What He doesn’t know I have

After the restaurant

Chapter 2

After the Restaurant

Nobody spoke until the valet had pulled the car around.

Chris took the front seat without being asked, leaving Ivy in the back beside her mother, who hadn't said a word since they'd left the table. Michael drove. The radio stayed off. Outside, the city slid by in smears of red light, and Katrina sat with her hands folded too tightly in her lap, staring at nothing.

"Mom." Ivy's voice came small from the back seat, the first sound any of them had made. "Who was that?"

Katrina didn't answer right away. In the rearview mirror, Michael caught her eyes for half a second, and something passed between them: a question he didn't have the right words for yet.

"That was your father," Katrina said finally, carefully. "He's... he's struggling with some things. It's not about you, baby. It was never about you."

"He looked at me like he knew me." Ivy's voice cracked slightly. "Like really knew me. Not just... not like someone who hasn't seen me in years."

Nobody had an answer for that either.

Chris shifted in his seat, glancing sideways at his father. "Dad. What did he mean? About you not knowing the half of it."

"I don't know," Michael said, too fast, his knuckles whitening slightly on the wheel. "I don't know, Chris."

But Katrina was watching him now, really watching him, the way she only did when something didn't add up. "You went pale," she said quietly. "Before he even said anything. You knew exactly who he was the second you saw him."

"Katrina..."

"And that woman." Her voice dropped lower, careful in front of the kids, but unmistakably sharp. "At the bar. I know her. I don't know from where, but I know her face, Michael, and I need you to tell me if you do too."

Michael's jaw worked. For a long moment, the only sound was the tires on wet asphalt.

"We'll talk about it at home," he said.

Katrina turned to look out the window, her reflection ghosted over the passing streetlights, and said nothing else the rest of the drive, but her mind had already started turning over every dinner, every photograph, every half-buried thing from three years ago, back when she'd packed Ivy's things and walked out the door, that she'd told herself she didn't need to remember anymore.

In the back seat, Ivy reached for her phone, opened a blank search bar, and typed her father's full name for the first time in years.

Chapter 3

The Hospice

The room smelled like antiseptic under flowers that were starting to wilt. Chris sat in the vinyl chair he'd practically claimed as his own these last few weeks, his mother's hand small and dry in his.

"You didn't have to come tonight," Diane said, her voice thin but still carrying that same dry edge it always had. "Don't you have some dinner with your father's new family to go to?"

"Already went." Chris didn't meet her eyes. "It got ugly."

That got her attention. She turned her head against the pillow, slow, careful. "Ugly how?"

"Robert Thompson showed up. The guy whose company Dad..." Chris stopped himself, exhaled. "He looked at Dad like he wanted to kill him."

Diane's mouth twitched, something almost like a smile, except it wasn't. "Good," she said quietly. "Let him stand in line."

"Mom."

"I'm not going to pretend I feel sorry for your father, Christopher. Not now. Not with what time I have left." Her grip tightened slightly around his fingers, more strength in it than he expected. "You know what he did to me. You were old enough to see most of it, even when I tried to keep you from it."

Chris's jaw tightened. He did know: the years of being made small in his own house, the money quietly moved out of reach, the long slow erosion of a woman who'd once been, by every account, formidable. He'd watched it happen in pieces, too young to stop it, old enough now to never forget it.

"I looked into some things," he said carefully. "About the company. About how he structured things after you two split. There's stuff that doesn't add up, Mom. Stuff he wouldn't want anyone finding."

Diane studied him for a long moment, her eyes still sharp, even now, even with everything the illness had taken from her, searching his face. "What are you planning to do with it?"

"I don't know yet." That was half a lie, and they both knew it.