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It is, he reflects, what he deserves, and at any rate it hardly costs him anything: some loose change for the bandages and the remnants of his dignity, which had been cheaper. Phoenix does not, in any way that counts, resent Apollo—once he too had been twenty-two and prepared to give or take a beating in return for some shiny abstract or another. And now that once familiar golden sheen on the other's chest, proudly flickering on impact—that he finds not even taunting, not even close. And after all Trucy had been watching silently from the back. Perhaps Apollo will be good for them; Apollo is a good man.
"Hold still, Daddy, don't be such a baby," Trucy commands; it is of little interest to her that her daddy has been holding still for some time now. Any remnants of Phoenix’s past glory not yet undone by Apollo’s raging fist, the nigh forgotten high, struggles, despairs, and finally quietens under her delicate performer’s hands; for that, Phoenix is grateful.
The wounds hardly need treatment but Trucy would have none of it. One on his cheekbone—the site of the collision; the other near the dip of his spine—the consequence of his fall. You are growing old, Daddy, you need to take care of such things, Trucy had admonished, and while they are both aware that the latter is the more severe injury, it is to the former that his daughter bestows her attention. You have to stay still, Daddy, and he holds still; you’ll need bandages, Daddy, and he surrenders to the bandages. A ritual, a play-act, a family thing rendered to perfection over the years after shady encounters of lesser propriety: Phoenix with his wayward wit and Trucy, dutiful daughter, cleaning up afterwards. It is almost a tradition.
“So. How is he?”
Trucy’s hands do not waver; rather it is the almost guarded choice of pronoun that betrays the nonchalance of her tone. By elimination there can be only one person among several on whom she has chosen to cast the spotlight. The dead and the dying, himself long since one of them, require more time before they can open their mouths: specters all—each thy father’s spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night—these words themselves a relic of a bygone time. And night has not yet fallen. Such is the rule of the stage, and thus the easier road, as of now. No, the only new player in this game of seven years is Apollo; it is the matter of Apollo, his fate and his goodness, that must be dealt with; and so naturally to Apollo do they steer their conversation.
“Ouch, Trucy. Your poor old dad’s the one with the black eye, and you’re asking after his assailant? We’ll make an attorney out of you yet.”
Trucy gives Phoenix’s nose a playful flick. Neither her gesture nor his own joke hurts as much as he feels that it should. “Oh, but you deserved it, Daddy. He seemed so angry and confused, the poor boy, that I almost felt sorry for him.” She returns almost ruefully to her set task. “But he seemed to regret it after hitting you, Daddy, so he’ll come around. You should be making an attorney out of him instead.” Phoenix knows Trucy is right, as she is always right about such things.
“Mm. He's a good kid, I can tell,” Phoenix agrees. A little too good, perhaps, but then again Apollo’s clear-cut morality is almost reassuring. How long has it been since he had received such an honest hit, been the brunt of a child-like fury almost humbling in its nobility—whereas the company he usually keeps comes tempered with veiled indifference, disgust, desire. Human and banal, much like himself. “He’ll need some time to think and cool off, maybe, but I remain hopeful. I’m thinking three months. One hundred days, give or take.”
“No, less than that, Daddy. Two, maybe. His mind is made up, even if he doesn’t know it. He had a particular look in his eyes, I could see him staring at your back when we left.”
Phoenix laughs a little. “Well, a good attorney he will make, but not a good poker player, I see. Good poker players don’t go around hitting people and looking sorry for it.”
Trucy smiles her child’s smile, a cultivated thing without mercy. “He wasn’t sorry. He regretted it but I don’t think he was sorry.” She takes out a little pair of scissors she keeps with her other paraphernalia. “But that’s better for you, Daddy. He wouldn’t come if he were. He would probably go find other people but not you. But,” the verdict is made with finality, and the vehement snip of her prop, “he likes you, I think. And I like him too. He’s going to be a much better assistant than you, Daddy.”
