Page 96 of The Night We Lost Him

“And you think I had something to do with that?”

“I don’t know, Joe,” Sam says. “You gave your life to this company, and it was never going to be yours and maybe you got mad about that. That it wasn’t going to you. That he was giving it to a woman you were with first—”

“Oh you’ve got to be kidding me. I knew that was his plan. And I knew about them for fifty years. The whole time. Do you know how many girlfriends I had in high school?”

“So then it’s just a coincidence that you tried to convince him to sell the company to your current girlfriend?”

“That had nothing to do with me. That was all your father. He didn’t want to do it without Grace. He didn’t want to do much of anything without her. I didn’t discourage it, but he needed something easy after Grace died. He needed to be done with it. And Cece was eager to do it. She’d always wanted the company. Did I broker that? Absolutely. At your father’s request.”

“And you weren’t mad when he reneged on selling to her at the last minute?” Sam asks. “At losing your last chance to be in charge?”

Joe stands up and moves right in front of Sam, inches from his face. Sam moving in the rest of the way, their noses practically touching, Sam clinching his knuckles, Uncle Joe clinching his wrist.

“Fuck you, kid.”

I step between them, putting a hand on each of their chests, pulling them back apart.

“Guys, take it down,” I say. “Just, slow down.”

Sam looks at me and pulls back. Uncle Joe is still shaking his head, but he calms himself too.

He sits back on the edge of the desk, leans in toward Sam.

“Look,” Joe says. “I know it’s hard to hear, but it wasn’t about you and Tommy or your abilities or any of that. He just… couldn’t. Everything he did was for her. This was the one thing he got to do with her every day. And he couldn’t keep doing it himself, not in her absence. The one thing your father couldn’t figure out how to do in his entire life was to be without her.”

He pauses, looks back and forth between both of us. And I feel the pain that must have existed for my father—for him and for Grace—that they were together and they weren’t together. Why would anyone make that choice? But I start to hear the answer without Joe needing to say it, as if anyone needs to say it: the reasons that you move away from the people you love are sometimes the very reasons you wish you could move toward them.

“The point is, ultimately, he decided it wasn’t fair. He decided you and your brother deserved your shot to do with it what you would.”

“Or maybe not. Maybe he just ran out of time,” Sam says. “Why else would he have called Cece the night he died?”

“Guess that was possible. But he seemed pretty settled in his decision. Besides, there was a much simpler explanation.”

“And what’s that?” Sam asks.

Before Uncle Joe can answer, I do it for him.

“He was trying to reach you,” I say.

He nods. “He was trying to reach me. I have bad coverage at Cece’s. He must have been trying to get to me for something.”

He motions to me.

“I probably should have told you all of this,” he says. “Cece certainly thought I should have. But I was reluctant to do that, to be honest. I just didn’t know how we could tell you any of this while also protecting the things, I think, he didn’t want shared…”

I see it in his eyes, the sorrow there. And I understand, suddenly, what our uncle Joe was trying to do until the end—he was trying to protect our father. It’s what he’s still trying to do now, the only way he knows how.

“You have it,” I say.

“Have what?” Joe says.

“His cell phone.”

He holds my gaze, for a minute, not replying. But then he walks around his desk and opens the bottom drawer, pulls a cell phone out.

“When I went to Windbreak, that next morning, I found it in the bedroom,” he says. “Your father and Grace had gone to such lengths to keep their relationship private, to hold it just for themselves. I didn’t want… It felt like the least I could do to help them keep it quiet now.”

He turns the phone over so we can see the home screen. A picture of Windbreak stares back at me—a picture of the view from Windbreak’s porch. The sun setting over the ocean, the edge of his favorite chair. It’s my father’s phone. Our father’s phone.

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