Chapter 126 My Father's Grave

Chapter 126 My Father's Grave
Lara's POV

I went to my father's grave on a Thursday morning in October.

Alone.

Not because I didn't want company. Not because Damien wouldn't have come if I had asked, he would have come without hesitation, he always did. But because this particular visit felt like something that needed to be just me and my father, the way some conversations needed to happen without witnesses even when the other person in the conversation was no longer there to hear them.

I had been thinking about going for a while.

Since Catherine was born, really. Since I had held her for the first time in that hospital room and thought about my mother and all the things she hadn't lived to see. Since I had named her Catherine and felt the weight of that name and what it carried and who it honoured.

I wanted to tell him.

Not just about Catherine. About all of it. About the company and the IPO and the years of rebuilding and what had happened this past year and what had come out the other side of it. I wanted to sit beside where he was buried and say the things I had been accumulating to say to him for years, the things that had been stacking up since the last time I had visited which was longer ago than I wanted to admit.

The cemetery was quiet on a Thursday morning.

The particular quiet of places that held the absence of people, a quality of stillness that was different from any other kind. Not sad exactly. Just particular.

I found his grave without difficulty even though I had not been in a while. I had always found it without difficulty, which was something I had never examined too closely, the particular internal compass that brought me to the right place without effort, as if some part of me had always known exactly where he was.

I sat down on the bench nearby.

Not on the grass. Not because of any squeamishness about that but because Catherine was in the carrier on my chest and logistics required a bench.

Catherine looked around at the cemetery with her usual focused attention.

"This is your grandfather's grave," I told her. "His name was Richard Montgomery. You're named after his wife. Your grandmother Catherine."

She looked at the headstone.

Then at a bird that had landed nearby.

Then back at the headstone.

"He would have loved you," I said. "He would have been completely undone by you. He had a way of looking at things he loved, people he loved, like they were the most important thing in any room, and that's what he would have done with you."

I sat quietly for a moment.

The bird hopped closer.

Catherine watched it with great interest.

"I rebuilt the company," I said to my father. Not out loud. In the way I always talked to him, in the space just inside my own head where the conversations happened that I needed to have with someone who wasn't there anymore. "I know you know that. I know somehow you know that. But I wanted to say it anyway because I needed to say it to you specifically."

I thought about the day I had walked back into the Montgomery Tech offices for the first time after Lucas. The state of what had been left behind. The fifteen employees who were still there, loyal in a way that had moved me so completely I had not been able to speak properly for several minutes.

The fifteen who became two hundred.

The offices in three cities.

The government contract.

The IPO.

Fifteen billion naira.

"I did it, Dad," I said. "Everything you built and everything he took and everything I had to rebuild, I did it. And it's stronger now than it was when it was yours. I think you'd find that funny. That the person who tried to destroy it ended up making it stronger because of what it had to survive to still be standing."

The bird flew away.

Catherine watched it go with mild disappointment and then transferred her attention to a leaf that was moving in the slight breeze.

I thought about Lucas.

I had not thought about him much since he died. Not because I was suppressing it or avoiding it but because he had genuinely stopped taking up space in my mind in the way he had occupied it for so long. He was simply gone. Not a presence I was managing anymore. Not a threat I was calculating around. Just something that had happened and was over and had left behind the life I was now living, which was better than anything I had had before it.

That seemed like the right outcome for everything he had put us through.

That his attempts to take things from me had resulted in a life more full and real than I might have had without them.

I didn't say that to my father. It felt too neat, too tidy a conclusion for something that had been genuinely terrible while it was happening. But I thought it.

"You would have liked Damien," I said instead. "I know I've said that before. But I want to say it again because I think about it a lot. You would have liked the way he loves me. The particular way of it. How he pays attention. How he stays." I paused. "And the children. God, Dad. The children."

I told him about Ethan.

