Chương 15
I looked at Phedra.
“What do you want?”
She noticed the question.
“Ten minutes.”
“Do you want me here?”
“Yes.”
Selina entered without makeup.
She wore a plain gray sweater and no jewelry.
Her eyes went immediately to Phedra’s head.
Then to the IV.
Then to me.
She sat in the visitor chair.
Nobody spoke for nearly a minute.
Finally, Selina said, “I brought your necklace.”
She placed the hummingbird pendant on the tray table.
Phedra looked at it.
“Thank you.”
Selina’s face crumpled slightly at the politeness.
“I should not have taken it.”
“No.”
“I thought you were going to sell it.”
“I was.”
“For treatment.”
“Yes.”
Selina nodded.
“I know.”
Phedra did not rescue her from the silence.
That might have been the bravest thing I had seen her do.
Selina folded her hands.
“I told myself I was protecting what Damian worked for.”
Phedra looked at her.
“From me?”
Selina’s eyes filled.
“Yes.”
The answer surprised all of us.
She wiped her cheek.
“I had already used so much.”
“For Victor?”
“For Victor, for the house, for Godfrey, for myself.”
Her voice became unsteady.
“And when you got sick, I looked at what treatment could cost and I panicked.”
Phedra’s expression stayed still.
“So you made me the problem.”
“Yes.”
“You shaved my head.”
Selina flinched.
“Your hair was coming out.”
“You held the clippers.”
“I know.”
“You put my mattress in the shed.”
Selina lowered her eyes.
“I know.”
“You took my phone.”
“I know.”
“You rationed my food.”
Selina shook her head quickly.
“I never meant for you to go hungry.”
Phedra’s voice remained quiet.
“I went hungry.”
That ended the argument before it began.
Selina pressed her lips together and nodded.
“I know.”
Phedra looked exhausted.
“Why did you come?”
“To apologize.”
“No.”
Selina stared at her.
Phedra continued.
“You came because everything is coming out.”
My mother opened her mouth.
Then closed it.
“I don’t know whether I would have come otherwise,” she admitted.
Phedra looked at me.
I did nothing.
After a moment she said, “You can leave now.”
Selina stood.
At the door, she turned toward me.
“Damian?”
“What?”
“Victor wants to speak to you.”
I felt almost nothing.
That surprised me.
“Did he tell you that?”
“Yes.”
“Give Lena his information.”
Selina blinked.
“You don’t want to meet him?”
“Not now.”
“He is your biological father.”
“No.”
The answer came easily.
“He is biologically related to me.”
Winston’s face appeared in my mind so clearly that I could almost hear him complaining about people who left tools outside in the rain.
I looked at Selina.
“My father raised me.”
She nodded once.
Then she left.
Phedra picked up the hummingbird necklace.
“Do you want it?”
I asked.
She turned it over in her palm.
“I don’t know.”
“You can sell it.”
“I might.”
“For treatment?”
She looked at me.
“For something stupid.”
I smiled.
“That sounds healthy.”
Months did what anger could not.
They made everything less clean.
The lender pursued Godfrey for the fraudulent application.
The bank completed its investigation and accepted that Phedra had not opened or controlled the account.
The matter involving the forged documents went forward through lawyers and investigators without producing the instant punishment I had imagined in the backyard.
Godfrey’s shop survived at first, then shrank.
He sold equipment.
He gave up the expansion idea.
Eventually, he sold his share to a mechanic who had worked there from the beginning.
He did not go to prison.
He did face financial penalties, legal costs, damaged credit, and a settlement that took nearly everything he had built.
Part of me resented how ordinary that looked.
Another part understood that waking up every morning inside the consequences of your own choices was not nothing.
Selina sold the SUV.
Then some jewelry.
Then, after considerable resistance, the house.
Money recovered from those sales and the financial claims did not restore what had happened.
It did pay back part of what had been taken.
Phedra refused to live on any money recovered in her name until Miriam had documented exactly where it came from.
“I am never signing anything because somebody points at a line again,” she told me.
I believed her.
The settlement finally arrived in my secured account.
A little over a million dollars.
For several minutes, I stared at the number on the screen.
Four years earlier, I would have imagined a house.
A car.
A business.
Maybe a vacation somewhere warm enough that winter could not find me.