“Whatever you want, Trucy.” How he loves her. “He’ll come to find the Wright Anything Agency anyhow. He can be anything. He can even be,” Phoenix, in familiar vertigo, dares. Lived experience and Trucy’s peculiar gift have reintroduced and reinforced over the years some old habits: falsehoods are made more adamant before potential interrogations when stretched thin and transparent against the truth. Magicians and actors come of the same stock, after all. In other words, “family. Of sorts.”
A light-hearted jest, a parry against Trucy’s wit is Phoenix’s initial intention; for one lapsed moment he fears, suspended, that his daughter will misunderstand him, but then Trucy shows herself to be delighted.
“Yes. A brother of sorts. That’s nice, Daddy. I’ve always wanted one.”
A shift? A tell? A pause. But no. Trucy is clever but this should be beyond her for now. The dread passes with lively gait. Phoenix ventures to look—nothing is out of place.
In return, in rhythm, his daughter reclaims her seat. Harboring an ample dab of balm, her hands are white and cool on Phoenix’s waiting face.
And then, with both in position, Trucy speaks. Her fingers stroke gently; her words cut. “But it’s even better for you, I suppose. You’ll be gaining somebody new.”
Trucy so allows the nature of the game to reveal itself: that of the zero sum. Somebody new—in lieu, Phoenix grasps, of others; the turn of the phrase is expansive enough to include the dead—the dying—the lost.
Trucy does not mean to hurt him, he thinks. She means to console him, in her way. Her loss is greater for its recency and yet she proves as ever quicker than Phoenix, who is a coward. And who is he if he does not feed on every scrap of kindness flung in his direction, take advantage of every blunder in the game? Otherwise he could not be.
And so Phoenix allows himself, hidden in the leniency of his disgrace and the space between Trucy’s hands, to count through the ones he once loved, the ones he still does and so still cannot afford. The ones he would have lost, perhaps indefinitely. Times that cannot be recovered, even more so for they stand, solid and substantial, in the hazy gaze of memory. It is a welcome distraction, a punishment long coming: two stones in his hand he throws at his own image.
They had been angry and rightfully so. It doesn't matter, I believe in you, you know that. Tell me something. Tell me anything. Tell me and we'll get through this like we always do. But who can say how? But who can say when. The forged words had not been his but neither the dead man's; it is a strange and unchartered script that Phoenix now reads in the aftermath.
Phoenix opens his eyes and looks at Trucy, seemingly oblivious in her dutiful task.
How she had looked and looked at him, eyes wide and stricken, hand on his arm and the old sofa sagging underneath their weight. Nick, it's okay, hey, Nick, it's okay to cry, we'll work this out, Nick, I know we can, Nick, and he had loathed himself for daring to imagine Mia there as well, and maybe even himself, as if they were some strangely melded sign, her a fluctuating currency, the ghost he had loved peering through the eyes of the one he loves even more. Disappointment he had imagined lurking there, underneath, like moss. How Maya, being Maya, had pretended not to notice and laughed and made jokes and done that brave front for Trucy, and maybe a little for herself, but what worth did a little girl have to another? Maya, Maya whom he loves dearly as a sister, a mirror, as Maya herself; Maya with whom he shares a soul. Maya had left, an orphaned promise behind her; Phoenix had shoved the hand-me-down magic stone into the depths of his pocket.
And how he had protested, that one night, hands untethered yet closed, when Phoenix had tried to explain that it was not a matter of his asinine pride to refuse the retrieval of favors and debts, that a golden badge isn't worth the trade-off, the calls, the trouble, isn't worth anything that Edgeworth now angrily tries to shove into his hands in bewildered desperation. In that moment Phoenix understands Edgeworth better than he has ever done over the years. Look, Edgeworth, it's not real gold, it's just a thin plating. You can't do that to yourself, Edgeworth, don't take this from me, Miles, please look at me. And Edgeworth, Edgeworth who would have willingly fallen in his stead, fake badge on his lapel, once did, in the snowy mountains; Edgeworth who would believe in anything but himself; Edgeworth, the traitor, who had looked not at him but at the little girl by his side and had fallen quiet at last. Phoenix had left, the far shores behind him; neither had had the courage to dislodge the lost words, each a stone in the throat.
