Full Circle (15 page)

Kayla carried the phone into the kitchen. She touched the thistles he had given her. Just like the previous day, his sense of timing held a soul-piercing strength.

“Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“You just go to her and you say the words.”

She set the mug back on the shelf. “I don't have any. Words.”

“You mean, you don't have the ones to make the mistake never have happened.” Adam gave her space to argue, then continued, “If she's the woman I think she is, whatever you offer will be fine. Because it won't be the words at all. And as far as she's concerned, the mistake is already long gone.”

Kayla turned back to the rear windows. The vista beyond was now lost to the night. She shivered with the realization that this was real. That she could no more run from him now than run from herself.

She heard a soft tapping and knew he was pacing. His footsteps formed a cadence to his words. Kayla found her gaze tracking back and forth across the empty kitchen, as though following his motions.

Adam said, “When Mom got sick, I became eaten up by my own helpless fury. Week by week I watched everything I'd worked for, all my savings, all my
dreams
, just drain away. Mom must have known how angry I was. But she never said anything except to thank me.”

His confession drew the night into a parchmentlike fragility. Kayla stepped to the rear window. She stared at the blank glass, willing herself to ask the question, Why was he telling her this?

Her fingers tapped against the glass in time to his unseen tread. She did not ask the question. She already knew the answer.

“I'm the worst person in the world to talk about love, Kayla. But I know there are some people out there who have a better handle on it than I ever will. My mom, for one. Not long back I came into her room, and she was doing so bad I was afraid that visit might end up being our last time together. That night I apologized for being a shallow soul. That's what I called myself. Mom smiled and said she was glad I was her son, and that she was proud of me. Three days later, I met your father. He offered me the job. I thanked him and turned him down and had to tell him why. But when I told Mom, she said it was time. And that night she had her first dream and said I'd come over and find the signs. And if I searched, I'd also find the answer for why I had to leave. Mom said it was her final request. I left because I couldn't refuse her anything. Not even if it meant leaving her alone.”

“Adam . . .”

“There are a lot of mistakes you can't undo, Kayla. Those are the tragedies. This problem with Honor is bad only so long as you leave it hanging. That's why I called. To tell you to do this now. Tonight. For Honor. For your father. And especially for yourself.”

chapter 16

T
he next morning, Adam sat with his back to the corporate world. He occupied a space he intended to make his own for as long as the company let him stay. The upstairs floor for junior analysts was a difficult place these days. That morning Adam scoured the building, searching for a place that might become truly his, where he could hunker down and focus
.

The old manor's central library was tall and narrow and lined on three sides by an open gallery. Downstairs, the central open space contained a table that ran the library's entire thirty-foot length. The upstairs gallery contained three alcoves connected to the main floor by a trio of circular staircases. Each alcove con-tained a table, reading lights, and two chairs. The surrounding floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were full of leather-backed volumes. The space suited him perfectly.

Adam spaced his charts and computer around the table, claiming his territory. He leafed through a stack of articles he had downloaded. He labeled a trio of new folders for investment opportunities that required further study. He stacked the files to one side, took out a legal pad and pen and a fourth empty folder. Adam was a great one for building paper dossiers. He did this for every project he analyzed. He would sketch out half-completed thoughts, then file them away with the news-paper clippings and financial reports and everything else that might prove interesting. Repeatedly he would lay out all the fragments and sort through them, not pressing, just allowing his subconscious to try to form a cohesive reality.

Adam decided to structure the previous day's tutorial in the same manner. It was the only way he could conceive of handling what he faced. Even so, he found it very hard to begin. To write anything meant unraveling the bundle of tension and coming down to the core elements.

His hand remained poised over the file's label. What was he to call it?

He finally wrote the word,
Parameters
.

He stared at it for a very long time, recalling the professor's soft voice, the parlor's gray light, the rain, the impact of her words. He had woken up that morning knowing with utter certainty that he needed to reexamine all the issues shaping his world. Look at them one by one. Only by separating them out could he hope to make any sense of the tumult.

He started two lists on the page. One was business, the other personal. But he found himself unable to divide up the issues. Where was he to put his mother's dreams? He was seated here in this company library because of them. And Kayla? Did he separate her from her project? If so, what about his offer to invest her project's funds? Adam tore out the sheet and started a new page, one where everything was listed together. It was utterly illogical to line up the emotional with the financial. It defied everything he had sought to do with his life. This became the echoing refrain as he took the main points and began drawing trees out to the right of each word, adding further details, watching the lines of tension fill the page. His entire life had been spent isolating his emotions from his work. Denying his memories. Ignoring his need for others. And where had it brought him? Adam stopped and stared at the sheet in front of him. The page was a jumbled torrent of words and risks and crossed lines of tension. There was no sense to it. None at all.

The ringing sound was so unfamiliar it took him a moment to recognize it as his new cell phone. He dug the phone from his jacket pocket and pressed the connect button.

The security consultant Peter Austin had recommended sounded as crisp and official as he had on Saturday morning. But his voice also contained a note of genuine triumph.

Adam felt the detective's words strike with the force of a hammer. “Repeat that again.”

As the detective went over his findings a second time, Adam watched the lines he had drawn on the sheet of paper begin to unfurl. One by one, they straightened and came together in perfect harmony.

It was only when he hung up the phone that he realized someone was calling his name. “Up here.”

