Afternoon: meetings, numbers, signatures.
Evening: Harper’s room, unbearable hope, unbearable failure.
Night: whiskey in the library, one glass becoming two, two becoming enough to blur the edges of Amelia’s portrait above the mantel.
His mother, Margaret Carter, watched it all with a quiet sorrow that made him angry because pity was one more thing he could not control.
She had moved into the brownstone after Amelia died, though she never called it moving in. She simply began staying longer, then bringing clothes, then sleeping in the guest room permanently.
Margaret was seventy, elegant, sharp-eyed, and the only person on earth who could still make Elias feel like a reckless boy with mud on his shoes.
She did not approve of the whiskey.
She did not approve of how much he worked.
Most of all, she did not approve of how afraid he had become of his own daughter.
One evening, a week before Christmas, Elias found her standing outside Harper’s bedroom, listening.
Inside, a nurse was gently adjusting Harper’s blanket.
Nothing unusual.
Nothing hopeful.
Nothing alive.
Margaret looked at Elias when he approached.
- “You need someone warm in this house,” she said quietly.
Elias loosened his tie.
- “We have nurses.”
- “You have employees.”
- “Harper requires professional care.”
- “Harper requires love.”
The word struck him harder than it should have.
- “Don’t,” he said.
- “Don’t what?”
- “Don’t imply I don’t love my daughter.”
Margaret’s face softened, but she did not step back.
- “I know you love her. But love that is locked behind fear cannot reach a child.”
Elias looked away.
At the end of the hall, the chandelier cast gold light over the staircase. Everything in the house gleamed. Everything looked expensive. Everything felt dead.
- “What do you want me to do?” he asked bitterly. “Sing? Dance? Pretend I know how to fix brain damage that apparently isn’t there?”
- “I want you to stop treating Harper as if touching her might break you.”
