Chapter Twenty-Four

Callum sat with the page open in front of him for a long moment before he could make himself continue, understanding, with a fresh ache that hadn’t dulled at all in five weeks despite how much practice he’d had at it by now, that the Tate story — the story that had cost him a relationship and very nearly his job, the story he’d believed, finishing it, had been entirely his own achievement — had also, without his ever once knowing it, been the specific thing that finally moved his father to act after thirty-seven years of careful paralysis. He had thought, publishing it, that he was closing a chapter of his family’s history that had nothing to do with his actual family at all, a public wrong he happened to have the skills to expose. He understood now that he had been, without knowing it, writing directly to an audience of one — a father reading alone in a cottage on the Old Quarter, buying three copies of a paper he didn’t need, crying over his tea at a kitchen table Callum had once refused to sit at for three years running.