Page 38 of Thin Ice

"I'm not signing."

I watched it travel across his face. Not shock. Thomas Harrington didn't do shock. Confirmation of a thing he'd feared. Which was worse, because it meant he'd already built the next room.

"Let's talk about what's concerning you."

"Nothing's concerning me. I've decided."

"You've decided." He folded his hands. "Without discussing it."

"We've been discussing it all week. You just weren't hearing the answers."

The composure thinned. Not gone. Thinned.

"This is about that boy," he said.

That boy.

Two words and the air changed. Not the joint program. Not the Moore situation. Not any of the careful language he'd been wrapping around it all week. That boy. Said the way you'd say that problem.

"Don't," I said.

"This is about the Riverside boy who you've decided is worth more than everything this family has built for you."

"His name is Liam."

"I know his name."

"Then use it."

"I don't need to use it. I need you to understand that whatever you think you're feeling has an expiration date, and when it expires, you will be standing in the wreckage of a future you destroyed over a phase."

"A phase?"

"A phase. An experiment. Whatever word makes it easier. You're twenty years old, Alexander. You don't know what you want."

He said it with such certainty. Not the cruelty. The certainty. The granite conviction that he knew his son better than his son knew himself.

I stood up.

The chair scraped the rug. The first sound that rug had made in twenty years.

"It's not a phase."

"Sit down."

"It's not an experiment. And I'm not a kid at a dinner table being wrong about something. I'm your son. Standing in front of you. Telling you the truth."

"Sit down, Alexander."

"No."

My father stood up.

He'd never done that. Not in this room, not during a conversation, not in response to me. The desk was his instrument, and the chair was the throne, and he never left it. But he left it now. Hands flat on the wood, pushed himself up, and he was tall. I forgot how tall he was. We were face to face across the desk for the first time in our lives.

"You will lower your voice in this house," he said.

"Why? Because someone might hear?"