Chapter 245: Your grandmother passed away
The thought did not announce itself. Did not arrive with the ceremony, such thoughts perhaps deserved. It simply was there. Already fully formed. Sitting in his chest with the weight of a thing that was going to be there for a long time.
"Daddy." Seren. He looked up.
She was standing over him with her face doing something he had never seen it do, not fear exactly, not the fear of a child who understood what was happening, but the prior stage of it. The stage of something is very wrong, and I don’t know what it is, and I need you to tell me.
"Daddy, what’s wrong?" Her voice is very small. Seb looked at his daughter.
At her face. At the eyes that were not his, looking down at him from the face of the person he had done everything correctly for and everything incorrectly around.
"Your grandmother passed away," he said.
The words came out quieter than he expected. Stripped of everything except the bare fact of them.
Seren looked at him for a moment. Processing. The face of a child moving through something they did not yet have the full language for.
Then she sat down on the kitchen floor beside him. And put her arms around him.
Nine years old. Arms not quite long enough for the full circumference of the hug she was attempting.
Face pressed into his shoulder with the complete, uncalculated generosity of a child who had decided that what was needed was this, and was providing it.
"I’m all alone," Seb said. To the kitchen. To himself. To whatever was listening.
"You have me, Daddy." Her voice muffled against his shoulder. "I’m here." A pause. "And you have Mummy too."
He held her.
For a moment, he held her the way you held something when everything else had been removed from the room, and this was what remained, not desperately, not with the clutching quality he had brought to most things he valued. Just held her. Completely.
They left within the hour.
He packed quickly. Efficiently. The practised packing of a man who had moved between cities and hotels and situations for long enough that the physical act of it required no thought.
Seren’s things took longer; she had opinions about what was coming, but they were in the car within the hour.
"Should we call Mummy?" Seren asked from the back seat.
"Mummy needs to take care of baby Divina," Seb said. "We won’t disturb her." Seren accepted this. Looked out the window as the city moved past.
The hospital where his mother lay was efficient and impersonal, and the staff who received him were kind in the way of people for whom this was the daily work, kind without intrusiveness, present without pressure.
He was shown to a room. He stood beside her.
His mother. In the particular stillness that had nothing in common with sleep, despite resembling it. The stillness was simply absence. The body without the specific thing that had made it her.
He looked at her hands.
He thought about when he was young. About the specific memories that arrived at these moments uninvited, not the large ones, not the significant occasions, but the small ones.
The texture of ordinary days. Her voice in a kitchen that was smaller than this one. The particular sound of the door when she came home.
He had not been a good son.
He knew this. Had known it while it was happening, had filed it in the category of things to address later, had always believed later would arrive with more room in it for being better.
Later had not arrived. He cremated her there.
It seemed right somehow to complete it here, not to transport the long distance of loss through logistics and paperwork and the mechanical business of shipping grief across borders.
He made the arrangements. Signed the forms. Sat in a waiting room chair with Seren asleep across three seats beside him, her head on his jacket, her breathing the slow unconscious rhythm of a child who trusted the world enough to sleep in a hospital waiting room.
He looked at his phone. Forty-five percent.
The number looked back at him from the screen without apology.
Forty-five percent of what had been his migrated quietly and completely to an entity he had not been able to identify, held with the patient stillness of someone who had not yet decided what to do with it but was in absolutely no hurry.
Forty-five percent. He stared at it.
And then in the waiting room of a hospital in a city that was not his, with his daughter sleeping beside him and his mother’s ashes being prepared in a room down the hall and everything he had built in a state of dissolution he could no longer arrest.
Something happened.
Not a plan. Not the arrival of a strategy or a manoeuvre or the next move in a game he had been playing for so long it had stopped feeling like a game and started feeling like a life.
Something quieter than all of that. An idea that had nothing to do with saving anything.
That had nothing to do with Creed Tech or the shares or Elav or any of the machinery he had been operating for years with the focused energy of a man who had confused acquisition with arrival.
It had to do with being a happy man. That was the thought.
Simple. Almost embarrassingly simple for the brain of a man who had spent a decade on complexity. I just want to be a happy man.
He looked at Seren sleeping. At her face in the waiting room light.
He thought about what happiness had felt like. When he had last recognised it. Not the happiness of winning, acquiring, or proving something, the other kind. The quiet kind. The kind that didn’t require anyone to lose for him to have it.
It had looked like noodles at a kitchen table. It had looked like a fish still alive because someone remembered to feed it.
It had looked like small arms, not quite long enough for the hug they were attempting. Seb put his phone away. He looked at the ceiling.
And for the first time in a very long time, he stopped thinking about the company.