For then he had been poor. Not even a single gold piece to his name, not even cheaper silver with a little gold plating. Not even able to afford, after all that time, anything else.
When Trucy's curious eyes flicker up, Phoenix acts as if the pressure of her hand against his cut is too great; Trucy accepts it and they fall back into their ritual. But the wound has congealed.
Things, and names, and words, and then. And now. And now they still remain, if a little distant, if a little lost; they had endured and would continue even more gladly at his behest, he knows.
Phoenix knows, and that is the wound: the knowing of the tell. In the end he had grown angry with them too. A brother, a father, a noble protagonist or another from a narrative now lost to him: the roles he once coveted had crumbled under the debt of their love.
Maybe, just maybe I'm a cheating, forging scumbag and maybe they're right, Phoenix had spit out once, closing his eyes and thinking of Kristoph's cool smile, because he is simply tired of it all, and it is a comforting thing to be tired of it all. Glass shards in his mouth had been infinitely easier, the poison an easy way out: an instant receipt, like the card with the single blooddrop, of scripted and thus easier deaths.
Dollie, I guess I loved you after all. And how easy it is to admit it, with her.
The things we pay, he thinks, to continue losing the ones we love.
“Will it bruise?” Phoenix asks instead.
“No, Daddy, because I’m taking care of it,” Trucy replies in her sing-song lilt and kisses Phoenix’s forehead. And she is right.
"There," his daughter says sweetly, "it's done."
She holds a little oval mirror to his face, but he does not look.
Evening comes so soon. Trucy relinquishes her hold on Phoenix. She seems proud of her handiwork: a long and rather ill-fitting bandage cutting across Phoenix’s cheekbone. It is perfect in its imperfection, as with all things that stem from youth, regardless of intent.
“Well,” Trucy claps her hands once in a manner that is strangely reminiscent; Phoenix reproves himself quickly—enough is enough, for now. “What shall we have for dinner? I was thinking noodles, but it would be better to have something more filling. A home-cooked meal for my injured daddy.”
“Sounds perfect,” Phoenix grins. “It’s been some time since we cooked together.”
Trucy bounds over to the refrigerator and, with a cursory glance, calls back: “Pasta! Carrots, leek, leftover broth. And a solitary onion.” She frowns. “We forgot to go shopping for groceries again.”
“No matter, Trucy. We can do with what we have.” Phoenix moves to join Trucy in the kitchen and, to his mortification, immediately finds that he cannot stand. The pain is not acute but throbs with something akin to vigor; it will go a few days at the very least. With neither sheer luck nor brute will to render it inconsequential before more pressing matters, his physicality—his age, as people seem to be bent on calling—feels strangely stubborn and unyielding. He is tired, he realizes, and topples back onto the couch. Trucy is quick on her feet; with genuine concern she reaches out.
“Oh, Daddy,” she cries with exasperation. “We’ll have to visit the clinic tomorrow. I knew you were hurting more than you let on. Your back pain is bad enough already.”
“It didn’t hurt so much at first,” Phoenix retorts in defense. “I would have said something otherwise. Guess the embarrassment of being punched in the courthouse outweighed the actual damage.”
“Well, we’re lucky—I think we have some pain relief patches left over at home,” Trucy says, her hands already flitting through the perpetual disarray—a bird in the branches. “Lie down, Daddy. I officially declare you the invalid of the house.”
“Yes, yes, make fun of your old and ailing father,” Phoenix mutters, but obeys.
“Of course, I’ll be expecting an increase in my weekly allowance for my service,” Trucy replies, endearingly sly. “Or its worth in pudding from that bakery downtown.”
“I’ll get you three when I can walk again,” Phoenix laughs. The mock deal is not new. Trucy does not often ask him to buy her things, even now when it should be easier to take his or indeed anyone’s goodwill for granted, but she sometimes does let him pay for the more indulgent items that seem to take her fancy in the passing moment. Little cakes and confectionaries from patisseries filled mostly with twenty-somethings and their phone cameras, the premises in which his presence is a blinding anomaly, are on the list these days.
