Chapter 18: A Seat Beside Her

Jerome's POV

My father had his lawyer brought to the bedside on the thirtieth, and he sent the nurse out.

I stood at the foot of the bed with my coat on.

I had not sat in that man's presence for five years without being asked.

"Sit down, Jerome," he said.

I sat.

"I'm rewriting the will," my father said. "Margaret's voting shares go to a trust. Dirk's too."

"And the company?"

"It goes to the board, with a chairman I choose."

"Who?"

"You."

"No."

The lawyer, a small man in a gray suit, looked at his shoes.

"I'm sixty-six, and a woman restarted my heart with her hands," my father said.

"I know."

"I'm not asking you for anything. I'm giving you something."

"I don't want it."

"You'd be good at it."

"I'd be good at it and I'd hate it every day," I said. "I like the boathouse. I like the boats."

"The chair isn't what I'm offering." He shifted on the pillows.

"I'm offering you your name back. For five years I let her keep you out. I'm ashamed of it."

I said nothing. I had waited a long time to hear that, and it landed in the wrong place.

"There's a seat at the family table on New Year's Eve," my father said. "I want you in it."

"Then I sit next to Hallie."

"That's what I said."

"No. You said the family. I'm saying where."

He looked at me for a long moment, and the old stubborn mouth twitched.

"Next to Hallie," he said. "Draw it up."

The lawyer wrote it down.

I drove back to the lake in the dark with the heater on high.

She was waiting in the boathouse in my sweater.

She sat on the stern seat of the half-restored runabout, with her bare feet up on the gunwale.

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