Restraint had never been an issue for teenage Felix. Girls put out for him all the time, but he could never take it to the next level. Sex was not the problem. Love, however, confounded him. He couldn’t make girls happy; they couldn’t make him happy. He tried to be a good boyfriend, but after a while he couldn’t see past their flaws, and then his attention would turn to the next pretty girl. The theme continued into his twenties, but everything had changed the day Ella collapsed on the Tube.
Still holding the laptop, Felix sat down on the bed. Harry’s skull and crossbones alarm clock ticked its ridiculously loud tick and Felix scrolled through the messages. He would never understand why he had decided to pry. Maybe there was no decision. Maybe all he wanted was to understand Harry better, but once he’d read the phrase attila the dad, there was no turning back. He had to read all of them. Every last message between Harry and Sammie, between Harry and Max, between Harry and Ella. (As if Harry and his mother needed yet another line of communication.) He read the messages that called him a control freak, that linked the words hate and Dad, and—the worst ones of all—the messages without smiley faces, the ones that shouted loud and clear, My dad terrifies me. It was official: he had failed to be more than someone who instilled fear.
The phone rang, but Felix didn’t pick up. He didn’t even move. Down the hall, Eudora’s voice played to the empty living room.
“Felix, honey, I know you’re home. I can see your lights on, and I heard Harry leave. Pick up the phone.” A long pause. “Felix Fitzwilliam. You have two choices. You pick up the phone right now, or I’m coming over. And since I’m in my nightgown, I know you don’t want that vision of wrinkled beauty on your doorstep.” A longer pause. “Lord, son, are you going to make me count? One, two . . .”
Felix ran into his bedroom and snatched the phone off the cradle. “Harry hates me.”
“Why, of course he does. He’s a teenage boy, and you’re his daddy.”
“We had a fight, and he said—” What the hell was he doing sharing family secrets with a neighbor? “I’m not sure there’s a way forward for the two of us.”
“Now, that’s not true, son. It might take a bit o’ doing, is all.” Eudora paused. “Noon tomorrow, meet me at Duke Gardens for some of that . . . what’s it called? My mind just fizzled worse than a . . . Brainstorming! That’s the word I was searching for. Brainstorming.”
“Eudora, I’ll be in the office until school pickup. We have a deadline on this hundred-million-dollar deal, and I need to work every second Harry’s in school. I don’t have time to wander around Duke Gardens.”
“Have you ever visited?”
“No.” Felix tried to edit exasperation from his voice.
“Well then, it’s all settled.”
“Excuse me?”
“You and I need to talk, and tomorrow’s one of my volunteer mornings. Did I mention I’m an ambassador for the Blomquist Garden? Such a joy to work with native plants.”
“Yes, I believe you have mentioned this several times, Eudora. Unfortunately, I don’t—”
“Meet me under the pergola at noon.”
Would he have to be rude to a pensioner? “I can’t. I’m in danger of losing my job. The well-paid job that funds this family.”
“Honey, that job sure is pointless if you lose your family anyway.” She paused. “Bye-bye!”
TWENTY-THREE
Felix drove through the matching stone balustrades that marked the entrance to Duke Gardens and slammed on the brakes with no thought to other drivers. Straight ahead, beyond majestic evergreens and plants with elongated leaves related—surely—to palms, the gothic spire of Duke Chapel rose like a monument to his past, to the one place that had always represented home: Oxford. Many times he’d glimpsed Duke Chapel from the Durham Freeway, and yet he’d never seen it from this angle. What a glorious surprise.
Ducking down for a better view, Felix inched toward the car park. He was in the middle of Durham, North Carolina, but he could have been looking at Magdalen College.