At times he wishes she would ask for more. More filling things, whatever that means, more so than delicate dessert dishes and candy in happy foreign wrappers. Luxuries that are still underpriced, much like the little treats he used to buy in bundles of three after school, all those years ago. But here he is, an invalid—Phoenix, prostrate on the couch, waits for his daughter with heavy eyes.
Through the open window a faint wind carries to him in slow motion the sounds of children returning home from school and anywhere else they had to be. The only shadow in his line of sight is his own.
The absence, even though Trucy is in the next room, affects him abruptly—the blue hour will come; then night will be upon them, and after them his and his daughter's apartment. It is no home, the adoption agency had said. It is no home but it will have to do. And the girl has nowhere to go, no next of kin. And so Trucy had stayed, for seven years, after everyone had left.
Phoenix does not believe it a tragic image: a little girl and a poor man who never really had anything, not even themselves. Nor is it comic. It is simply a life, a living. Bound in a pact, partners in crime, partaking in trivialities that are grounding by nature. Antics and affectionate gestures now performed like clockwork. A certain number of smiles a day and laughter every mealtime, and he thinks they could be happy. A scene of a house if not a home, bright and warm (he scraped everything to pay the bills on time, everything, if only the bills, the bills that arrived in the mail and Trucy read aloud with her performer's charm)—and it had only been once, the break; once he had awoken hot and confused in his own bed, a long dream waking into another.
"Trucy," he had called. And in his despair, Phoenix had whispered: "Trucy, I had a nightmare, Trucy. Silly of your big old dad to go having nightmares, but people sometimes get them. My friend used to have them, Trucy, bad ones. We used to talk and talk. Do you ever have nightmares? I don't know what to do, Trucy. I just don't know what to do." But his hands had remained alone and empty, clutching at the covers. Only the dull yellow light creeping under the bathroom door had cut into his eyes, and so Phoenix had not said anything more in the hours after, lying there.
Come morning a picture of the magician, framed and grinning with performer's bravado, had been conjured in violation of his disappearing act; now it hung above the piano, and Phoenix had no objections. To an extent he had been glad. Trucy, again his daughter, had reminded him, her hands strangely small against the white envelope, that he had bills to pay this week to keep the lights from going out. Her daddy gratefully accepted her banner of truce; he had been forgiven; there had been some pancake batter leftover and for that they could forgive each other.
So nothing is broken, nothing is lost. These things they say to another—comfortable and contained as the scripts and folios he had once so dutifully studied, a before, when all the words had seemed bounding in truth and every noble act engraved with the grim conviction of a nine-year-old boy. Through lines and lines they cling to each other.
Trucy, I love you.
Daddy, I'm going to the park to perform today, you have to come with me to rouse up the crowd. It's tourist season and we have to make it count. Okay Trucy, I know you're a pro and busy with your work, but your silly old dad needs to ask you for a hug before we go out. I love you so much. Daddy, I love you too, but you're horrible at magic. Of course, Trucy. That's your thing. But anything for you Trucy, anything of mine is yours. Daddy, I love you too.
That's why I'm going to take care of you, Daddy.
And they had meant for every word to count but they had been so poor.
My little girl, my Trucy, my truth-ee, my light. Even amidst the ruins you sing.
For Trucy is coming to him, singing. With her charm, with her grace, a happy little tune, with the light. Worth more than anything he ever had, she comes, through the doorway, singing, across to him, for him.
She stops before him, kneels, and surveys the damage. More inherent vice than she may realize. But she has brought the pain relief patches anyway. “There you are,” she says, as if he were the one who had been away.
“Here I am,” Phoenix agrees. The ache prevails and he gives himself up. Another man down, time and time again. The night will be ancient and inconsolable.
