," she said. "The only person I need is Amara. You said so." Seb looked at his bowl.
"Yes," he said. "I did."
"Can I call her?"
He looked up.
At this child across the table. At the face that was so fully, so entirely her own, her eyes, her particular expression, the specific way she held herself, and beneath all of it, clearly, unmistakably, the piece of herself that was Amara’s. The tenderness. The directness. The way she loved without calculation.
"Yes," he said. "You can call her."
Seren was already reaching for her phone. Amara had just fed both babies.
The boy had been efficient about it, businesslike, focused, done in good time, and satisfied afterward in the way that suggested he had already developed a personal philosophy about the importance of not making things complicated.
The girl had taken longer. Had needed adjusting, repositioning, the specific patience of waiting for the right moment to become the right moment. But she had fed. She was sleeping now in the cradle with the boneless completeness of the recently satisfied.
Amara was on the bed with the work files.
The pile that had accumulated during her absence, approvals pending, decisions deferred, the quiet ordinary machinery of the company that had kept running with James and the team keeping it steady, and was now waiting for her attention with the patient backlog of things that had respected her recovery time and were now gently indicating that the recovery time was perhaps concluding.
She was not reading them. She was looking at them. Which was not the same thing.
Julian was in the study. She could feel the house carrying the particular quality of Julian-in-the-study, a kind of focused weight that settled into the walls, a preoccupation that was not absence but direction. He was pointed somewhere she couldn’t fully see and had been, she understood now, for some time.
She had decided not to ask yet.
When he was ready, he would tell her. This was what she had learned about Julian, not that he hid things maliciously, but that he processed them completely before bringing them to her. That his silences were not doors closing but rooms being built.
She would wait for the room to be ready. Her phone rang. She looked at the screen.
And something happened in her chest, the immediate, unconditional, utterly uncomplicated thing that happened whenever Seren’s name appeared.
"Seren."
