Chapter 281: Chapter 283: Thank You For Raising Him
After dinner Richard asked Aria to come to the study.
Not Damien. Just Aria.
She followed him down the corridor and he held the study door open and she went inside and looked at the shelves and the clock and the desk that Damien had described to her once....the drawer, the ring sitting in it for twenty years.
Richard sat in his chair.
She sat across from him.
He looked at her for a moment.
"He’s different," he said. "Since you."
She held his gaze.
"I’ve known that boy since he was born," Richard said. "I watched him grow up and I watched what his father’s death did to him and I watched him build something out of it that was....impressive, and also hard in ways that worried me." He paused. "He closed things off. One by one. People, feelings, anything that could be taken from him. He got very good at not needing things."
She said nothing.
"And then you came," Richard said. "With your false name and your stolen identity and your desperate plan." He looked at her steadily. "And he let you in anyway. Not because he was fooled. Because something about you made him willing to take the risk."
"He took a significant risk," she said.
"The best ones always are." He paused. "Are you going to take care of him."
She looked at Richard Blackwood.....seventy three years old and sharp as anything and completely unbothered by the directness of what he’d just asked.
"Yes," she said. "The same way he takes care of me."
"Which is how."
"Completely," she said. "And without making it small."
Richard looked at her for a long moment.
Then he opened his desk drawer.
He took out a small box and set it on the desk between them.
She looked at it.
"My wife’s earrings," he said. "She wore them at our wedding." He pushed the box slightly toward her. "She’d have wanted you to have them. For yours."
Aria looked at the box.
She thought about Eleanor Blackwood who she’d never met and who had worn a ring for forty three years and who had apparently, according to everyone who spoke about her, been someone worth knowing.
She thought about a ring on her finger that had sat in a drawer for twenty years.
She thought about a lot of things very quickly.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don’t thank me." He pulled the box back slightly. "I’ll give them to you properly before the wedding. Tonight was just so you knew they existed." He closed the drawer. "Now go back to dinner. Mrs Hartley has made something for dessert and she’ll have opinions if it’s ignored."
Aria stood.
"Grandfather," she said.
He looked up.
"Thank you. For him." She held his gaze. "For however you raised him. Whatever you did that made him....." She stopped. "Thank you."
Richard looked at her for a moment.
"Go," he said gruffly. "Before Mrs Hartley comes looking."
She walked out of the study.
****
MEI’S POV
She found Alexander on the terrace after dessert.
He was standing with his hands in his pockets looking out at the grounds, which were lit in the particular way of an estate that had been doing this for a long time and knew how to make itself look like what it was.
She stood beside him.
"How are you finding it," she said.
"Richard Blackwood asked me four questions at dinner that were each more specific than the last," Alexander said. "He ran a comprehensive file before I arrived."
"He ran one on me too," Mei said. "First time Damien brought Aria here."
Alexander looked at her. "Did he."
"He asked me about my work. Very specifically." She paused. "Then he asked me what I thought of Damien. I told him I thought he was intense and slightly terrifying and clearly in love with my daughter."
"What did he say."
"He said....good. That’s what she needs."
Alexander was quiet for a moment.
"He’s not wrong," he said.
"No." She looked at the grounds. "He’s not."
They stood there for a moment. The night, the lit grounds, the sounds of the dinner continuing inside.
"She called me first," Alexander said quietly. "This morning. Before anyone else. She called me to tell me."
Mei looked at him.
His profile in the terrace light. The particular stillness of a man sitting inside something he didn’t quite have words for yet.
"Of course she did," Mei said.
"I didn’t expect...." He stopped.
"Alexander." She turned to face him slightly. "She’s been choosing you every day since you arrived. Every conversation, every visit, every time she could have kept the distance and didn’t." She paused. "She called you first because you’re her father. She’s decided that. You should catch up."
He looked at her.
Something in his face did a thing she hadn’t seen it do before. Not composed, not contained. Just....open. Briefly, completely open.
"Okay," he said.
It was such a small word for such a large thing.
She turned back to the grounds.
"The fish was excellent by the way," she said. "Last week."
He was quiet for a second.
"Yes," he said. "It was."
"We should go again sometime."
"Yes," he said. "We should."
She didn’t say anything else.
Neither did he.
Inside, through the terrace doors, she could see Aria at the dinner table with Richard, laughing at something, her hand moving when she talked the way it always did. Damien beside her, watching her laugh with the expression he wore that he didn’t know was as visible as it was.
Mei watched her daughter.
She thought about the kitchen table. The four year old with her certain voice. Twenty four years of watching that child decide what she was going to do and then do it completely.
She’d done it again.
She’d walked into a billionaire’s estate to steal a plant and she’d come out with a life.
Mei smiled.
She went back inside.
