For
Riley,
Isaiah,
Isabella,
Hailey,
Cameron,
Mary,
Cooper,
Eliot,
and
Raina,
Who have a lifetime
Of roads before them
I must lose myself in action,
lest I wither in despair.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for the Chemical Garden Trilogy
By Lauren DeStefano
Copyright
About the Publisher
IN THE ATLAS the river still flows. The thin line of it carries cargo to a destination that no longer exists. We share a name, the river and I; if there’s a reason for this, it died with my parents. The river lingers in my daydreams, though. I imagine it spreading out into the greatness of the ocean, melting into sunken cities, carrying old messages in bottles.
I have wasted too much time on this page. Really I should be in North America, charting my way from the Florida coastline to Providence, Rhode Island, where my twin brother has just bombed a hospital for its pro-science research on embryos.
I don’t know how many are dead because of him.
Linden shifts his weight restlessly. “I didn’t even know you had a brother,” he’d said when I told him where I was going. “But the list of things I don’t know about you is growing longer every day, isn’t it?”
He’s bitter. About our marriage and the way it ended. About the way it’s not really over.
My sister wife looks out the window, her hair like light through autumn leaves. “It’s going to rain,” she says quietly. She’s here only at my insistence. My once-husband still doesn’t quite believe she was in danger in his father’s, Vaughn’s, home. Or maybe he does believe it; I’m not sure, because he’s barely speaking to me these days, except to ask how I’m feeling and to tell me I’ll be discharged from the hospital soon. I should consider myself lucky; most of the patients here are crammed into the lobbies or a dozen to a room, and that’s if they’re not turned away. I have comfort and privacy. Hospitalization of this class is reserved for the wealthy, and it just so happens that my father-in-law owns nearly every medical facility in the state of Florida.
Because there is never enough blood for transfusions, and because I lost so much of it when I sawed into my leg in a maddened delirium, it took me a long time to recover. And now that my blood has regenerated, they want to take it a bit at a time and analyze it to be sure I’m recovering. They’re under the assumption that my body didn’t respond to Vaughn’s attempts to treat the virus; I’m not sure what exactly he told them, but he has a way of being everywhere without being present.
I have an interesting blood type, they say. They wouldn’t have been able to find a match even if more people donated their blood for the meager pay the hospital gives.
Cecily mentioned the rain to distract Linden from the nurse who has just sterilized my arm. But it doesn’t work. Linden’s green eyes are trained on my blood as it fills up the syringe. I hold the atlas in my blanketed lap, turn the page.
I find my way back to North America—the only continent that’s left, and even it isn’t whole; there are uninhabitable pieces of what used to be known as Canada and Mexico. There used to be an entire world of people and countries out there, but they’ve all since been destroyed by wars so distant they’re hardly spoken about.
“Linden?” Cecily says, touching his arm.
He turns his head to her, but doesn’t look.
“Linden,” she tries again. “I need to eat something. I’m getting a headache.”
This gets his attention because she is four months pregnant and prone to anemia. “What would you like, love?” he says.
“I saw brownies in the cafeteria earlier.”
He frowns, tells her she should be eating things with more sustenance, but ultimately succumbs to her pouting.
Once he has left my hospital room, Cecily sits on the edge of my bed, rests her chin on my shoulder, and looks at the page. The nurse leaves us, my blood on his cart of surgical utensils.
This is the first time I’ve been alone with my sister wife since arriving at the hospital. She traces the outline of the country, swirls her finger around the Atlantic in tandem with her sigh.
“Linden is furious with me,” she says, not without remorse, but also not in her usual weepy way. “He says you could have been killed.”
I spent months in Vaughn’s basement laboratory, the subject of countless experiments, while Linden obliviously milled about upstairs. Cecily, who visited me and talked of helping me escape, never told him about any of it.
It isn’t the first time she betrayed me; though, as with the last time, I believe that she was trying to help. She would botch Vaughn’s experiments by removing IVs and tampering with the equipment. I think her goal was to get me lucid enough to walk out the back door. But Cecily is young at fourteen years old, and doesn’t understand that our father-in-law has plans much bigger than her best efforts. Neither of us stands a chance against him. He’s even had Linden believing him for all these years.
