Charles said nothing in response. Sylvie touched his hand and then leaned her head on his shoulder. His skin was warmer than hers.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
He looked away, maybe guilty. A crack formed in her brain. Could he know, too? About this girl, as Tayson had called her?
But, no. It hadn’t been a girl. She couldn’t believe that. Tayson had heard a rumor and took a gamble. It worked on Sylvie, too. He’d hit her in her softest, weakest spot, exactly where he needed to in order to get her to act.
She waited for Charles to say something, but all he did was shake his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” she said. And then she moved onto her hands and knees. “I think I’m going to go inside now.”
“Okay.” Charles unzipped the tent flap for her. She crawled out, stood up, and assessed herself. Her skirt was wrinkled. Individual blades of grass were imprinted on her knees. She peered in at Charles, who was sitting cross-legged.
“Are you going to stay in there?”
“For a while, if that’s okay.”
“Of course it’s okay.”
She turned and opened the front door. Retraced her steps up the stairs, walking under her grandfather’s portrait, coming to a stop outside James’s office. She took a deep breath and walked across the room.
The key slid easily into the filing cabinet lock. She heard a release and the drawer opened. A dull, metallic sound echoed throughout the room.
There was a single paper clip at the bottom of the drawer. Rusted. A bit bent. Nothing else.
She pulled the next drawer open. It, too, was empty. And so was the next. She reached to the very back, but there was only cold metal. She stood back and pushed her hand through her hair, letting out a defeated laugh through her nose.
All this time, fearing an empty drawer.
She sank down on his office chair. What James had done was an indelible part of her now; she would have to live with it. So it had blindsided her; so she hadn’t seen it coming. So James hadn’t seemed like the type of man who would ever do such a thing. The point was that it had happened, and there was nothing she could do to change that. He had made a mistake; a lot of people did. People she loved, people she thought would never make mistakes. That was the only conclusion she could come to, the only way she could really come to terms with it.
The sun outside broke free from a cloud, sending a carpet of gold across James’s desk. Sylvie was sitting at just the right angle to notice a gleaming hair next to his old computer. She bent down. It was a gray hair, short and coarse. His.
A sob welled up in her throat. It felt like it was the only tangible, organic thing left of him. Not the ring he gave her, not the clothes in his closet, only this single, tenuous hair. Her heart clenched. She’d spent so much time fixating on the woman, maybe as shelter from the fact that he was really gone. And he was gone. He would not come downstairs to talk to her ever again. He would not sit next to her when she was sick, putting cold washcloths on her forehead. She wouldn’t hear the noises of him moving around, getting ready for work, swearing as he bumped around in the clumsy, woozy morning. She had stood over him in his last few hours alive, cursing what he’d done, and after he died, she’d stared down at him, too numb to think. And that was all there was. She wouldn’t get any more time with him. She’d squandered what she had.
After a while, she looked down into the backyard. The tent loomed, silent and cheerful, next to the exact same brick patio that had been there when Sylvie was a girl. And there were the exact same flowerbeds, too, and the same gazebo and pool that no one used but they’d never replaced with something else. That old decking. That old blue diving board. The DNA from her grandfather’s feet was probably all over that diving board, as well as skin from his hands on the edges of the pool and the metal ladder and the long-handled device that skimmed the bugs from the surface.
Sylvie supposed she could imagine that the Charles inside the tent wasn’t a troubled adult but still a little boy. Both he and Scott could still be little boys, and things could still turn out differently for them, more like what she’d envisioned. She supposed she could even imagine that she was a little girl, too. This office was still her grandfather’s, and the tent down there was hers. And she wondered if that was what she’d been doing all this time, living in this big, broken house, working so hard to keep things exactly the same. She wondered if, deep down, she hoped time wasn’t a straight line but could loop back on itself, letting her start over.
She turned away from the window and walked downstairs to the kitchen. Taking a long time to consider, she decided to make herself a tuna sandwich on rye bread, mixing the tuna and the mayo and putting in pieces of celery and red onion. And she put on classical music, something from her own collection, not her grandfather’s old records, and she sat down at the kitchen table and ate. She tried as hard as she could to enjoy every bite.