I'd Give Anything(6)

I couldn’t do a thing with the part about her bone structure and her eyes, except to cut him off before he went below the neck.

“So the HR department did its due diligence by Dale’s ridiculous accusation and found nothing, since there was obviously nothing to find,” I said. “And still Paul fired you to—what? Nip rumors in the bud? That sounds sketchy to me. I think we should consult a lawyer.”

Harris flushed and shook his head.

“When Dale approached me and threatened to go to Paul, I panicked.”

“Rattled,” I said. “You got rattled, as anyone might. Because his take on the matter was so far off the mark.”

“Yes, that’s right. And on an impulse, just completely off the cuff, I offered to give him a bit of information.”

My mouth took a page from Harris’s book and went dry.

“Nothing really earth-shattering, but something that was still, at that time, insider information. About a new chemotherapy drug.”

I flinched first at the word chemotherapy and then, retroactively, insider.

“Unreleased,” I said. “As yet unreleased information.”

As if the information were an extra track on a Beyoncé record, as if my husband hadn’t been prepared to silence his accuser with the offer of making money off the suffering of cancer patients.

Then, I said, “Oh, Harris.”

When his eyes met mine, they were full of tears. “I’m sorry, Ginny. Not for my relationship with Cressida because that was—”

“Professional. Aboveboard. As HR’s inquiry bore out.”

“But I was worried how it would look. There are so many people who are ready to believe the worst. I was concerned that Paul would force this productive relationship we’d built, this beneficial mentor-mentee type of relationship, to end just because of the way it might look to suspicious minds. He might even have fired Cressida.”

Yes, I wanted to manage this mischief with a vengeance, to piece together a narrative, with a shiny pieced-together Harris at its center, that would bring my daughter the least amount of pain. And I needed Harris to believe in that narrative. But, oh my Lord, there are limits, and when Harris said what he’d just said, I snapped. I jumped up, knocking my beautiful café chair onto our beautiful Bermuda grass lawn.

“Do you hear yourself, Harris?”

If I live to be a hundred, I might be able to forgive Harris the look of utter blankness that followed my outburst, the look that said, “I do hear myself, and I have no idea what you’re upset about,” but probably not. Almost definitely not.

“You did this thing that got you fired, that could even get you thrown in jail, that could send the rosebushes and the plates from your mother and your cherished green egg all catapulting into a giant black screaming hole, all to protect that girl? To keep her with you?”

Harris was an intelligent man. He had never been stupid, but he’d also never been quick. Now, I watched my words work their way first through Harris’s usual slow, steady collection of cogs and wheels (no doubt slowed down further by my gratuitous plummeting plates, et cetera imagery) and then crack through the mantle of his breathless fixation on Cressida before hitting his consciousness. His eyes woke up. His jaw dropped a centimeter. Fever pink flooded his cheeks.

“I just meant—”

I reached out and gripped his jacket sleeve.

“Listen to me. Let. Go. Of. Cressida.”

“But I never—”

I yanked at his sleeve.

“Okay. Fine. You never. We’ll go with that. But what did or didn’t happen doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter. And by that I mean, the girl, what you did, all of it just stopped being material. Just stopped being. Do you understand that?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean Avery.”

“What? You know I would never hurt Avery.”

Suddenly, I felt tired, weary to my bone marrow and the tiny veins in my eyes. My hair felt tired. I let go of Harris’s sleeve, righted my chair, sat, and leaned my tired cheek against my tired palm.

“Maybe you wouldn’t. But you did.” I turned my free hand in a weary circle in the air. “This world. We made it for her and let her be safe inside it.”

“She’s still safe. This has nothing to do with her.”

I wanted to wind myself up in burlap and sleep alongside the rosebushes.

“She’s a teenager in the age of social media, in a town where everyone knows everything,” I said.

I watched Harris absorb this. His eyes filled with tears, again; the tears spilled over. This man who had spent a lifetime keeping his emotions stowed away, hidden from almost everyone, especially himself, had suddenly experienced every one of them in the course of a day that wasn’t even over yet. Harris crying. Harris crying knocked the meanness right out of me. Still, I had to finish explaining, to make him understand what was at stake.

“But even if she didn’t know what other people thought,” I said, gently, “or even if she were the single fifteen-year-old in the history of the universe who didn’t care what people thought, she would still have to reckon with you.”

“Me.” It wasn’t a question. Harris wiped his face with the backs of both hands. I waited. “Because I did something dishonest, offering Dale the unreleased information. And I’m not who she thought I was.”