Still, I ask, “Why didn’t you tell Linden?”
She draws a shaky breath and sits more upright. I look at her, but she won’t meet my eyes. Not wanting to intimidate her with guilt, I look at the open atlas.
“Linden was so heartbroken when you left,” she says. “Angry, but sad, too. He wouldn’t talk about it. He closed your door and forbade me from opening it. He stopped drawing. He spent so much time with me and with Bowen, and I loved that, but I could tell it was because he wanted to forget you.” She takes a deep breath, turns the page.
We stare at South America for a few seconds. Then she says, “And, eventually, he started to get better. He was talking about taking me to the spring expo that’s coming up. Then you came back, and I thought, if he saw you, it would undo all the progress he’d made.” Now she looks at me, her brown eyes sharp. “And you didn’t want to be back, anyway. So I thought I could get you to escape again, and he would never have to know, and we could all just be happy.”
She says that last word, “happy,” like it’s the direst thing in the world. Her voice cracks with it. A year ago, here is where she’d have started to cry. I remember that on my last day before I ran away, I left her screaming and weeping in a snowbank when she realized how she’d betrayed our older sister wife, Jenna, by telling our father-in-law of Jenna’s efforts to help me escape, which only aided his decision to dispose of her.
But Cecily has grown since then. Having a child and enduring the loss of not one but two members of her marriage have aged her.
“Linden was right,” she says. “You could have been killed, and I—” She swallows hard, but doesn’t take her eyes from mine. “I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself. I’m sorry, Rhine.”
I wrap my arm around her shoulders, and she leans against me.
“Vaughn is dangerous,” I say into her ear. “Linden doesn’t want to believe it, but I think you do.”
“I know,” she says.
“He’s tracking your every move the way he tracked me.”
“I know.”
“He killed Jenna.”
“I know. I know that.”
“Don’t let Linden talk you into trusting him,” I say. “Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’re alone with him.”
“You can run away, but I can’t,” she says. “That’s my home. It’s all I have.”
Linden clears his throat in the doorway. Cecily bounds to him and ups herself on tiptoes to kiss him when she takes the brownie from his hand. Then she unwraps its plastic. She settles in a chair and props her swollen feet up on the window ledge. She has a way of ignoring Linden’s hints about wanting to be alone with me. It was a minor annoyance in our marriage, but right now it’s a relief. I don’t know what Linden wants to say to me, only that his fidgeting means he wants it to be in private, and I’m dreading it.
I watch as Cecily nibbles the edges of the brownie and dusts crumbs off her shirtfront. She’s aware of Linden’s restlessness, but she also knows he won’t ask her to leave. Because she’s pregnant, and because she’s the only wife left who so genuinely adores him.
Linden picks up the sketchbook he abandoned on a chair, sits, and tries to busy himself looking through his building designs. I sort of feel sorry for him. He has never been authoritative enough to ask for what he wants. Even though I know this conversation he’s itching to have will leave me feeling guilty and miserable, I owe him this much.
“Cecily,” I say.
“Mm?” she says, and crumbs fall from her lips.
“Leave us alone for a few minutes.”
She glances at Linden, who looks at her and doesn’t object, and then back to me.
“Fine,” she sighs. “I have to pee anyway.”
After she leaves, closing the door behind her, Linden shuts his notebook. “Thanks,” he says.
I push myself upright, smooth the sheets over my thighs, and nod, avoiding his eyes. “What is it?” I ask.
“They’re letting you out tomorrow,” he says, taking the seat by my bed. “Do you have any sort of plan?”
“I was never good at plans,” I say. “But I’ll figure it out.”
“How will you find your brother?” he says. “Rhode Island is hundreds of miles away.”
“One thousand three hundred miles,” I say. “Roughly. I’ve been reading up on it.”
He frowns. “You’re still recovering,” he says. “You should rest for a few days.”
“I might as well get moving.” I close the atlas. “I have nowhere else to go.”
“You know that isn’t true,” he says. “You have a—” He hesitates. “A place to stay.”
He was going to say “home.”
I don’t answer, and the silence is filled with all the things Linden wants to say. Phantom words, ghosts that haunt the pieces of dust swimming in beams of light.
