Chapter 583 | A Very Angry Flamingo

Chapter 583: 583 | A Very Angry Flamingo

Misato made it four switchbacks down before her hands started shaking.

She noticed it the way she noticed a clone flicker, as a small wrongness at the edge of the formation. Her fingers were trembling against the seams of her sleep shorts. She shoved them into the front pocket of her hoodie and kept walking, because a captain who stopped in the middle of a slope was a captain who could be seen stopping.

She had told Johnathan Davenport no.

She had walked onto his helipad in pajamas with her knees bleeding and said the word Headmaster to his face, and asked him if he would answer, and then she had stood there and watched him do arithmetic with her mother inside it. She had watched him lose. She had watched him walk back to his helicopter with nine folded pages in his fist and decide to call it later.

Now her body was catching up. Her knees had gone loose. Her throat hammered. Mendoza would call it adrenaline, and then he would write down how long it lasted.

The gravel turned to asphalt at the bottom of the hill, where the service road curled toward the harbor. A black car with Davenport plates idled at the curb, engine running, driver behind the wheel with his face lit by his phone.

Her mother stood beside it on the grass, under an open umbrella.

There was no rain. There had been no rain for a week. Keiko Ayame stood under her navy umbrella anyway, in her housekeeping uniform with the silver crest stitched over the pocket, her canvas tote hooked over one arm, and she watched her daughter come down the hill as if she had planned on exactly this, at exactly this time.

"Mama."

"You ran in your pajamas."

"There wasn’t time to change."

"There is always time to put on shoes." Keiko looked at her knees. "You fell."

"Twice. It’s fine."

Keiko tilted the umbrella until the shade covered both of them. In the sunrise it did nothing. Misato stepped under it anyway.

"He’s gone," Misato said. "The helicopter. He isn’t taking you back."

"I know. I heard it leave." Keiko nodded at the car without looking at it. "The driver says Mr. Davenport will send the helicopter back for me at nine."

"You’re not getting in it."

"No," her mother agreed. "I am taking the eight-thirty ferry. I bought the ticket on my phone already. I bought it in the helicopter."

Misato stared at her.

"In the helicopter," Keiko repeated patiently, the way she said things twice for the Davenport children when they were small. "Mr. Davenport read the contract out loud to Miss Cassandra. All nine pages, over the noise. He thinks a woman with headphones on cannot hear. He has read things out loud when he is angry for nine years, and for nine years he has thought I cannot hear." One shoulder lifted. "Clause Fifteen. Employment, housing, compensation. I kept my face very still the whole way. Then I bought a ferry ticket."

Something in Misato’s chest gave way.

It was not loud. It did not come out of her mouth. Nine years of it had been packed down tight: every insult in a hallway, the slap in the kitchen, every tuition statement with the Davenport crest at the top, every answer she had swallowed because her mother’s apartment and her mother’s job sat on the other side of the scale. Her hands came out of the hoodie pocket on their own. They were shaking too hard to make fists, so she pressed them flat together in front of her mouth, the way you hold something you have caught and are afraid you will drop.

She did not cry. Her eyes burned and stayed dry. It was only her hands. Her hands could not stop.

Keiko hooked the umbrella handle into the crook of her elbow and took both of Misato’s hands in her own small ones. She did not say anything. She held them, warm and rough from wax and bleach, until the shaking slowed enough that Misato could hear the ocean again.

"Nine years," Misato said. Her voice came out wrong, too thin. "I kept my head down for nine years so he wouldn’t touch you."

"I know."

"And she wrote it down. In one night."

"Who wrote it?" Keiko asked. "Not the lawyer. Who wrote the words?"

"Blair." Misato swallowed. "Herself. At midnight. She woke up a notary, Mama." She looked back up the hill without meaning to. "She’s still on the pad. Barefoot, in a boy’s sweater. She ran out of her apartment without shoes when she heard the rotors."

Keiko followed her gaze up the slope for a long moment, past the eucalyptus, to where the switchbacks disappeared over the ridge toward the helipad.

"Then she will need shoes," she said.

"She has a closet full of shoes."

"Not today, she does not." Keiko let go of one hand and patted the tote bag on her arm. Something inside it shifted. "I always carry the spare pair. You will bring me to her at breakfast."

"Mama, she’s not going to want—"

"She is going to want them, and she is going to pretend she does not. She has pretended since she was nine years old." Keiko reached into the tote again and came out with a second umbrella, an old navy one with a bent rib, folded tight. She put it in Misato’s hand and closed Misato’s fingers around it. "And this is for you."

"It isn’t going to rain."

"In case."

"In case of what?"

Keiko didn’t answer. She looked at the scrape on her daughter’s knee, then at her daughter’s face, and there was something in her own face that Misato had not seen there in a very long time. It took her a second to name it. It was not worry. It was pride, and her mother did not know where to put it.

"Send me the contract," Keiko said. "I heard it once. I want to read it with my own eyes."

"Your eyes are bad."

"Then I will read it twice."

Misato laughed. It cracked in the middle and came out half a sob, and her mother pretended not to hear that either.

Behind them, the driver’s window hummed down an inch. "Ma’am? Mr. Davenport’s office says nine o’clock."

"Thank you," Keiko said pleasantly, without turning around. "Please tell Mr. Davenport I have a ferry."

The window hummed back up.

Misato wiped her face with the back of her wrist even though it was dry, and turned to look up the hill one more time.

The sun had cleared the ridge. The switchback trail glowed gold where the dew caught it, and halfway down the second bend, small against the light, someone was walking down the gravel slowly, carefully, carrying something in both arms.

Monroe. With Blair Davenport held against his chest in a princess carry, her bare legs over his forearm, her face turned firmly away from him toward the ocean, and her hand flat on his shoulder.

Keiko shaded her eyes. "Ah," she said.

Misato waited for it. Nine years had trained her to wait for it: the old hot twist of watching Blair Davenport get something she wanted, handed to her, carried to her, always.

It didn’t come.