Page 37 of Thin Ice

"Not yet," I said.

"It'll come to you." She picked up her bag. "I've got to go back for the evening. And don't clean anything else, you're scaring me."

Chapter 10: Alex

Iwoke up knowing today was the day.

I didn't know how it was going to happen, and I rehearsed nothing, and I didn't care anymore.

I got up. Showered. Put on the white shirt and the dark sweater and checked my hands and stopped.

Why am I checking my hands?

Because he noticed they were shaking once when I was fourteen, before a junior regatta. Your hands are shaking. Don't let them see your nerves. Twenty years later, and everything I did in this house was still organized around what Thomas Harrington would notice.

My hands were shaking.

The Patek sat on my wrist. I looked at it and left it there. One thing at a time.

Downstairs. Quiet. My mother's coat was gone from the hook. Out for her walk.

The study door was open.

Not shut. Not waiting for a knock. Open. He was expecting me, and he'd left the door the way you leave it for someone you expect to walk through and comply.

My heart was in my throat.

I stood in the hallway. The photographs on the wall. Harringtons in rows, class of '58, class of '85, men who'd walked through this door and done what they were told. Every one of them had nodded. Every single one.

I could still nod.

Sign the plan. Say yes, sir. Go back to Kingswell in January. Row the single. Finish the degree. Take the internship at the firm. Let the review disappear, and the scholarships survive and Liam become a boy I used to row with.

I could do all of it quietly. The hundreds of kids would never know.

And in thirty years I'd be the man behind the desk.

I could still do that.

My hands were still shaking. I walked in.

"Alexander. Sit down."

He was at the desk. Coffee poured, two cups. The folder centered between us, closed, a pen laid across it at an angle that looked casual and wasn't.

I sat down. Hands on the armrests. The last time.

"I appreciate you thinking it over," he said. "I know this week hasn't been easy."

"No."

"Change rarely is." He pushed the folder an inch toward me. Uncapped the pen. "I think you'll find, once the paperwork is done, that the relief is considerable."

He waited. The pen between us. The folder between us. Decades of money and expectation between us.

"Dad."

My father leaned in.