“Or,” he starts up again. “There is another option. My uncle.”
That gets me to look at him, maybe too inquisitively, because he seems amused. “My father disowned him years ago, when I was very young,” he says. “I’m supposed to pretend he doesn’t exist, but he doesn’t live far from here.”
“He’s your father’s brother?” I say, skeptical.
“Just think about it,” Linden says. “He’s a little strange, but Rose liked him.” He says that last part with a laugh, and his cheeks light up with pink, and I strangely feel better.
“She met him?” I ask.
“Just once,” Linden says. “We were on our way to a party, and she leaned over the driver’s seat and said, ‘I’m sick of these boring things. Take us anywhere else.’ So I gave the driver my uncle’s address, and we spent the evening there, eating the worst coffee crumb cake we’d ever tasted.”
It’s the first time since her death that he’s brought up Rose without wincing at the pain.
“And the fact that my father hates him just made my uncle that much more appealing to her,” Linden goes on. “He’s too pro-naturalism for my father’s taste, and admittedly a little strange. I’ve had to keep it a secret that I visit with him.”
Linden has a rebellious side. Who knew. He reaches out and tucks my hair behind my ear. It’s done out of habit, and he jerks his hand back when he realizes his mistake.
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
“It’s all right,” I say. “I’ll think about it.” My words are coming out fast, bumbling. “What you said—I mean—I’ll think about it.”
CECILY HANGS out the limo’s open window, her hair flailing behind her like a ribbon caught on a hook. Bowen, in his father’s arms, reaches out to catch it. I’m astounded by how much he grew while I was away. He’s a teddy bear of a boy—stocky and friendly and apple-cheeked. He was born with dark hair and beaming blue eyes that have since gone hazel. His hair has lightened to a coppery blond that I imagine mimics Cecily’s when she was a baby, which we’ll never know for certain. He has her defiant chin, her thin eyelashes. With every day that passes, prominent traces of Linden dissolve from his face.
He is beautiful, though. And Cecily is mad for him. I’ve never seen anyone love anything as much as she loves that baby. Even now, though she’s facing the sky that rushes past, she’s singing a lullaby for him. I recognize it as a poem from a book in the library on the wives’ floor. Jenna used to read it aloud.
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire …
The sun is setting, making the world orange. I rub my fists over my knees, uneasy. I can’t believe Vaughn let us use the limo for this. Maybe he’s trying to stay on Linden’s good side, to manipulate him by being contrite and reliable. I keep expecting the driver to turn on us and take me back to the mansion. But he has taken us so far into the countryside that I’m beginning to let go of that fear. It’s been minutes since we passed any buildings. There’s only grass, and the occasional lone tree that comes and goes like an explosion.
Cecily interrupts her song to ask, “Where are we?” and lean back into her seat.
“Someplace rural,” Linden says. “It’s hard to say. I never knew the street names.”
Cecily reaches for the baby, and then holds him over her head, blowing absurd-sounding kisses on his belly; his giggles make her grin.
“It’s this turn,” Linden tells the driver. “Off the road. Follow the tire tracks.”
Even the limo, with its smooth ride, jostles over the uneven terrain. And a few minutes later we’ve come to the only thing in sight: a two-story brick house that looks as old and stable as the mansion, but much smaller. Surrounding it are half a dozen tarps arranged like black car-shaped ghosts. There’s a dilapidated shed and a windmill. The roof is covered in reflective panels.
Cecily crinkles her nose and turns to Linden. “We can’t leave her here,” she says. “It looks like a junkyard.”
“It’s not as bad as all that,” he says.
“There’s tinfoil on his roof!”
“They’re solar panels,” Linden amends patiently. “So he doesn’t have to use so much electricity.”
Cecily opens her mouth to object, but I say, “It’s only for a couple of days. It looks fine.” I don’t mention that, while this is a step down from the luxuries of the mansion, it’s as nice as any of the homes I grew up near. And solar panels aren’t uncommon in Manhattan at all, where many can’t afford electricity.
The limo stops, and I open my door quickly, afraid of sleeping gas or locks or snakes that could come slithering through the vents to strangle me.
