Chapter 51 YOU'RE JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER

Chapter 51 YOU'RE JUST LIKE YOUR MOTHER
RICHARD'S POV

I heard Nova's door close at half past eleven.

I had been awake since nine, sitting in the chair by my bedroom window the way I had been sitting most nights lately, watching the garden lights throw yellow circles across the grass and thinking about things I could not change no matter how long I sat with them.

The doctors had told me to rest. They had told me a lot of things at that hospital and I nodded at all of it and came home and went straight to my study to check on something I had been thinking about from the hospital bed for three days.

The filing cabinet was exactly as I had left it.

I stood there for a long moment with my hand on the drawer before I closed it again and went to sit by the window instead.

Some things you kept because getting rid of them felt like pretending they had never existed. Some things you kept because you were a coward and throwing them away meant making a decision you were not ready to make when you put them there and had still not been ready to make in the eight years since.

I heard footsteps in the corridor earlier. Elias, moving quietly the way he did when he thought no one was listening, which meant he was almost certainly somewhere he was not supposed to be.

I had not gotten up.

I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hospital or the doctors or the medication sitting in a neat row on my bedside table. It was the other kind of tiredness. The kind that came from carrying something for so long that you had forgotten what it felt like to put it down.

Isabella.

I said her name inside my head the way I had been saying it for eight years, quietly and without ceremony, the way you said the name of something you had lost badly enough that saying it out loud still cost you something.

She had been the smartest person I had ever known. I had told Castellano that once, years before everything fell apart, and he had smiled and said that was exactly why she was useful.

I should have understood then what kind of man he was.

I should have understood a lot of things a lot earlier than I did.

My door opened softly and I turned my head.

Nova stood in the doorway in her pajamas, her hair loose around her shoulders, her hand still on the handle. She looked at me sitting in the chair by the window and something moved across her face.

"I saw your light on." She stayed in the doorway. "I wasn't going to knock but then I did anyway."

"Come in." I straightened up in the chair. "I wasn't sleeping."

She came inside and sat on the edge of the bed across from me, pulling her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. She looked young sitting like that and very much like her mother in a way that still caught me off guard sometimes when I wasn't prepared for it.

We sat in silence for a moment. The garden lights moved slightly in the wind outside the window.

"You couldn't sleep either," she said. It wasn't a question.

"I don't sleep much these days." I looked at her. "Too much to think about."

She rested her chin on her knees and looked back at me and didn't say anything, which was something else she had gotten from Isabella. That ability to sit in silence without needing to fill it immediately.

"Your mother used to do that," I said. "Sit exactly like that. When she was working through something she would pull her knees up and go very quiet and I always knew to leave her alone until she came back out of it."

Nova looked at me steadily. "Did you leave her alone when it mattered?"

The question landed clean and direct with no cruelty in it, just the honest weight of it sitting between us.

"No." I held her gaze without looking away. "When it mattered most I left her completely alone."

She didn't say anything to that. Just kept looking at me with those dark eyes that saw things clearly and didn't pretend otherwise.

"I have something for you." I pushed myself up from the chair slowly, my body reminding me of every year I had lived, and walked to the drawer in my bedside table.

The key was small and silver, sitting at the back of the drawer where it had been sitting for eight years wrapped in a piece of cloth. I had moved it three times over the years, always telling myself I was going to do something with it, always putting it somewhere else instead.

I held it out to her.

She unfolded herself from the edge of the bed and stood up and looked at it in my palm without taking it immediately.

"Your mother gave that to me." I kept my hand out. "About three weeks before she died. She said if anything happened to her I should give it to you when you were ready." I paused. "She didn't tell me what it opened. She just said you would know."

Nova reached out and picked the key up carefully.

She turned it over in her fingers, holding it up slightly in the low light from the bedside lamp. Her face was completely still but her hand was not quite steady.

"Why didn't you give it to me when I was eighteen?" Her voice came out quiet and even.

"Because you left before I could." I lowered myself back into the chair. "And after that I didn't know how to find you."

She looked at me over the key.

"That's not the whole reason," she said.

"No." I folded my hands in my lap. "It is not the whole reason."

She waited.

"I was afraid of what she had put behind it." I looked at the window rather than her face. "Isabella was careful about everything she did. If she went to the trouble of giving someone a key for safekeeping it was because what it opened mattered enough to protect." I stopped. "And I was not ready to find out what that was."

"But you're ready now," Nova said.

"I am dying." I said it without drama, just the plain fact of it. "That tends to move things along."

She stood there holding the key and looking at me for a long moment.

Then she crossed the room and did something I had not expected. She bent down and pressed her lips briefly to my forehead the way a person did when words were not quite enough and not quite right either.

She straightened up and walked to the door without saying anything.

"Nova." I turned my head toward her.

She stopped.

"I owe you more than a key." My voice came out rougher than I intended. "I know that."

She stood in the doorway with her back to me for one moment.

"I know you do," she answered, and walked out.

I sat in the chair by the window for a long time after her footsteps faded down the corridor.

The garden lights moved in the wind outside.

Somewhere in the house I could hear Elias's door close and then Callum's voice, low and brief, and then silence.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone and looked at the number I had been looking at for three days without dialing it.

Then I put the phone away and closed my eyes.

Some things could wait one more night.

Others, I was beginning to understand, had already waited far too long.