“No one’s going to hurt me, Victory,” I whisper into her ear.
Gray is looking at his father, his face a mask of confused disappointment. “Dad?” he says. “What have you done?”
Drew takes a few deep breaths, seems to steel himself. “I did what I had to do for our family, so that we could all be together like this.”
Gray gets to his feet so fast that everything shakes. A piece of stemware falls to the floor and shatters, spraying wine and shards of glass at our ankles. No one moves to pick it up; everyone stays fixed, frozen. Gray’s face is red, a vein throbbing on his throat. I’ve never seen him so angry.
“What are you talking about, Dad?” Gray roars.
Drew is turning a shade of red to match, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Fucking answer me!”
Drew picks up his bottle of beer and takes a long, slow swallow. It’s clear that he doesn’t feel as though he needs to answer his son.
“Grief Intervention Services is a client of Powers and Powers, Inc.,” I say finally to Gray. I want to rage like him, to start picking up the china and glasses from the table and flinging them just to watch things break and crash, but my daughter is clinging, hysterical in my arms. I feel as if I owe it to her to keep myself together. “I looked up the client list on our computer this afternoon. It’s there.”
Gray’s eyes rest on me and then move back to his father. I can see that he doesn’t know what to believe.
All eyes are on Drew now, who still has said nothing, just puffed up his chest and pulled back his shoulders. He is the picture of self-satisfied arrogance, the man assured of his righteousness.
“So what?” he says simply. “What does that prove?”
Gray’s face falls; all the rage seems to leave him. I remember the expression from my time in the psychiatric hospital years ago when he talked about his father, how powerless he’d felt against his father’s will, his father’s desires for him. How he’d lived his life trying to please a man who would never be pleased. We hadn’t talked about that in so long, always wrapped up in whatever drama I had going on. I could see that nothing had changed. Maybe Gray had betrayed himself in the same way I had, living a fake life for what seems to be the greater good. Maybe he never wanted to go back to work with his father; maybe he just thought he had to, to make a life for us.
“You spent your whole childhood trying to save your mother,” says Drew, picking up his fork and knife and going to work on his steak. “I didn’t want you to spend your adulthood trying to save someone else you couldn’t save. I didn’t want another child in my care growing up with an unstable mother. We did what we had to do. We helped Annie, but ultimately she had to save herself. Our methods were unorthodox, sure. But it had to be that way. Annie knows that.”
He’s so cool, so matter-of-fact, he could be talking about anything—a risky business venture or a volatile investment that paid out after all. But he’s talking about me, my life, my daughter. Gray and I both stare at Drew while he eats. Victory is still crying quietly in my arms. Vivian stands at the head of the table, her hands resting on the chair where she sat during the meal. The sun has dropped below the horizon, and there’s an orange-blue glow over the ocean. Such a beautiful place to live such an ugly life.
“You were haunted, Annie,” Vivian says, her voice soft and earnest. “He was always going to haunt you.” But no one seems to hear.
I’m watching my husband, and I can see him working the problem, going over in his mind the story I told him, remembering the accusations I launched against Drew and Vivian, the things he told me were all a dream. “Alan Parker, Grief Intervention Services, everything he told her,” says Gray, not yelling anymore, not enraged. Just…sad. “It was all true?”
Drew carefully cuts another piece of steak and puts it in his mouth, begins to slowly chew. Gray and I stare at him, stunned by his calm, by his indifference, all our shock and anger just a breeze through the branches of a great old oak.
“Look,” he says finally, resting his silverware with a