It’s early evening now, and without civilization for miles I can see darkness stretching toward me from every direction. The stars are bright, splayed across every shade of pink and blue, tracing a lone, oblong cloud.
Linden comes up beside me, follows my gaze skyward. “When I was little,” he says, “my uncle told me the names of all the constellations. But I could never find them.”
“But you know which one’s the North Star,” I remind him. I remember that he told Cecily about it, and she was discouraged by his lack of romance.
“Right there,” he says, following the line of my arm as I point.
“That’s the tail of Ursa Minor,” I say, moving my finger along the corresponding stars. “It’s my favorite because I think it looks like a kite.”
“I actually see it,” he says quietly, as though astonished. “But I thought Ursa Minor was supposed to be in the shape of a dipper.”
“Well, I think it looks like a kite,” I say. “That’s how I’m always able to find it.”
He turns toward me, and I can feel his breaths, so faint and unassuming that they only move the finest hairs around my face. I don’t dare take my eyes from the stars. My heart is pounding. Memories rush through me. Memories of his fingers unbuckling my shoes, inching under the strap of my red party dress. His lips on mine. The darkness of my bedroom swimming with ivy and champagne glasses the night we came home late from the expo. Snow dusting his shoulders and his dark hair the night we said good-bye.
Cecily slams the car door, snapping me back to reality. “If Rhine is staying here tonight,” she says, “I am too, to make sure she doesn’t get murdered by whatever lunatic runs this place.”
I open my mouth to chide her for being so rude. To say that Linden’s uncle was nice enough to let me stay, and that asking for anything more would seem ungrateful. And also to point out that she’s barely as high as my shoulder, and how exactly would she fend off a lunatic if I couldn’t?
But the words won’t come out. The thought of my only remaining sister wife going back to that mansion is making my palms sweat. She was safe when Vaughn kept her oblivious, but now that she’s seen the workings of his basement and she understands what he’s capable of, I worry for her safety.
“My uncle isn’t a lunatic,” Linden says, and opens the car door again to pull out the suitcase that was sliding around the floor on the way here.
“Why does your father hate him so much, then?” Cecily says.
Linden’s father is no judge of who is or is not a lunatic, but I don’t say this either. I lean back against the trunk of the limo because I’m starting to feel light-headed, and the stars are throbbing, and Linden is right, I do need to rest before I venture into the world again. Everywhere I look, there’s nothing. The world is so far away. All that effort, all those miles undone. I was in Vaughn’s basement of horrors for more than two months. Two months that felt like ten minutes. Gabriel must think I’m dead. Just like my brother thinks I’m dead.
But there has been so much sadness, so much disheartenment, that my body has worked up a defense mechanism to keep me from thinking about it. My head goes numb, and my bones start to ache. Hurricane winds spiral in my ear canals. A sharp pain has streaked my vision with a lightning bolt of white.
Cecily and Linden are talking—something about what counts as eccentricity versus insanity, I think, and the conversation is getting terse as they interrupt each other. Linden is a creature of saintlike patience, but Cecily has a way of wearing anyone down.
“You okay?” Cecily asks me, and I realize that they’ve moved a couple of yards ahead of me, toward the house. Linden turns to watch me, Bowen’s diaper bag slung from his shoulder, and a suitcase in his hand; he packed some clothes for me from my old closet.
I nod and follow after them.
Nobody answers when Linden knocks on the door. He knocks harder, then tries looking into the only visible window, which has its shade drawn. “Uncle Reed?” he calls, and knocks on the glass.
“Does he know we’re coming?” I ask.
“I told him last week when I visited,” he says.
“How often do you come out here?” Cecily says, wounded. “You never told me.”
“I’ve kept it secret. …” Linden trails off, mouthing something to himself as he tries to see around the window shade. “I think I see a light inside.” He knocks again, and when there’s no answer, he opens the door.
Cecily cradles Bowen’s head protectively, and casts a pensive stare into the darkness. “Linden, are you sure?” But he has already gone in ahead of us.
I follow him, my sister wife shuffling close behind and gripping the hem of my shirt.
