Part 5
Travis Miller worked south of the river in a fabrication shop that looked as if winter had been built into its walls.
Malcolm found the place on a Tuesday afternoon after Tessa gave him only what she was allowed to give and Ruth filled in what old Harbor House notes suggested. Black iron fencing bordered the lot. A forklift beeped somewhere behind the building. Sparks jumped inside an open bay door where men in heavy gloves moved around steel frames with the blunt rhythm of people paid by the hour and weather.
Malcolm wore his oldest overcoat and still looked wrong there.
A foreman pointed him toward the back without much interest. “Miller’s on the stair rail job.”
Travis was bent over a workbench, welding hood down, one shoulder lifted against the cold. When the torch shut off and he raised the hood, Malcolm saw the years before he saw the man. Travis had been young the last time they stood within speaking distance, angry and unshaven and burning through chances faster than anyone could hand them over. This man was leaner, grayer at the beard, with a scar cutting through one eyebrow and exhaustion settled into the lines around his mouth.
For a moment, Travis did not recognize him.
Then he did.
“Well,” Travis said, pulling off one glove. “Malcolm Mercer. That’s a rich man’s ghost.”
“I’m not here about a job.”
“I figured. Men like you don’t come down here to offer one twice.”
Malcolm accepted the hit because it had been earned long before this conversation. “I’m here about Ava and Sophie.”
The change in Travis was immediate. His face emptied first, then filled with fear so naked that Malcolm looked away to give him the dignity of not being watched.
“They’re alive,” Malcolm said. “They’re safe.”
Travis sat on an overturned crate as if his legs had stopped receiving instructions. “With who?”
“With me for now. Under county supervision.”
Travis gave a short, disbelieving laugh that had no humor in it. “Ellie’s husband.”
“Yes.”
At Eleanor’s name, something moved behind his eyes. “She really gone?”
Malcolm nodded.
Travis lowered his head. His gloved hands hung between his knees. For several seconds, the shop noise filled the space where grief might have been if either of them had known how to share it.
“I heard she got sick,” Travis said. “Didn’t ask after. Figured I’d used up my right to ask about decent people.”
“She cared about your girls.”
“I know.” He rubbed one hand over his mouth. “I knew more than I admitted. She brought groceries once. Took Sophie to the clinic another time. Sat on the floor with them like she had nowhere else better to be.” His face tightened. “I told her to stay away.”
“Why?”
“Because I was ashamed, drunk, and still arrogant enough to think I could protect my pride after I’d failed to protect anything else.”
The words were too honest to answer quickly.
Malcolm leaned against the workbench across from him. “I fired you from the Granville Hotel project.”
“You did.”
“I remember the fight.”
“You remember enough, then.”
“No,” Malcolm said. “I remember what made you inconvenient to me. That isn’t the same as remembering enough.”
Travis looked at him sharply.
“You hit a man,” Malcolm continued. “You damaged a truck. You were a liability on a dangerous site. I signed the papers and moved on.”
“You want me to tell you that was wrong?”
“No. I want to say I never asked who would fall when you did.”
Travis looked toward the bay door, where gray afternoon light spilled across the concrete. “My wife had been dead eight months. Rent was late. I was drinking before breakfast some days. The guy I hit called me a junkyard drunk in front of the crew, and I decided to become exactly what he said I was.” He gave Malcolm a flat look. “You didn’t make me swing.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t pour the bottles.”
“I know that too.”
“Good.” Travis’s voice roughened. “Don’t come here trying to buy yourself clean.”
Malcolm let the words stand between them. Then he said, “I came to tell you the girls need truth more than drama.”
Travis laughed under his breath. “Ava still hate liars?”
“She hates almost everyone on principle.”
That caught Travis off guard. For half a second, fatherhood crossed his face before shame covered it. “She was like that at four. Her mother used to say Ava came into the world checking the exits.”
“Sophie still draws flowers.”
Travis closed his eyes.
“She asks whether people are mad at her when they die,” Malcolm said.
The sentence struck exactly where he had feared it would. Travis bent forward, elbows on knees, and breathed through it.
