“Alex, I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“What about my father?”:
Silence. “Your father… Alex, your father passed away two weeks ago.”
* * *
Alex sat down hard on the bed, the air rushing out of her lungs in a single long, harsh gust.
“I’m sorry, Alex,” Peter said. “So sorry.”
Even within the shock of the moment, she felt a part of herself thinking that Peter was probably sincere. After all, his family had known hers for a long time, and her father had been fond of Peter. She heard the creak of the bedsprings as Peter settled beside her, carefully looping his arm behind her back without quite touching.
Peter shook his head, and immediately smoothed back a few strands of his hair that had fallen out of place with the motion. “I wish there’d been some better way to tell you. The hospital and William’s lawyers tried to find you when it happened, but they were having trouble locating you, so I offered to do it. I thought you should hear it from someone you know.”
Alex wondered why, at a time like this, her senses seemed more acute than ever before. Why Peter’s tasteful cologne seemed so overwhelming, and the perfect, cultured modulation of his voice seemed almost too affected. Father is dead, she thought, but there was no reality in it.
“How did it happen?” she whispered.
“A heart attack. He didn’t suffer, Alex. I know this is a shock, and it’ll take time to… sort it out.”
Time. Time that should have healed all the old wounds and hadn’t. All the time that had passed since she last saw her father, so long ago that it felt like another life.
“So you came out here to tell me,” Alexandra said. Her voice was remote and strange, as if she felt nothing, when in truth she felt too much. “You stayed in touch with my father. When you took over Schaeffer Industries—”
“It was more than business.” Peter moved closer, but she had no will or strength to put any distance between them. “We stayed in touch because I hoped you’d eventually come back to San Francisco. Even your father…”
She looked at him for the first time, amazed that her heart was still sensitive enough to feel this kind of pain. “My father,” she echoed dully.
“It’s true, Alex. Whatever happened between you—”
“You know what happened between us.”
“Yes.” Peter looked down at his manicured fingernails. “Just as I know that he—he wouldn’t have wanted it to end the way it did.”
Sickness twisted her stomach in a knot. Reconciliation. Was that what Peter meant? That her father would have wanted a reconciliation, after the things he’d said to her?
But now he was dead. And she hadn’t seen him since the day of her graduation from college. Time had run out.
“I know it’s hard for you to deal with right now. But I have papers here…” He reached into an inside pocket of his shearling jacket and produced an envelope. “When you’re ready to look at them. The will.”
The will. So her father had left her something after all, when he’d withheld himself? As much your fault, Alex, for never giving him another chance…
She curled her fists against the mattress so tightly that her blunt nails cut her palms. “He never tried to find me, Peter. Never.”
“God, Alex. I wish I could say something to—”
“You don’t need to say anything.” She could feel her breath coming too short, shock giving way to feelings she wouldn’t be able to control. And anger. Anger to block out the pain, anger that needed an object to turn on.
“I need to think about this,” she said, pushing away from the bed. Her knees were a little unsteady, but she made them function. She heard Peter stand up behind her.
“Of course. Time is what you need. But I don’t want you to be alone right now, Alex.”
Anger. Anger to keep the grief and guilt away. “I’m not alone.”
“You mean your friend out there.”
She placed her hands flat on the old dresser and pressed her forehead against her knuckles. “Does it surprise you that I’ve found friends, Peter?”