Chapter 308: Chapter 310: Richard Invited Aria Over
They drank their tea and looked at the garden and a bird landed on the wall at the far end and left and the morning did what mornings did.
"How old are you this year," he said finally.
"Twenty four."
"When I was twenty four I was in my second year of building what became Blackwood Enterprises." He looked at the garden. "I had forty pounds in a bank account and a business plan that three different investors had told me was too ambitious and a particular quality of stubbornness that my own grandfather described as the most exhausting thing he’d ever encountered in a person."
Aria looked at him.
"He wasn’t wrong," Richard said. "I was exhausting. I was also right." He paused. "About the business plan."
She waited.
"At twenty four I made a decision," he said. "To build something that would last. Not for myself. For whoever came after." He looked at his cup. "I had no one in mind at the time. I just understood that things built for one person died with that person and things built for something larger than yourself outlasted you." He paused. "It took me another ten years to understand that the something larger didn’t have to be a company."
He looked at her then.
"It can be a person," he said. "Or people. The ones you build toward even before you know who they are."
She held his gaze.
"You broke into my grandson’s house," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"With a false name and forged references and a plan to steal from him."
"Yes."
"And in the process of doing that," he said, "you became the best thing that has ever happened to him."
The garden was very quiet.
She looked at the wall where the bird had been.
"I’m not saying that to be kind," Richard said. "I don’t say things to be kind. I say them because they’re true and truth is more useful than kindness in most situations." He paused. "You are the best thing that has happened to that boy. And I want you to know that I know that."
She pressed her lips together.
"Don’t," he said.
"I’m not doing anything."
"You’re about to deflect," he said. "You do that when something lands too directly. You’ve been doing it since the first dinner. I notice things."
She looked at him.
"I know you notice things," she said.
"Then don’t deflect." He held her gaze. "Receive it. What I said. Let it mean what it means."
She sat with it.
The specific discomfort of being seen clearly by someone who had no investment in flattering you. Richard Blackwood didn’t offer things he didn’t mean. She’d understood that from the first dinner when he’d looked at her across the table and asked her questions that weren’t small talk and hadn’t softened them when she answered.
She received it.
"Thank you," she said.
He nodded once.
Went back to his tea.
They sat in comfortable quiet for a few minutes.
She looked at the garden. The particular order of it, not the manicured precision of the estate grounds, something more personal than that. Tended by preference rather than by staff. She could see his choices in it. Which things had been allowed to grow large and which had been kept contained. What he’d prioritised.
"You tend this yourself," she said.
"Most of it." He looked at the beds along the wall. "Mrs Hartley’s nephew does the heavy work. I do everything else."
"Since when."
"Since Eleanor died." He said it simply. "She had the garden. When she was gone I started tending it and I haven’t stopped." A pause. "It’s a useful thing to do with your hands when you’re thinking."
"What do you think about," she said.
He looked at her sideways.
"Many things," he said. "Lately....my grandson."
She waited.
"He was a serious child," Richard said. "Not unhappy. Just....serious. He carried things. His father’s death, the company, the weight of what the name meant. He was twenty two when Charles died and he picked everything up and he hasn’t put it down since." He paused. "Until recently."
She said nothing.
"He laughs now," Richard said. "Properly. Not the controlled social version he deployed at events. Actually laughs." He paused. "I heard him on the phone last week saying something to Marcus that made him laugh and I stood in the hallway and listened to it and felt....." He stopped. "I felt like the last twenty years had been worth it."
Her throat was doing something she was managing carefully.
"You did that," Richard said.
"He did that," she said.
"You gave him somewhere to put it down," Richard said. "The weight. That’s not nothing. That’s everything." He paused. "I spent thirty years watching him carry it and I didn’t know how to help him put it down." He looked at his hands on the cup. "You walked in with a false name and a stolen plan and you figured it out in eight weeks."
"I wasn’t trying to...."
"I know you weren’t trying to," he said. "That’s what makes it real."
She looked at the garden.
She thought about who she’d been when she walked through those gates. The fear of it, the desperation of it, the particular tunnel vision of someone who had exactly one goal and couldn’t afford to see anything else.
She thought about what she’d seen anyway.
"He was terrifying at first," she said.
"He’s still terrifying."
"He’s different terrifying now," she said.
Something moved at the corner of Richard’s mouth again. "Yes. I imagine he is."
"Can I ask you something," she said.
"You can ask me anything," he said. "I’ll answer what I choose to answer."
"Fair." She looked at him. "The ring. You put gave him that ring." She paused. "Why."
He looked at the garden for a moment.
"Eleanor bought that ring herself," he said. "She chose the stone, she chose the setting, she paid for it herself before I had any money worth speaking of. She told me she wasn’t waiting for me to figure out what she wanted." A pause. "She told me she knew what she wanted and she was going to have it and I could come along or not."
Aria looked at him.
"She was twenty one," Richard said. "The most certain person I’d ever met. I was twenty three and already building toward something and she just....looked at me across a room and decided." He paused. "I spent forty three years grateful that she did."