About who he was and who he was becoming and the medical school conversation and the graduation and the cameras in the safe room and the phone call that had kept Damien occupied while Bode's people found their position. About the notebook he had left open on his desk on purpose. About the way he held Catherine the first time, the careful arrangement of his arms, the thing he had said to her.

I told him about Richie.

About the dinosaur lifetime commitment and the David situation and the way he had waited on the floor for an entire hour for Catherine to wake up in the hospital, unbothered, patient in a way he was not usually patient about anything, because she was worth it.

About the way he had said she told me when asked how he knew what Catherine wanted, because of course she had told him, of course she had, because that was Richie and the world worked according to Richie's understanding of it and his understanding was that his sister communicated with him specifically.

I told him about Catherine.

About how she arrived. About her name. About the bone marrow and what it had done and the medical impossibility of her existence and how she was here anyway, as if impossibility was simply a word that had not fully understood what it was dealing with.

About the way she looked at things.

About Damien holding her for the first time and crying in the way he cried, properly, honestly, not trying to stop it, and what that had meant to see.

I told him about the year.

Not in detail. Not everything. But enough. About what had been threatened and what had held and what had endured and what had arrived on the other side.

By the time I finished talking Catherine had fallen asleep against my chest.

Her small warm weight.

Her particular breathing.

I sat with my father for a while longer without saying anything, just sitting, the way you sat with someone you loved without needing to fill the time with words.

The cemetery was still quiet around me.

A few other people further away, visiting their own people, having their own private conversations with the people they had lost.

I thought about what my father had been like.

The specific things. Not the summary of him, not the version that had been reduced over years to a few defining characteristics, the stubbornness and the vision and the way he had built something from nothing. The specific things. The way he laughed at his own jokes before he finished telling them. The particular smell of his study, old books and something else I had never been able to identify. The way he had always called me by my full name when he was proud of me and just my initial when he was exasperated, which had meant I spent my entire childhood being able to tell exactly what was coming by whether I heard Oluwadamilola or just D.

I missed him.

Not in the acute way I had missed him in the years immediately after he died. More in the settled way of someone who had learned to carry an absence and had gotten used to the weight of it, had stopped being surprised by it, but still felt it clearly when they stopped moving for long enough to notice.

I missed him today.

I was glad I had come.

I stood up eventually, adjusting Catherine in the carrier, and stood at the graveside for a moment.

"I'm okay," I said. "I want you to know that. I'm genuinely, completely okay. Better than okay." I paused. "She's going to know who you were. All three of them are. I'm going to make sure of it."

I looked at the headstone.

Richard Montgomery.

Beloved father. Builder of things. Stubborn in all the right ways.

That last part was something Ethan had suggested we add to the mental description of him that our family kept. Not on the headstone, which had been carved before Ethan existed, but in the way we talked about him.

Stubborn in all the right ways.

I thought that was exactly right.

I walked back to the car slowly, through the quiet of the cemetery, Catherine asleep and warm against me.

I sat in the car for a moment before starting the engine.

I thought about what I had said at the graveside. About being okay. About being better than okay.

It was true.

That was the thing about it. It was simply and completely true, not something I was performing for my father's benefit or telling myself to make the visit feel worth the drive. Just true.

I was okay.

The company was strong. My children were growing into themselves in ways that made me proud every single day. My husband was in the garden on Sunday mornings checking on his roses and reading novels during Catherine's nap windows and making coffee the way I liked it before I even reached the kitchen.

And somewhere in a cemetery in the city where I was born, my father was buried, and his name was on a building that was stronger than when he left it, and his granddaughter was asleep on my chest named after the woman he had loved, and his legacy was not just intact but extended, carried forward into people he had never met but who would know who he was.

That was enough.

That was more than enough.

I started the car.

Drove home through the city.

Went inside.

Found Damien in the kitchen.

"How was it?" he asked.

"Good," I said. "It was good."

He nodded and handed me coffee without asking if I wanted any.

I took it and sat down and let the morning be what it was.