Chapter 55 Ask your father

Chapter 55 Ask your father
My father had died when I was nineteen. A car accident on a road he had driven a hundred times. A wet night, a bend, a barrier that gave way. I had been at university two hours away and my mother had called me at seven in the morning and I had driven home in a state that I could not now fully reconstruct because the mind protects you from certain things by making them blurry around the edges.
I had never questioned it.
It was an accident.
People died in accidents.
Richard had known my father.
Not well. They had met three times before my father died. Twice at family dinners my mother had arranged when Richard and I had first started seeing each other and once at a function I could not now specifically recall. Richard had been polite and my father had been polite and my father had said afterward that he seemed capable, which was the highest compliment my father gave to anyone.
Capable.
I had thought about that word many times over the years.
"He knew my father," I said.
"Yes," Bruno said.
"They met before we married," I said. "Before the engagement. Early on." I looked at Bruno. "My father died eight months after we met."
Bruno was very still.
"Richard came to the funeral," I said. "He was the one who drove me. He held my hand through the whole thing and he was patient and kind and afterward he said let me take care of you and I thought it was love and I said yes."
I stopped.
Bruno put both hands on my shoulders and held them there, warm and steady.
"He took care of me for twelve years," I said. "Starting from the week my father died."
The studio was very quiet around us.
Outside Lisbon went about its warm morning, trams and voices and the smell of bread from the café on the corner, and none of it reached us in here.
"You do not have to go," Bruno said.
"Yes I do," I said.
"Phoebe—"
"He signed the guilty plea," I said. "Cole gets everything. The trial is done. Richard goes to prison." I looked at Bruno. "The only thing left is whether I know the truth about my father."
Bruno looked at me for a long time.
His hands moved from my shoulders to my face and he held it the way he did when something mattered enough to say directly.
"Whatever he tells you," Bruno said. "Whatever it is. It happened before me, before any of this, before you had any way to see it coming." He held my gaze. "It does not change what you survived. It does not change who you are. And it does not change what we are." He paused. "I need you to know that before you walk into that room."
I looked at him.
"I know," I said.
He kissed me, brief and certain, and I held his face for a moment after and then stepped back.
"I want three days first," I said.
He looked at me.
"Three days in this studio," I said. "The bread from the café and the north-facing window and you in that chair reading while I paint badly." I looked around the room. "Three days of none of it existing. And then I go back and I sit across from Richard and I hear what he has to say and I walk out with the guilty plea and I come back here."
Bruno looked at me for a moment.
"Three days," he said.
"Three days," I said.
He picked both bags up from where he had dropped them and carried them through to the small room off the studio that served as a bedroom and I stood at the north-facing window and looked out at the narrow street below and the bookshop door still propped open and a cat sitting in the sun on the step outside it.
The easel stood in the corner behind me.
I turned and looked at it.
Then I crossed the room and opened my bag and found the small set of paints I had bought at the airport on a sudden decision that had surprised even me and set them on the table beside the easel and looked at the blank canvas the previous tenant had left behind.
Bruno came back into the studio and stopped when he saw the paints.
"You bought paints," he said.
"At the airport," I said.
"You did not tell me," he said.
"You were getting coffee," I said.
He looked at the canvas and the paints and me standing beside them and the north-facing window throwing its clean light across all of it and his expression was the open unguarded one, the one that belonged only to rooms with no one else in them.
"Paint something," he said.
"Now?" I said.
"Right now," he said. He pulled one of the chairs to the corner and sat in it and crossed his legs and looked at me with complete patience. "I will sit here."
"You said you had a book," I said.
"I lied," he said. "I want to watch you."
I looked at him sitting in the corner of the studio in the Lisbon morning with the city outside the window and the bread smell coming up from the café and the light moving across the floor between us.
I picked up a brush.
Three days later I stood outside the facility where Richard was being held with Bruno beside me and the signed guilty plea already filed with Cole and the morning cold and grey after Lisbon's warmth.
Bruno took my hand.
I looked at the building.
"Ready?" he said.
"No," I said. "Let's go anyway."
We went in.
Richard was already at the table when they brought us through. He looked smaller than the last time. Not physically. The particular smallness of a man whose authority has been removed along with his freedom and who has not yet worked out what is left of him without either.
He looked at Bruno first.
Bruno looked back at him without expression and sat beside me and did not speak.
Richard looked at me.
"Thank you for coming," he said.
"Tell me about my father," I said.
Richard looked at the table for a moment.
Then he looked up.
"Your father came to me," he said. "Six months before he died. He came to me because he had found out something about a man he had done business with. Something serious. He needed advice on how to handle it."
"What man?" I said.
Richard was quiet for three seconds.
"Cassano," he said.
I looked at him.
"Your father had evidence against Cassano," Richard said. "Financial evidence. The kind that would have put him in prison." He held my gaze. "He asked me what to do with it. I told him to give it to me. That I would handle it safely."
"And instead you gave it to Cassano," I said.
Richard said nothing.
"You told Cassano my father had evidence against him," I said. "And six months later my father died on a road he had driven a hundred times."
Richard looked at the table.
The room was very quiet.
Bruno's hand found mine under the table and held it hard.
"Was it an accident?" I said.
Richard looked up at me.