Chapter 10 — Eli
1663 Words
POV: Adrian Blackwood
Present Day — Meridian City, one week later
Seraphina never answered my question. Not really. She'd said something careful and lawyerly about "the results being what they were" and "needing time," and I'd hung up the phone that night feeling like a man who'd been handed an acquittal he hadn't asked for and didn't want.
A week passed. I went to work. I ran meetings. I signed things Marcus put in front of me without reading them closely enough, which was so unlike me that he'd started looking at me the way you look at a building you suspect has a structural problem nobody's found yet.
"You've approved three vendor contracts this week without a single redline," he said, on the fifth day, with the caution of a man testing ice. "That's not normal for you."
"I trust our legal team."
"You've never trusted our legal team. You proofread the coffee order."
I didn't have an answer for that one, so I didn't give him one.
I didn't feel innocent. I felt like a man standing in a room where the furniture had all been rearranged an inch to the left — nothing wrong exactly, everything slightly, permanently off. I kept catching myself doing the math I'd sworn off the moment that email came in. Alex's jaw. Alex's stillness. The particular way he'd looked at a lab terminal like it owed him something. None of it had changed. Only the paperwork had.
On the seventh day, I didn't go to the office at all.
I told my assistant I had an off-site meeting. I went home instead, to the back of my own closet, to a box I hadn't opened in longer than I wanted to admit, and pulled out a beat-up canvas jacket, a pair of glasses with no prescription in them, and a knit cap that made me look like exactly nobody important. I hadn't been Eli in over a year. I hadn't needed to be. There'd been nothing in my life worth escaping until a five-year-old's face had rearranged my entire understanding of the last five years in one afternoon.
My mother had started calling me Eli when I was small enough to still fit in her lap, back before my father decided that nickname was too soft for the son of Blackwood Industries and phased it out along with most of the rest of her influence on how I turned out. I'd resurrected it myself at nineteen, the first time the weight of being Adrian Blackwood got heavy enough that I needed somewhere to put it down. Eli didn't have a last name, or a company, or a father whose voice lived permanently in the back of his skull. Eli just walked, usually to the same park two neighborhoods over from Blackwood Tower, where nobody had ever once recognized Adrian Blackwood, because Adrian Blackwood did not wear a knit cap or sit on public benches or feed pigeons that were, frankly, too aggressive to deserve it.
I was halfway through a truly mediocre coffee from the cart by the fountain when I heard the commotion.
A cluster of small children had formed near the swings, the specific chaotic gravity of a kindergarten social crisis in progress. In the middle of it stood a little girl in a yellow dress, arms crossed, radiating the exact weary patience of someone forced to attend a meeting she hadn't scheduled.
"Aurora, will you marry me," one of the boys announced, holding out a slightly crushed dandelion like it was a diamond.
"We're five," she said, with the gravity of a woman twenty years older informing a suitor she was already engaged to her career. "I have a five-year plan, and it does not include you, Kevin."
"I'll wait."
"Don't."
Another boy shoved forward, apparently unwilling to be out-romanced by a dandelion. "I have gum. Two pieces."
"I don't chew gum from boys I haven't vetted."
A third one, smaller than the other two, tried a different strategy entirely. "I can do a cartwheel."
"Impressive. Irrelevant."
I nearly choked on my coffee.
"Alex always claims to be my knight in shining armor," she muttered, mostly to herself, glancing toward the far end of the park where, presumably, her brother was supposed to be and very much wasn't, "but he's never actually here when I need him. Typical. He shows up for server closets. Never for this."
The crowd of small suitors, sensing weakness in the lack of a visible bodyguard, pressed closer. Kevin, apparently emboldened by rejection, tried to take her hand. Another one grabbed for the ribbon in her hair, missed, and knocked into a smaller kid trying to squeeze to the front of the crowd, who sat down hard and started crying — which turned the entire cluster from mildly chaotic into an actual small riot within about four seconds, three kids now arguing about whose fault the crying was while the crying kid himself sat forgotten in the middle of it.