It’s so dark that I can barely make out Linden’s shape as it moves ahead of me. It’s a long hallway, the wood creaking under our feet, and there’s the smoky smell of cedar and must. Then there’s a faint orange light flickering in a room at the end of the hall.
We gather at either side of Linden in the doorway. We’ve come to a kitchen—at least I think that’s what it is. There’s a sink and a stove. But rather than cabinets there are shelves cluttered with things I can’t make out in the darkness.
There’s a small round table, upon which a candle flickers in a mason jar. A man is seated there, hunched over something that looks like a giant metal organ. Its wires, pipes, and gears are the arteries, and it’s a mechanical heart, bleeding black oil onto the table and the man’s fingers.
“Uncle Reed?” Linden says.
The man grunts, working some intricacy with a pair of pliers and taking his time before looking up. He sees me first, then Cecily. “These are your wives?” he says.
Linden hesitates. But he doesn’t have to answer, because the man returns to his work rather unceremoniously and adds, “I thought you said there were three of them.”
“Just two,” Linden says, with so little emotion it gives me pause. It’s as if Jenna never existed. “And this is my son,” he adds, taking the baby from Cecily’s arms. “Bowen.”
The man—Reed—pauses, astonished by something. But then he only grunts. “Doesn’t look like you,” he says.
Cecily plays with a light switch on the wall; it doesn’t work. “Please don’t touch anything,” Reed says, and wipes his hands with a dingy rag that only spreads the oil around. He moves to the sink, and the faucet shudders before it spits out an unsteady stream. I can’t be certain in the candlelight, but I think I see flecks of black in the water. Reed mutters curses.
Then he pulls a cord over his head, and bleary light fills the room from a bulb that swings from the ceiling. The shadows jump back and forth, animating jars and pipes and senseless pieces that fill the shelves. There’s a refrigerator in one corner of the room, but there’s no electrical hum to it, no indication that it’s on.
Reed comes closer, inspects the child in Linden’s arms. Bowen’s eyes are dazed, transfixed on the swinging bulb. “Nope, nothing like you,” Reed reaffirms. “Whose is he?”
“He’s mine,” Cecily says.
Reed snorts. “How old are you? Ten?”
“Fourteen,” she says through gritted teeth.
I get a whiff of something heady and smoky when Reed moves to stand before me. It’s making my eyes water, but I’m just grateful that he looks nothing like Vaughn. He’s not as tall, and he’s a little overweight, and his gray hair is as wild as waves breaking on rocks. “I thought you were dead,” he says to me.
I must be worse off than I thought, because surely I just imagined that. But then Linden says, “That isn’t Rose, Uncle. Her name is Rhine. Remember I told you the other day?”
“Oh, right, right,” Reed says. “I’m bad with names. I’m usually much better with faces.”
“I’ve been told I look like her,” I offer.
“Doll, you could be her ghost,” Reed says. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“She can’t be a reincarnation of Rose,” Cecily says, indignant. “They were both alive at the same time.”
Reed looks at her like she’s something he just stepped in, and she inches closer to Linden’s side.
“Tell me,” Reed says, turning back to me, “because my nephew’s story was confusing. You’re running away from him, and he’s helping you?”
“That’s one way to put it,” I say. “But I’m not running away. Not really. I’m looking for my brother.” A lump is forming in my throat, caused by Reed’s stare and his smell and the interrogating hue of that light. “The last I heard, he was in Rhode Island. He’s gotten into a—situation, and I need to find him. I won’t be any trouble in the meantime.” My words are coming out one atop the other, fast, and Linden puts his hand on my arm, and for some reason it calms me.
Reed looks me over, his mouth squished to one side of his face like he’s thinking. “You have too much hair,” he says. “You’ll have to tie it back so it won’t get caught in the machines.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I say, “Okay.”
“I told him you would help out a little,” Linden says. “It won’t be anything arduous. He knows you’re recovering.”
“From the car accident. Right,” Reed says. I don’t know what story Linden fed him to explain my injuries, but judging from his tone he doesn’t believe it, or care to. “There’s a room upstairs where you can put your things. My nephew can show you. The floors make a terrible creaking, so I’ll have to ask you not to walk around at night.”
That’s apparently our cue to leave, because he turns his attention to the contraption on the table. Linden herds us down the hallway.
