When the crowd disperses, Henry and I stay near the bridge, eventually finding an old bench to sit on. For a while, we simply look out at the canals and crowded alleys in silence. Then he shifts closer toward me—only by an inch, maybe less, yet it somehow makes all the difference in the world—and the silence changes, crackles with electricity, demanding to be filled. His lashes lower. His eyes flicker to my lips...
I panic and blurt out the first thing I can think of: “Your dad.”
He pulls back with a frown. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your dad,” I repeat slowly. Too late to go back now. “Um...you never finished your story. On the train. About how things turned out with him.”
Even as I’m saying the words, I want to kick myself. What kind of person ruins a potentially romantic moment by bringing up childhood trauma?
But Henry looks more surprised than offended. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah,” I tell him, and even though this isn’t the conversation I expected to have with him tonight, I mean it.
He doesn’t reply at first. His gaze travels to a rowboat gliding out from under the bridge, a family of four huddled together on the seats, the youngest child squealing every time they bounce over a small wave. Then he sighs. Says, “I told you about how things were when I was around five. But shortly after I turned ten, during another long study session, I sort of...” He tilts his head, like he’s recalling vocabulary from a foreign language. “What’s that term again? When your emotions overpower rational thought and all regard for etiquette?”
“Exploded?” I offer, struggling to picture Henry doing such a thing. “Snapped? Totally lost your shit?”
He gives me a small, sheepish smile that makes my heartbeat spike. “Well, yes. Something to that effect. My father was shocked, of course, but he actually ended up apologizing. Promised he would never use such...extreme measures again.” He glances back down at the family in the boat, their faces bright with moonshine and laughter. “And he never did.”
“Wow.” I shake my head. “Just like that?”
“It probably helped that I was doing so well at school, and that I already showed interest in running the company. But I also imagine that he simply hadn’t realized there were alternative ways of effective parenting. His father had been even stricter with him about his studies, and so when he got into Harvard and founded SYS and became successful—”
“The results seemed to validate the process,” I finish for him, remembering our earlier conversation.
“Exactly.”
Henry rubs his eyes, and for one bizarre moment, I think he’s crying. But then he lets his hands fall back down in his lap, the lantern light from the shops around us throwing his features into sharp relief, and the truth dawns on me, so simple I almost laugh—he’s tired.
He had been lying today, when Chanel asked him if he’d slept well. Neither of us had slept at all on the train; we’d stayed up finalizing our plans, then the backup plans, and then one of us—I can’t remember who—got sidetracked and we just...talked. About school, about his brief time in England, about the games his sister used to invent when they were kids, the Shanghainese dishes his mother made him whenever he was sick. About everything and nothing all at once, laughter and half-coherent thoughts spilling out of my lips before I could stop them. I don’t think either of us had been expecting the night to go as it did.