“I’ve been sober sixteen months,” he said finally. “I’ve got this job. I’ve got a room over my cousin’s garage. I send Tessa the paperwork. I go to meetings. I do what they tell me, mostly.” He lifted his head. “Mostly isn’t enough.”
“No.”
“I know I can’t take them. Not now.”
“No.”
“I don’t even know if I should see them.”
“That isn’t only your decision.”
Travis looked at him. “And you? What are you to them?”
Malcolm had no tidy answer. “A man learning late.”
“Late is better than gone, I guess.”
“Not always,” Malcolm said. “But I’m hoping it can be.”
The first supervised visit took place at Harbor House because Ava knew every exit and Tessa wanted the girls on ground that belonged to them. Travis arrived twelve minutes early in a clean denim shirt, his hair still damp as if he had washed in a shop sink. His hands had been scrubbed hard enough to redden the knuckles.
Malcolm waited in the hallway with him.
“You don’t have to stay,” Travis said.
“Yes, I do.”
“You think I’ll bolt?”
“I think you might want to.”
Travis studied him. “You always talk like this now?”
“No. I’ve only recently become difficult.”
A sound almost like a laugh came from Travis’s throat, then vanished when the art room door opened.
Sophie came in first, holding Ruth’s hand. Ava moved around her so quickly it seemed less like a choice than a reflex. She placed herself between Sophie and Travis, chin up, shoulders square.
Travis did not move toward them. He crouched slowly, lowering himself until he was not towering over them, and rested his hands open on his knees.
“Hi, Soph,” he said, then looked at Ava. “Hi, Aves.”
Ava’s face changed at the old nickname, but only for a second. “You’re alive.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t come.”
“No.”
“Why?”
Every adult in the room seemed to go still without actually moving. Travis looked at his daughters, not at Tessa, not at Ruth, not at Malcolm.
“Because I was drinking,” he said. “Because I was ashamed. Because every time I thought about trying to fix things, I got scared of seeing how much I’d broken, and I waited. Waiting hurt you. I know that now.”
Sophie’s fingers tightened around Ruth’s. “Did you forget us?”
“No.” His voice nearly failed on the word, but he kept it together. “I tried to forget myself. That’s not an excuse. It’s just what happened.”
Ava’s eyes were dry. Somehow that was worse. “Sorry doesn’t make you a dad.”
“No,” Travis said. “It doesn’t.”
“You don’t get to take us.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to make Sophie cry.”
Travis swallowed. “I know.”
Sophie wiped her cheek with Eleanor’s handkerchief. “Are you still bad?”
The question hurt every adult in the room. Travis accepted it as if it had been placed carefully in his hands.
“I did bad things,” he said. “I’m trying to become safe. Those aren’t the same, and they don’t cancel each other out.”
Ava looked at Tessa. “Did somebody tell him to say that?”
Tessa’s mouth softened. “No. I think that was him.”
Sophie moved first. She walked to the art table, chose a green crayon, and placed it on the floor halfway between herself and Travis.
“You can draw a stem,” she said.
Travis looked at the crayon for a long moment before picking it up. “Okay.”
Ava stayed near the door for the entire visit. She did not draw. She did not sit. She corrected Travis once when he said she used to like grape jelly, because apparently she had always hated grape jelly and he had been confusing her with Sophie. Travis apologized without making a joke out of it. Ava seemed to notice.
On the drive home, Sophie fell asleep with her head against the window. Ava sat beside her, arms crossed over her chest, watching streetlights pass in gold stripes across the glass.
“You think we have to forgive him?” she asked.
“No,” Malcolm said.
“Ruth says forgiveness is for us, not him.”
“Ruth is usually right.”
“That’s annoying.”
“It is.”
Ava kept watching the window. “Mama Ellie would say to be kind.”
“Eleanor believed in kindness. She also knew kindness did not mean pretending you weren’t hurt.”
Ava looked at him then.
He kept both hands on the wheel. “You’re allowed to be angry.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it’s true.”
The car climbed the ridge road toward the house. Sophie stirred in her sleep, and Ava reached over automatically to tuck the blanket around her without taking her eyes off Malcolm.
After a while, she said, “I don’t want it to be true forever.”
Malcolm slowed at the turn into the driveway. The house glowed through the bare branches, no longer grand from this distance, just lit.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think you do.”