Chapter 8
Keep her safe.*
My mother had kept that note in a kitchen drawer until the day she died.
I had asked questions when I was younger.
Where had he gone?
Why hadn’t he called?
Why did every adult lower their voice when I mentioned him?
My mother had always answered the same way.
“He loved you.
That’s what matters.”
But love had never explained the empty place at our table.
“What do you remember?”
I asked.
Dominic’s jaw tightened.
He looked toward the edge of the rooftop, where smoke from the fireworks drifted over the buildings.
“I remember my father telling me to stay upstairs.”
“That sounds harmless.”
“It wasn’t unusual.
He didn’t like me in his study when he was meeting people.”
“People like my father?”
“Yes.”
The cold no longer bothered me.
I barely felt it.
“Why was my father meeting him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You just said you remember.”
“I remember seeing him.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No.”
Dominic’s expression tightened with frustration, though not at me.
“I remember going downstairs because I heard raised voices.
My father’s study was on the first floor then.
The door was open.
Your father was inside.”
“What were they saying?”
“I couldn’t hear all of it.”
“Could you hear enough?”
He closed his eyes for a moment.
“My father said something about records.
Your father told him he wouldn’t change them.”
“What records?”
“I don’t know.”
“You expect me to believe that you stood outside a room while my father argued with yours, and you never wondered what they were talking about?”
“I wondered for thirteen years.”
“Did you ask?”
“My father told me to go back upstairs.”
“And you did?”
“Yes.”
The simplicity of it made anger rise in my chest.
“You were seventeen, Dominic.
Not seven.”
“I know how old I was.”
“Then why didn’t you do anything?”
His eyes met mine.
“Because I was afraid.”
The words stopped me.
Not because I had never imagined Dominic afraid.
I had.
But I had imagined it as something he experienced privately, behind locked doors and composed expressions.
I hadn’t imagined it belonging to the same boy who had stood outside his father’s study while mine argued for something neither of us understood.
“What happened next?”
I asked.
“I heard the front door close.”
“Whose?”
“I assumed your father’s.”
“Assumed?”
“I went downstairs after a few minutes.
The study was empty.