“The money,” I said, finally speaking up. “In the briefcase.”
“Ferncrest’s insurance coverage runs out faster than the actual recovery timeline does,” Harlan said. “I cover the difference out of pocket every month, in cash, because their billing office prefers it that way for a program Miles is enrolled in outside standard insurance categories. Visiting hours end at eight sharp. It’s a twenty-minute drive from your house. I leave at 7:30 because that’s the absolute latest I can manage and still make it there with enough time to actually sit with him before they ask visitors to leave.”
“That’s why you go south,” Nadia said quietly. “Not north. Not home.”
“That’s why,” Harlan confirmed. “I live north of you, exactly like I said. Ferncrest is south. I’ve been splitting my evenings between two directions for eighteen months, and I let all of you believe, through nothing but my own silence, that the second direction was something far worse than the truth actually was.”
My mother invited him back for dinner the following Sunday, though this time the conversation started well before seven o’clock instead of ending abruptly around it.
“I want to meet him,” she told Harlan directly, once he’d finished a considerably more complete account of the past eighteen months than any version he’d offered across the previous six. “Miles. If that’s something he’d be comfortable with, and something you’d be comfortable with too.”
Harlan looked at her for a long moment, something shifting visibly behind his eyes. “I’d like that,” he said. “I think he would too, honestly. He asks about you sometimes, in his own way. I’ve mentioned you to him more than I ever let myself mention him to you.”
We visited Ferncrest together the following weekend, my mother, Nadia, and I trailing a step behind Harlan as he led us down the same second-floor hallway Nadia had found on her own the week before.
Miles’s face broke into a slow, genuine smile the moment he saw his father in the doorway, an expression that only widened, with visible effort, once he noticed the three of us standing behind him.
“Miles,” Harlan said gently, kneeling slightly beside the wheelchair, “this is Louella. And her daughter, Yvonne. And this is Nadia, who I believe you already sort of met, in a manner of speaking.”
Nadia gave an awkward little wave, and Miles, after a visible effort, managed something close to a wave back, his hand trembling slightly with the effort.
“Hi,” he said, the single word arriving slow and deliberate, but entirely clear.