Dinner would have been a quick and cheap affair, befitting their pretense at celebration. Take-out considering Phoenix’s state, perhaps with an indulgence of ice cream afterwards from the convenience store. It would have been easier to have indulged, to have consumed, and so to have swallowed; infinitely so.
Instead, the end arrives—inevitably, quietly. It arrives in the form of Trucy gently leaning against the crook of Phoenix’s back, the patches in place where they cool the skin underneath: puppeteer’s job done for the time being. It claims the place of hunger in the stomach, the dark hollow where a strange foreboding inhabits.
Trucy draws in a breath, a tentative effort. She stands. The sofa moans softly.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, “of leaving.”
Leaving home? Leaving him? “What do you mean, Trucy?” He knows what she means. Is he surprised? In a sense, Phoenix is not. He supposes he would have been, once. But this—this is not betrayal, he thinks. Phoenix is glad that the years have hardened him, if only slightly.
“Leaving the Wright Anything Agency,” Trucy responds. As ever, hers is the much better answer. “I am fifteen years old, Daddy. It’s about time I set out and made a name for myself.”
“Fifteen years old is hardly old enough, Trucy. You’re my little girl, and a minor.”
“Don’t pretend,” Trucy says, “that you care about the law, Daddy.”
Phoenix lets out a bark of laughter. “I suppose that era is long behind me,” he muses. “But I still have to hold my ground, as your father.”
“And that’s why I have to hold mine, Daddy.”
“What will you do? Since when have you been thinking this?”
"That's not important," Trucy responds: it is not for him to know; since seven years ago. “What is important is that you’ve been found an innocent man today, Daddy, and the Agency—your office—has found a real lawyer whom you like. Someone who can be what I can’t, Daddy, because I’ll always be a magician, first and foremost.”
“It’s not a certainty, his joining us,” Phoenix says rather lamely, because it is the logical thing to say. He had forgotten about Apollo—Apollo really had no part in any of this, the poor kid.
“We’ve been through this.” Trucy sounds almost cross. “He made up his mind, I could see it. He will come. And,” with a flourish that seems almost an afterthought, she summons Mr. Hat and speaks through it, “he’s dead.”
He’s dead! He’s dead, of course he is dead. The father of his daughter is dead. Bludgeoned to death in a shoddy basement. The urgency of the trial resolved, the card trick gone and done—the man’s death is only now truly finalized through his daughter’s voice.
Phoenix looks at his daughter. His daughter, he thinks possessively. His alone, now. And that should have been enough. Trucy’s eyes are equally steely and stare straight back. And though betrayed and befouled, they see no sorrow and no shame.
"Zak Gramarye." It is not a question: the name, summoned at last. The body is in the open now.
Trucy gives the slightest of nods, as if any other affirmation would be damning. Mr. Hat, on the other hand, grips its wooden chest above its supposed heart and keels over.
It is Phoenix who looks away first. "It doesn't matter, Trucy.” It does, it should, but the cards had been drawn a long time ago. And Trucy had come to him in all his poverty. Trucy his light. "It never did. You know that, darling."
“It does,” she says. And then, patiently, as if talking to a child: “Don’t you see, Daddy?”
“I don’t understand,” Phoenix unhappily admits. “Trucy, sweetheart, he was your father. I’m sorry that you had to experience all this—"
“I am not sorry, nor sad,” Trucy says. Mr. Hat stands still, a doll once more. “The fact of the matter is that my father is dead, and I am not sorry for it at all. It’s a simple matter. I wouldn’t have minded if you really had been the one who killed him, Daddy, except you would have had to have gotten away with it, and you’re notoriously bad at not looking sorry.”
Phoenix rubs his eyes before the brutality of her conviction. “I should have never asked you to help me, Trucy. I know it now; I knew it yesterday.” The fact of the matter is that he would have asked her again and again.
“Oh, Daddy. And here you go, looking sorry anyway. I did it for myself,” Trucy says. “I could never have let you do it alone. Nor would you have managed, Daddy, the little trick with the card and the blooddrop. It was the only way.” She is, of course, right.
“It was,” Phoenix says, “your father.”
