THE GREEN EYES ARE THE SAME. THE SLOW BLINK, THE sidelong glint. The all-encompassing gaze that almost knocked me down the first time he took me in: it’s the same. His power over me at sixteen was cataclysmic. I look at the pen in his hand as he sits behind my uncle’s desk and recall those same fingers all over me years ago, teaching me how to be alive in my own body.
And now? The first time James Hollings sees me in eight years? I’m as disheveled and unkempt and taken aback as I was the day we met. Clearly my plan for world domination isn’t quite complete.
He taps that fountain pen again. The light catches his wedding ring.
“I hear you landed a job at Grogan, Dwyer. Congratulations. Leo will be pleased to know that you’re back with us in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes as a full-fledged attorney.”
“How is Mr. Roberts?” I ask, with a sudden wash of nostalgia for the dignified man, so of another era, who kept his Korean War medals and citations framed over the chipped wooden desk he refused to spend the money to upgrade.
He grins. “Leo is old. But he’s still Leo. We’re partners now.”
So James is on the masthead. Roberts and Hollings. Like father and son.
“Is Wanda still there?”
The grin disappears. “Wanda died a year ago. Cancer.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
He nods. “She knew she was sick, and wasn’t going to be working much longer, so she trained her replacement before she went. Someone I think you might know from your high school years.” When he says high school I shiver, remembering how he knew me from my high school years. “Her name is Barbie Mitchell.”
Barbie Mitchell!
Harrison’s beard who later married Harrison’s crush.
I shake my head. “This town is way too small. It’s why I left.”
James narrows his eyes. “Is it?”
His question makes me nervous, and I allow him to see that. He’s getting to me too quickly. I need to pull things back.
“Let’s talk about why I’m here, not why I left,” I say, folding my arms across my chest. “Lawyer to lawyer.”
“All right, Toni. Lawyer to lawyer.”
I’ve amused him. Not my intention. But he straightens up in his chair and pushes a manila folder in my direction. He’ll play along.
“As you’ve clearly surmised, I represent your uncle and the King Family Construction business. So technically, you.”
“Not me,” I reply. “I was cut out of the holdings when I refused the job that you got as my uncle’s second choice.”
James chooses to ignore my pathetic and juvenile retort. “Yes, it’s true that you’re no longer a named beneficiary of the company. However, I’m here in my capacity as family lawyer, and you haven’t been legally excised from this family. Your uncle wants complete unity on the public statement. You’re the wild card, Toni. Without your signature, Christopher won’t sleep at night wondering what you might say to the media.”
Right on cue, Christopher and Harrison enter the office, followed by Izzy and Evelyn. I feel like I’m falling out of my body. How can I be standing in the same room with the man who has been my secret for eight years and the people I kept that secret from, then and forever after? I shut my eyes. All I want is Paul. But not the Paul of now: the Paul from the old days when we were little. Before he reincarnated himself as the Dragon of Bosnia, savior of all regardless of race, religion, or creed, and left me alone to fend for myself.
When I open my eyes again, I’m vertiginous. The office is closing in on me now, tilting and keening like a carnival ride. I can’t be drawn back into the past. They can’t have me anymore. I need to do whatever it takes to get away again as fast as possible.
“Give me the statement.”
James stands up, walks around from the other side of the desk, and hands me the manila folder. I take it, but he doesn’t let go yet. Instead, he stands opposite me, not touching me but so close that I catch his scent, his essence—both the sensory experience of him now and my memories of him then.
“Toni,” he says to me quietly enough that the others can’t hear. “Just do this. Don’t get caught up in opposing your uncle because you don’t want what he wants. You’re better off without a fight. There are no tricks in here; it’s exactly as it seems.”
Has anything in my life ever been exactly as it seems? Would I know what that was if I saw it? Everything throws shadows. No amount of hardy midwestern American bootstrap culture has ever lifted those shadows away. The four people behind me spent my childhood trying to convince me that the shadows didn’t exist. Even this man, who became my escape from the chokehold of all that denial: he represents King Family Construction now. He is not here for me. I can’t let myself forget that.
I look at James. Then I look over my shoulder at the family, the four of them standing close to each other, waiting. Waiting for me.
I let go of my half of the folder.
“Please, give me a second,” I murmur. “Long drive. I need to use the restroom.”
Uncle Christopher lunges forward slightly, but James stops him with a glance.
“Take your time,” he says, as much to my uncle as to me. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Christopher is all barely controlled intensity. But surrounded by the others, he pulls back. Slowly, deliberately, I pick up my bag from the chair where I dropped it and walk across the office to the bathroom. I bolt the door behind me and exhale.
Even after so much time: five minutes in a room with James Hollings and he’s happening to me all over again.