Chapter 11: What Comes After
Three weeks later, Nathan drove to the lake house on a Friday evening and found Grace on the dock with Lily, both of them sitting with their feet over the edge, Lily's fishing rod propped between her knees.
He parked and walked down to the water.
"Anything?" he asked.
"We saw one," Lily said.
"It was this big." She held her hands about six inches apart.
"That's a good fish," Nathan said.
"It went away," Lily said.
"But Grace says it will probably come back."
"Grace is probably right."
He sat down on the dock beside them.
The water was still.
The evening light came in low across the surface.
"How was the city?" Grace asked.
"The board meeting was two hours.
They voted to restructure the Hargrove credit facilities out of the company's debt structure.
It'll take six months to complete, but it's done." He looked at the water.
"Three board members resigned.
Two new ones have been nominated.
Daniel is reviewing the nominations."
"And the DA?"
"Victoria received a target letter yesterday.
Richard's attorneys are negotiating.
Callum has been suspended without pay pending the internal affairs review." He paused.
"It moves slowly.
But it moves."
Grace nodded.
Lily reeled in her line a little, then let it back out.
"Nathan," she said, without looking up from the water.
"Yes?"
"Are you going to live here too?"
Grace went very still beside him.
Nathan looked at Lily's profile — the serious set of her mouth, the dark eyes fixed on the water, the small crease above her brow that was his own face given back to him in miniature.
"I'm working on it," he said.
Lily considered this.
"Okay," she said.
"But you should probably get your own fishing rod."
Grace made a sound beside him.
He looked at her.
She was pressing her lips together, looking at the water, her shoulders shaking slightly.
"Are you laughing?" he asked.
"No," she said.
She was absolutely laughing.
He looked back at the water.
After a moment, he was too.
It was the first time he had laughed in weeks.
It felt strange and then it felt normal, and the strangeness passed quickly.
The sun moved lower.
Lily reeled in the empty line and set the rod down and leaned back on her hands and looked at the sky.
"There are a lot of stars coming," she announced.
"Not yet," Grace said.
"It's still light."
"But they're coming," Lily said, with absolute confidence.
Nathan looked up.
The sky was still pale at the edges, deep blue overhead.
She was right.
They were coming.
He had a meeting on Monday.
A DNA-verified legal filing to complete.
A trust to formally transfer.
A company to rebuild without thirty years of Hargrove architecture holding up its walls.
A daughter whose first four years he had not been present for and whose next forty he intended to show up for completely.
He had a great deal of work ahead of him.
He looked at Grace.
She was watching Lily watch the sky, her face quiet, the tension that had lived in her jaw and her shoulders for nine days — for five years — finally, visibly, gone.
She felt him looking.
She turned.
She didn't say anything.
Neither did he.
There was time for the rest of it.
The conversations that needed to happen, the things that needed to be said between two people who had been circling each other across five years and a kitchen floor and a courthouse hallway.
There was time.
The first star appeared.
Lily pointed at it immediately.
"There," she said.
"I see it," Nathan said.
Grace leaned back on her hands beside Lily and looked up.
The dock held all three of them, steady on the water, as the light continued to go.
---
*Some secrets are buried so deep that it takes a child's voice to finally bring them into the light.
Lily never knew she was carrying the truth — she simply looked at her father and said his name, and everything that had been hidden for five years began to surface.*
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