Nobody's parent was close enough. I looked. That was the first thing I checked, out of an instinct I apparently still had even in a knit cap. A woman on a bench near the fountain was scrolling her phone, oblivious. Another was chasing a toddler in the opposite direction entirely. Nobody was coming.
I got up and walked over before I'd fully decided to.
"Hey. Everybody take one step back." I said it the way I said most things — flat, certain, the voice that had ended board meetings in under a sentence. It worked on five-year-olds exactly as well as it worked on executives, which was to say, immediately. The circle broke apart, suddenly very interested in the ground, in their shoes, in anything that wasn't the large unfamiliar man who'd just materialized among them.
"He started it," one of them offered, pointing at Kevin.
"I did not."
"Nobody asked," I said, which shut down that particular line of inquiry with impressive speed.
I crouched down to the crying kid's level first, because that seemed like the correct order of operations. "You okay, buddy?"
He nodded, sniffled, and wandered off toward what I assumed was his own guardian, already forgetting the entire incident the way small children mercifully do. The rest of the boys scattered in his wake, sensing correctly that the fun part of the afternoon had concluded.
That left the girl in the yellow dress looking up at me, entirely unbothered by the chaos she'd just been standing in the middle of, sizing me up with an expression I felt somewhere behind my ribs before I understood why.
"Thank you," she said, with the crisp efficiency of someone closing out a business transaction. "They get like this sometimes. It's exhausting, honestly."
"I can imagine."
"I'm Aurora."
"Eli."
"Are you somebody's dad?"
The question landed harder than it should have, from a stranger's kid, in a park, over nothing. "No," I said. "Not exactly."
"Huh." She considered that with the same solemn focus she'd given the gum negotiation. "You have very sad eyes for a guy who isn't anybody's dad."
I laughed before I could stop myself — the same short, involuntary sound I'd made in a hospital hallway two weeks ago, for reasons I was becoming less and less able to explain to myself.
"You're very observant," I said.
"I know," Aurora said, entirely without modesty, and sat back down on the bench beside me like we'd known each other for years instead of ninety seconds. "My brother's observant too, but he's observant about computers. I'm observant about people. It's a more useful skill, honestly, but nobody gives me enough credit for it."
"I believe you."
"Most adults don't." She said it without bitterness, just a plain accounting of the facts, and swung her legs against the bench slats for a moment before launching, unprompted, into everything she currently knew about volcanoes — the difference between shield volcanoes and stratovolcanoes, a fact about Pompeii she'd clearly gotten slightly wrong and delivered with total confidence anyway, and a strong personal opinion that lava should be, in her words, "more orange and less gray, for effect."
I sat there and let her talk, half-listening, half-caught on the strange, specific ease of it — how easy she made it to just exist beside her, no boardroom, no ledger, no version of myself I needed to perform. She reminded me of someone. I couldn't place who. I didn't try very hard to.
"I should get back," she said eventually, hopping off the bench when a woman's voice called her name from across the park. "Nanny Wren gets nervous if I'm gone too long. It's very inconvenient."
"Probably for good reason, given the last ten minutes."
"That was an isolated incident." She grinned, gap-toothed and entirely unrepentant, already walking backward toward the voice calling her. "Bye, Eli. You should come back here sometime. You're better company than Kevin."
"Low bar."
"The lowest," she agreed cheerfully, and ran off across the grass toward a young woman waving from the path — Nanny Wren, presumably, tall and harried-looking in the specific way of someone who loved her job and was also perpetually one crisis behind it.
I sat there for a long time after they'd gone, coffee gone cold in my hand, turning the whole strange encounter over like a coin I couldn't decide the value of. I told myself it meant nothing. Children talked to strangers in parks. It happened every day, to every reasonably harmless-looking adult who sat still long enough.
I didn't quite believe myself. Something about the shape of her face when she laughed had snagged on a memory I couldn't place, gone before I could chase it down, the way a name sits just out of reach on the tip of your tongue. I told myself that meant nothing either.
I was getting worse at believing the things I told myself. That, at least, felt honest.
- Writer
