PART 14:

The part that wasn’t analysis was harder to name. He got off two stops early and walked the last stretch home through a neighborhood that had been changing slowly for the 5 years he’d lived in it. Some buildings renovated, some still holding on with the particular dignity of structures that had been there long enough to feel they’d earned the right to stay.

He liked this neighborhood. It had a quality of unglamorous persistence that he recognized. He stopped at the grocery store on the corner and got the good pasta, the kind Lily preferred, and a jar of the sauce that was not as good as making it from scratch, but was better than most jars and faster than everything.

He got home at 4:15. Lily was at the kitchen table with Dana working on the butterfly life cycle poster with a focused intensity that suggested significant progress had been made. Dad. She said it without looking up. I need your opinion on the chrysalis. He set down the groceries and came to look at the poster.

The chrysalis in question was depicted in what he would describe as aggressive detail. Lily had a tendency toward documentation over aesthetics. “I think it looks accurate,” he said. “Does it look like a chrysalis, though, or does it look like a sock?” He studied it seriously. “It looks like a chrysalis.” “You’re not just saying that?” “I don’t just say things.

” She seemed to accept this and returned to her work. Dana caught his eye over the top of Lily’s head and gave him a look that asked how the meeting had gone. He gave her a small nod that said he tell her later. Later, after dinner and after Lily was in bed and the poster had reached a stage described by its creator as almost done, but I might add more butterflies, he sat across from Dana at the kitchen table and told her about Blackwell’s offer.

Dana listened the way she always did, completely, without rushing him toward her reaction. When he finished, she wrapped both hands around her tea mug and was quiet for a moment. “What does your gut say?” she said. “My gut has opinions. I’m not sure I trust them.” “Why not?” He thought about it. “Because there are two separate things pulling in the same direction, and that always makes me suspicious.

Part of me wants the job because it’s what I was built for, and I’ve been running at maybe 40% of what I’m capable of for 3 years. And part of me wants it because she asked, and the reason she asked is a reason that feels” He stopped. “Significant,” Dana said. “Yeah.” “Those aren’t bad reasons, Ethan.” “I know.

That’s not why I’m suspicious of them.” Dana looked at him. She had the expression of someone who was going to say something true that he might not immediately want to hear. He braced for it. “Melissa would tell you to take the job,” she said. His wife’s name in the kitchen air. Four years and it still had a specific weight to it, not crushing anymore, but present, real.

“You don’t know that,” he said, but without heat. “I knew her for 28 years. I know that.” Dana set down her mug. She didn’t want you to stop being who you were. She wanted you to take care of Lily. Those aren’t the same thing. He was quiet. You can take care of Lily and be who you are, Dana said. You’ve just been afraid to test whether that’s true.

He looked at the table. Outside the city made its night time sounds. A car, something distant, the particular low frequency of a lot of people living close together. I told her I needed to ask Lily, he said. Dana stared at him. She’s the most affected by scheduling changes, he said. It’s reasonable. Dana’s expression went through several phases before settling on something that might have been the most fondness he’d ever seen her direct at him in one moment.

You told a billionaire CEO that you needed to ask your 7-year-old. Yes. And what did she say? She thought it was a reasonable position. Dana picked up her mug. I like her, she said. He asked Lily on Friday morning at breakfast between her second piece of toast and the ongoing saga of the butterfly poster, which had indeed acquired more butterflies.

I might be changing jobs, he said. I wanted to tell you. Lily looked up from her toast. She had his eyes. That was what everyone said, though he thought it was more complex than that, that she had something of her own in her face that belonged to nobody else. Changing to what? She said. A different kind of work.

More like what I used to do before you were born. Making sure certain people are safe. She considered this with the seriousness she applied to things that mattered to her. Are the people nice? One of them, yes. I think so. Would you still come home? Every day when I could. Some days I might be away. Like when Auntie Dana used to travel for work, remember? Lily remembered.

She had strong feelings about that period, mostly because Dana had brought her back a stuffed seal from somewhere that she had named Gerald and still kept on her bed. “Would you bring me things?” Lily asked, “When I traveled?” “Yes.” “I would try.” “Gerald-level things?” He looked at her. “What’s the standard for Gerald-level?” “Something alive-feeling,” she said, which was a description that was both entirely Lily and entirely unhelpful as a procurement guideline.

“I’ll do my best,” he said. She seemed to accept this as reasonable terms. She went back to her toast. “Dad,” she said after a moment. “Yeah.” “In your old job, did you keep people safe?” “Yes.” “Did they stay safe?” He thought about the ones who had, the overwhelming majority, the principals he’d protected over 11 years.

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