Instead, the first major payment went to medical care and insurance-related costs.
The second went toward a modest two-bedroom apartment lease near Phedra’s treatment center.
The third paid for financial planning and legal help because I had finally learned that being careful after disaster was more expensive than being careful before it.
I did not invest in Godfrey’s business.
There was no dramatic announcement.
I simply never wrote the check.
Phedra’s treatment was difficult.
Some weeks she improved.
Some weeks she could barely eat.
There were infections, postponed appointments, good scans that were not as good as we wanted, and bad days that were not as bad as we feared.
Her hair began returning in soft dark patches.
The first time she complained that it was growing unevenly, I nearly cried.
She caught me looking.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re doing the traffic face.”
“I’m in a kitchen.”
“You’ve adapted it.”
A year after I came home, her doctors used the word remission carefully.
Not victory.
Not cure.
Remission.
Phedra cried in the parking garage afterward.
Then she asked if we could get tacos.
We ate them in the car because the restaurant was crowded.
She dropped salsa on her shirt and swore.
It was one of the happiest afternoons of my life.
I never returned permanently to the Calgary shop.
The settlement gave me room to choose differently, but choice turned out to be uncomfortable after years of believing survival was the same thing as duty.
Eventually, I took a position with a smaller fabrication company closer to home.
Fewer hours.
Less money.
No twelve-hour overnight shifts.
The first month, I kept checking my schedule because leaving work while the sun was still up felt like stealing.
Phedra laughed at me.
Then she made me learn how to cook something besides eggs.
My relationship with Selina did not heal into anything simple.
For six months, I did not see her.
Then I met her in a coffee shop because Phedra told me avoiding her forever was still letting her make decisions for my life.
Selina apologized again.
This time there were no explanations attached.
That mattered.
It did not erase anything.
We began with coffee once every few months.
No house keys.
No shared bank accounts.
No pretending.
Godfrey took longer.
Two years passed before we sat in the same room voluntarily.
He had a job managing inventory for an auto-parts distributor by then.
He looked older.
So did I.
He said, “I keep trying to figure out when I became somebody who could do that.”
I stirred my coffee.
“Did you figure it out?”
“No.”
“Maybe there wasn’t one day.”
He nodded.
That was all.
I did not forgive him there.
He did not ask me to.
Some relationships return as smaller things.
That can still be a kind of truth.
Victor contacted me twice through attorneys.
The second message included a letter.
I kept it unopened for three weeks.
Then one Sunday morning, I read it while Phedra watered basil on the balcony.
He explained himself.
Of course he did.
People always have explanations.
He wrote about Selina, Winston, money, regret, illness, debt, and the years he had spent wondering whether he should reach out.
He confirmed that Winston had once offered him money to stay away.
He also admitted Winston had never threatened him.
Winston had simply said, “If you want to be his father, then be one, but don’t come and go.”
Victor took the money and went.
That was the proof he had used to torment Selina.
Not proof that Winston bought my father away.
Proof that Victor had accepted a price for leaving.
I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope.
Phedra looked over.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Some of it.”
“Are you going to answer?”
I looked through the balcony door at her.
Her hair had grown to her shoulders.
She had gained weight.
There was a small scar near her collarbone from a procedure she no longer bothered hiding.
“I don’t know.”
She nodded.
“Good.”
I laughed.
“Good?”
“You finally don’t need to decide everything today.”
That evening, we drove past Selina’s old house.
A young family lived there now.
Someone had painted the front door blue.
The storage shed was gone.
In its place stood a plastic swing set and a patch of new grass.
Phedra asked me to stop.
We sat in the car across the street.
Neither of us spoke for a while.
Then she touched the short chain at her neck.
The hummingbird pendant hung there again.
She had never sold it.
She had also never worn it until that day.
“Why today?” I asked.
She looked down at it.
“Because it’s mine.”
Nothing more.
No lesson.
No forgiveness.
No grand declaration about survival.
Just ownership.
She reached across the console and took my hand.
I held hers without tightening my grip.
Across the street, a little girl ran from the house toward the swing set while someone inside called for her to put on shoes.
She ignored them.
Phedra smiled.
May you like
I started the car.
This time, before pulling away, I asked her where she wanted to go.
