As if Brin were a person whose intelligence warranted taking seriously, which Cade thought, watching this from the corridor doorway, she absolutely was. He'd worried in the earlier months about how this would go, not whether it would happen. He'd stopped being uncertain about that. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth time, Octavia had sat in his kitchen on a Saturday morning and stayed through lunch without either of them acknowledging that. Staying through lunch had become a thing that happened.
He'd stopped being uncertain about Octavia. What he'd worried about was Brin, not because Brin was fragile. She was in fact the least fragile person he knew per pound of body weight. But because she was nine now, and nine-year-olds were starting to understand permanence in ways that four-year-olds didn't, and the permanence of what she'd lost was something that lived in her in ways that sometimes surfaced without warning at school concerts, when other kids' mothers were in the audience, at birthday parties where family configurations reminded her of the shape of her own in quiet moments when she went to her room without explanation, and he knew enough to give her 20 minutes before knocking. He'd worried that Octavia, for all her directness, for all her genuine effort, for all the ways she'd surprised him, might be one more thing that reminded Brin of absence rather than presence.
He'd been wrong, or not entirely right, which wasn't the same as being wrong. What had actually happened was slower and stranger and more real than what he'd feared. Brin hadn't adopted Octavia. She hadn't warmed to her in the movie sense. The gradual thaw, the sudden breakthrough, the moment where everything changed.
What had happened was more like two people who had decided to be honest with each other and were finding out one Saturday at a time what that built into. Brin asked Octavia hard questions. Octavia answered them. Octavia occasionally said things that were too blunt for a child and had to be walked back. And Brin occasionally said things that were too direct even for Octavia and produced a silence that required navigation.
It was imperfect. It was ongoing. It was, in other words, exactly what real things looked like. He watched them now, Brin perched on the reading table in the library. Octavia standing with her arms crossed in the particular posture that meant she was engaged rather than guarded.
A distinction Cade had taken months to learn to read. And he thought about something his father had told him once when he was much younger, and thought he understood things he didn't yet understand. His father had said, "The people who stay aren't the ones who found it easy. They're the ones who found it worth it." He hadn't known what that meant then.
He understood it now. Lunch was sandwiches at the kitchen island Cade made them because Octavia had not improved in the kitchen in 12 months. a fact she acknowledged with complete equanimity, and they sat in the afternoon light with the estate quiet around them, and Brin talking about her school's upcoming winter performance, in which she had been assigned the role of a narrator. A casting decision she had complicated feelings about. Narrators just explain what's happening, Brin said.
Everyone else gets to actually do things. Narrators control the story, Octavia said. Everyone else is just inside it. Brin considered this. That's a different way to think about it.
That's a different Most things are different depending on which side of them you're on. Brin looked at her. Is that why you like running companies? Because you're the narrator. Cade stopped mid sandwich.
Octavia was quiet for exactly 2 seconds. The pause of someone who has been asked something that landed more accurately than expected. That's probably part of it, she said. Yes. Does it get lonely?
Brin asked. Being the one outside the story. Another pause. longer "It did," Octavia said, "for a long time." Brin nodded with the particular gravity of someone who had decided to accept an answer rather than pursue it further.
Then she picked up her sandwich and said, "My teacher says I have a good narrator voice." She says, "I project. I believe that completely," Octavia said. After lunch, Brin asked if she could look at the wine cellar. Cade and Octavia looked at each other across the kitchen island. "
Why the wine cellar?" Cade asked. Cuz you got weird when I walked past that door earlier. Brin said. Both of you.
Octavia pressed her lips together briefly. We hid in there. Cade said during the blizzard when the situation was. He paused. Complicated.
Brin looked between them. The look she had when she was assembling pieces. That's that's where you were when the bad man was in the house. Luther. Yes.
She thought about this. Can I see it? They took her down to the sublevel. The wine celler was unchanged stone walls, wooden racks, the overturned crates they'd sat on still in the corner. Someone had restored power to the small overhead fixture, so it was lit now rather than dark, and the space looked smaller in light than it had seemed that night.
Brin walked in and turned around slowly, taking it in. " It's small," she said. " It felt smaller that night," Octavia said. " Were you scared?" Brin asked her.
The same question she'd asked Cade the day he picked her up from school. Direct, genuine, no performance in it. Octavia looked at the stone walls. " Yes," she said. " Very." "
Did you tell Dad that?" " Not until later." " Not until it was over." Brin nodded. " He hates it when people pretend they're not scared.
He says it wastes time." " He mentioned something like that," Octavia said with a glance at Cade. " He's right," Brin said. " Being scared doesn't mean you run away. It means you pay attention."