Joshua Dobbins paraded up the stairs. The finance chief wore his trademark dark gray suit and overly narrow tie. The alcove's shadows deepened the acne scars on his cheeks. He sneered at Adam. “I see you've been nesting. What a pity.”

Adam nodded slowly, so captured by what he had just learned he felt utterly insulated from what was about to come. “You got your way with the board.”

Dobbins flushed angrily. “Apparently Peter unwisely chose to bandy about confidential information. Which only adds to my pleasure in dismissing you.”

“On what grounds?”

“Spare us the need to prolong this, Wright. As you have not even signed a contract, I see no need for complaint.”

“There's something you should know—”

“Oh, please. You don't actually think I might have the slightest interest in some further analysis.”

Adam tore the sheet from the notebook and started to fold it. “You never can tell.”

“No you don't!” Joshua reached over and tore the page from Adam's hand. “You take nothing from this company, do you hear me? Nothing at all. You are fired. Axed. No longer welcome.” Dobbins spun about, walked to the railing, and said to the security guard below, “Escort this gentleman from the premises.”

When Kayla came downstairs that morning, she discovered Honor seated at the kitchen table. Her forehead rested on one hand. The fingers of her other hand traced a line in the wood's grain. “Is everything all right?”

Honor took her time responding. “Not really, no.”

“Is it Daddy?”

“Partly.” Honor used both hands to sweep her hair away from her face. “I need to do something this morning. But I don't want to, and to be perfectly honest I'm not quite sure if I even can.”

Kayla leaned against the kitchen cabinet. “That makes two of us.”

“Excuse me?”

She took a very hard breath and launched straight in. “I need to apologize. And not because Daddy asked me to. Because I was wrong in how I thought about you. And how I responded to your questions about . . .”

“That horrid man,” Honor said quietly. “Geoffrey.”

“Right. Him. And I'm especially, extremely sorry for not being here when you got married. All the reasons I had for not returning, every single one, were wrong.”

Honor sat with her back to the winter valley and the gray blanket overhead. For once, Honor did not touch her belly. It was a habit Honor had, whenever she was troubled or worried. Shielding the child with one or both hands. Only now Honor sat and watched Kayla with a calm intensity. Both hands remained flat on the table between them. “You are an answer to one woman's very desperate prayers.”

“That was not exactly the response I was expecting.”

“No?”

“A bit of vindication, maybe. A quick little dab with the paring knife.”

“Kayla, please.”

“It's what I deserve.”

“If we all got what we deserve, we'd be doomed.” She came slowly to her feet. “I must tell you, your speaking with me just now is a gift. I am dreading something, but I have to do it, and I don't want to do it on my own. Will you come with me, please?”

“Sure.”

“I must warn you, it could be most unpleasant.”

Kayla pushed away from the counter, feeling weightless from having the apology behind them both. “Let's roll.”

Her father's wife drove a silver gumdrop of a car. Honor drove into Oxford with tightfisted tension, her normally placid face creased in worry. Kayla held her silence until they were seated in a café on Little Clarendon Street, a narrow lane running between the colleges and the surrounding businesses. “Why are we here?”

“I am supposed to meet my sister.” Honor glanced at her watch. “She's late. She may not come at all. She hates me.”

Kayla realized just how little she knew about her father's wife. “I find that a little hard to believe.”

“Emily loathes me and always has. Peter won't allow her into our home. This morning he refused point-blank to come with me.” Honor rubbed her swollen belly. “I feel so vulnerable now.”

“Daddy won't let her in the house?”

“I know that doesn't sound like Peter. But it's true.” Honor jerked at the ringing of the bell over the door. She sighed, partly with disappointment, partly from relief. “If Emily does come, it will be because she needs money.”

The bell tinkled, and Honor jerked once more. Kayla felt her own tension rising. “Why do you do it?”

“Peter asks me the same thing. And the answer is, I feel I must.”

Kayla leaned across the table. “You're not alone in this.”

Honor's eyes were impossibly big. “Thank you for coming, Kayla.”

“Tell me about your family.”

“There's just Emily and Momma close by now. My mother is in a nursing home and has forbidden me from ever coming to visit her again.”

The news pushed Kayla back in her chair. “Why?”

“Because I spoke to her about my faith. Or tried to. I have a brother, Drew. But he immigrated to South America when I was nine. With my father. They live in Bogotá. Or they did. I haven't heard from either in years. My father was a school headmaster. He was caught having an affair with a fifteen-year-old student. The scandal cost my father his job. We also lost our home, since we lived in the headmaster's residence. After living on the dole for a year, my father fled to Colombia.”

The bell rang once more, and this time Honor's entire body went rigid. “Here she is.”

Honor's sister wore clothes that made a statement of angry disdain. Her hat was a knit glove that mashed her hair and elongated her angular face. From the back of the cap grew a squirrel's tail. Her dress was the color of dried mud. Over it she wore a black lumpish cloak knotted at her neck. “Well, well. How quaint. What do they say these days? It used to be a bun in the oven.”

“Hello, Emily.” Honor's voice had gone still as a winter's dusk. “This is Kayla, Peter's daughter.”

“That would make you a pregnant bride and a stepmother to boot.” She unfastened her cloak, draped it over the chair. “How utterly domestic.”

Kayla asked, “Can I get you something?”