“Oh, Linden,” Cecily whispers, her words almost lost to the creaking of the steps. “I knew you were mad at her, but you can’t be serious about leaving her here.”
“I am doing Rhine a favor,” he replies. “And she can take care of herself.” He looks over his shoulder at me. I’m two steps behind him. “Can’t you?” he says.
I nod like I’m not at all unnerved by this new cold side to him. Not cruel like his father. Not warm like the husband who sought me out on quiet nights. Something in between. This Linden has never woven his fingers through mine, never chosen me from a line of weary Gathered girls, never said he loved me in a myriad of colored lights. We are nothing to each other.
Reed may have forgotten my name, but he apparently remembered that I was coming, because the spare bedroom is lit up by three candles—one on the nightstand, two on the dresser. They and a twin bed are the only furniture in the room. There’s a cracked mirror on the far wall, and my reflection drowns in the darkness of it. Rose’s ghost. I almost expect it to move independent of me.
Cecily drops the suitcase and the diaper bag on the floor, and a cloud of dust bursts from the mattress when she sits on it. She makes a big show of choking on it.
“It’s fine,” I say, shaking out the pillow.
“I’m afraid to even ask if there’s a bathroom I can use,” Cecily says.
“At the end of the hall,” Linden says, rubbing his index finger along the bridge of his nose; it’s something I’ve only seen him do when he’s frustrated with his drawings. “Take a candle with you.”
After Cecily has left the room, I sit on the edge of the bed and say, “Thank you, Linden.”
He looks at his reflection in the mirror. “My uncle won’t ask any questions, if you don’t,” he says. “About why you aren’t staying at home with me, that is.”
The silence is tight and unnatural. I grip the blanket in my fists and say, “Are you and Cecily going back there?”
“Of course,” he says.
He still won’t believe me about everything that happened in the basement. About Deirdre. I vaguely remember whispering about her in my medicated delirium, and about Jenna’s body hiding away in some freezer. He rubbed my arm, whispering words that sounded like moth bodies flying into glass windows. Nonsensical things I tried to cling to. Maybe, lying there, I was so pitiful that he felt no choice but to love me. Now he says I can take care of myself. Now I’m the liar trying to destroy the perfect world his father set up for him, who ran away, broke everything. And it’s getting late, and it’s time to part ways.
But the words come out of me anyway. “Don’t go.”
He looks at me.
“Don’t go,” I say. “And don’t take Cecily back there. I know you don’t believe me, but I have a terrible feeling that—”
“I can take care of Cecily,” he says. “I would have taken care of you, too. If I’d known you were so worried about my father.”
Bowen has fallen asleep against Linden’s chest, and Linden shifts him to the other arm. “My father thought that if you didn’t want to be married to me, he could have you. It’s because of your eyes. He wanted to study them, and he took it too far. He can be that way.” His eyebrows knit together, and he looks at his feet, struggling to make sense of what he’s saying, to force logic where there is none. “He isn’t the monster you think he is. He just—he gets so into his work that he forgets people are people. He gets carried away.”
“Carried away?” I spit back. “He drove needles into my eyes, Linden! He murdered a newborn—”
“Don’t you think I know my own father?” he interrupts. “I’d trust him before I’d believe anything you say. You couldn’t even do me the dignity of telling the truth.”
There was a night, months ago, when I almost did. It was after the expo. I was half-drunk, my hair sticky and perfumed and teased, the bed tipping under me. He climbed over my body, and he kissed me. I could hear tree branches murmuring to one another in the moonlight. And Linden said, so close that I could feel his breath on my eyelashes, But I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where you came from. His eyes were bright. I wanted so badly to tell him, but something about that entire night seemed so beautiful, so bizarre, that I didn’t trust it with my secrets. Or maybe I just wanted to play along, to wear his ring and be his wife for a little while before the magic took the light from the moon.
Now I say nothing. There’s no brightness in his eyes for me.
“If you didn’t love me,” he says, “you should have said it. I would have let you go.”
“You might have,” I admit. “But not your father.”
“My father has never been in charge of what I do,” he says.
“Your father has always been in charge of what you do,” I say.