“You say lots of things.”
“Unfortunately.”
She stepped back and studied him. “Are you going to prison?”
Owen started to speak, but Silas raised a hand.
“Yes,” he said.
“For a long time?”
“Maybe.”
Clara looked down.
Silas waited.
Finally, she asked, “Are you scared?”
He thought about lying.
He did not.
“Yes.”
She nodded slowly.
“Good,” she said.
Silas blinked. “Good?”
“My dad says scared people can still be brave, but people who say they’re never scared are usually just dangerous.”
Owen, several feet away, looked proud.
Silas sighed. “Your father has too many sayings.”
“He’s working on a book.”
“That is terrible news.”
Clara smiled.
Then she took his hand and led him to the wall.
Near the center, carved into pale stone, were the words:
FOR THE CHILDREN WHO WERE NOT FORGOTTEN
No one spoke for a while.
Wind moved through the trees.
Somewhere behind them, a child laughed, and the sound rose into the morning like something stubbornly alive.
Clara leaned against Silas’s side.
“You know,” she said, “you don’t have to pretend anymore.”
Silas looked down.
“To be my dad?” he asked quietly.
She shook her head.
“No. I have my dad.”
Across the garden, Owen smiled faintly.
Clara squeezed Silas’s hand.
“You don’t have to pretend you’re bad all the way through.”
Silas looked at the wall.
At the names.
At the city beyond the trees.
At the father who had trusted a little girl to run.
At the child who had chosen him because everyone else was afraid.
Something inside him, something locked for so many years he had mistaken it for stone, opened just enough to hurt.
“I don’t know what I am,” he said.
Clara rested her head against his arm.
“That’s okay,” she replied. “You can start there.”
Silas Arden, once the most feared man in Los Angeles, stood in the sunlight with a child holding his hand.
For the first time in his life, he did not wonder who was watching.
He did not wonder what it cost.
He did not wonder whether mercy made him weak.
He simply stood there.
And when Clara did not let go, neither did he.