Page 16 of Thin Ice

At ten, I knocked.

"Come."

This is it.

My father's study was the room the house was built to protect.

South-facing, stone-walled, floor-to-ceiling glass that made the frozen lake look like something owned rather than shared. Walnut desk, clear except for a phone, a pen, and a legal pad squared to the corner in a way I recognized as genetic, because I did it too.

And the wall behind the desk. My father's biography in objects. Diplomas, firm placard, board appointments in matching frames. And at the center of it, wider and better-lit than anything else, was the photograph.

Thomas Harrington, at twenty-two, on the bank of the Thames in a Kingswell blazer, cup above his head, the other arm around a teammate whose name I'd never been told because the teammate wasn't the point.

That's the standard, Alexander. That's what this family does.

I had heard that sentence for the first time at seven. He had crouched down and pointed at the cup and said it, and I had smiled because I thought I was a part of soemthing. Something important, and something that actually cared about what I became.

Seventeen years ago.

Now I learned that was not the truth.

My father was on the phone. He held up one finger without looking at me, the finger that meant sit, wait, you are not the priority, and continued in the low, level voice he used for serious business. I didn't sit. I stood by the credenza under the window and continued to look at the photograph.

I'd seen it a thousand times but the photograph looked different from this side of twenty. My father around my age. Who was he then? Was he like me? Or was he like Marcus?

He finished the call. Set the phone on the desk. And caught me looking.

The atmosphere changed. His shoulders came down a fraction, and his mouth softened at the corner, and I watched it happen with a physical shock, because I hadn't seen it in a while — him about to open up to me.

"Do you remember what I told you about the year I was a freshman?" he said.

"You lost the Henley seat," I said. "To Lockwood's father."

He nodded at the photograph. "You know what I did wrong that spring?"

"You over-trained."

"I over-trained." He said it the way a doctor says a diagnosis. "Three weeks before selection, I tore something in my lower back. Couldn't sit at an erg. Selection came and went. Lockwood made the boat, rowed the four to the semis. I stood on the bank with nothing and watched my seat go to Henley without me."

He looked at me directly.

"And I decided that morning, on the bank, that I would never lose to Lockwood again."

He let that sit.

"I put my head down. I stopped chasing Lockwood. I chased the boat. Two more years." A slight gesture at the photograph, almost apologetic, which for my father was as close to vulnerable as he got. "Senior year we took the Prince Albert. Kingswell's first in fourteen years."

"I know."

"I know you know. I'm telling you again because you're twenty and every twenty-year-old thinks he invented the sensation of resenting his father." He paused. "You're going to want to be angry with me after Christmas. That's fine. Be angry. Put your head down. Chase the boat. And in three years you'll have a photograph of your own to point at your kid, and you'll understand this entire conversation from the other side of the desk."

He held my eyes a beat longer than he needed to. Then the softness sealed back over, and he was Thomas again.

"Sit down, Alexander."

I sat. Hands on the armrests. Feet flat.

He pushed a folder across the desk. Cream stock. Tabbed.