“And he made his choice seven years ago,” Trucy says, “when he left. Do you remember, Daddy? I said to you back then that he said that I could trust you. But he never did say that, you know.”
Phoenix is delighted, despite everything. “A bluff. And before I taught you anything.”
“He simply knew that you would go along with the act. And I knew too, of course. I was the one who told him.” And the moment of guilt: “I made my choice, too. I was the one who chose you. He only made sure afterwards.”
“Trucy, it doesn’t matter. In fact, I’m glad that you were the one who chose me.”
“It does matter, Daddy. I knew by his tells that he was going to leave, but he didn’t care enough. I decided there and then that he didn’t deserve me, and that I would never be sorry for his or anyone else’s sake.”
“I still don’t understand why this leads to your having to leave, Trucy. Not like this, darling. Not now.”
“Then I’ll have to explain,” Trucy says, “the rule of the game that every magician knows.
“My Daddy, my first one. He was an okay enough magician but a better poker player, and I think he would have been happier without the rest of us. He wasn't a true Gramarye—not by blood, I mean, that's one of the reasons he gave up and ran away from the stage—but he knew enough." Mr. Hat wavers, folds, and so collapses; in its place Trucy's words grow firm and commanding. The man of sticks instead reclaims its parasitic position, rooting once more into the shadow behind her back. Trucy does not bother masking the slight effort before Phoenix.
"He knew. And now you’ll know too. One, the trick is always carried out in two parts, and two, if something disappears—" she gives her cape a slight tug and her veiled hands reappear hard and hollow, "—it must reappear," a father, a daughter, "and the same thing the other way around, that's the way of things. That’s the rule of the game, and it was what he meant to do, I think, in the end: come back and find me again like some lost thing, if it was worth it. Pay you back for the trouble, maybe." Trucy laughs, a little cruel, and Phoenix cannot speak; there had indeed been a certain exchange.
Trucy turns her eyes to Phoenix, defiant; her upturned face crowned with dusk is older than what he remembers from yesterday. "But then I loved you, Daddy. I really do, I couldn't help it, I wanted you all for myself, and I'm a magician in my own right. I'm a Gramayre and it's in my blood—" (Phoenix thinks viciously, but the blood on our card was fake, the blood doesn't matter, but he does not interrupt her)—"the card trick wasn't even difficult, Daddy, I didn't think twice about it. You thought it would hurt me, I can tell, but I didn't care. I don't want to care. I didn't want him anymore because he didn't want me either; that's why I did what I did. I played the game. For you. For your new investment. Because you deserve better. If not going back to before.
"But better isn't—the before," Trucy's voice breaks a little, because despite everything she is still fifteen years old: the words a torrent, a history beyond repair—no repeat performance. "You're a little too good, Daddy, even if you don't believe it, and sometimes I don't know what to do." Her grin is wet and gleaming. "I'm clever most of the time, but I really, really don't know what to do sometimes, Daddy. I just don't know what to do."
"Trucy."
"But now." A pause, an actor's temporary reprieve. Phoenix is familiar with the grammar, as she knows. "And now, it's done. The Gramarye magic, seven years in the making, even if the finale needed a little editing. So, thank you, Daddy. For everything." Trucy holds his hand as if in a handshake, a professional one, in a manner that he himself never quite perfected.
The handshake is in itself a tell and a question: the old query, the answer to which Trucy had taught him every time. Must he raise, or must he fold? Ten different ways he could broach Trucy's offer; ten different ways she would let him. A debt repaid, a burden relieved. An eye for an eye, a playing card for a page—love, inexplicable and true, for love. Those are the terms, now coming to a close.
"Trucy." He means to fall back into his familiar and playful rhythm, into sweetened banter of cloying affection and wit—and yet a painful urgency overcomes Phoenix; sweat-drenched blankets and dull yellow light trounce any tricks he had up his ratty sleeves. The acrid memory is not entirely his alone, he now knows this.
Phoenix closes his eyes, thinks of his disgrace and his joy, and does not pretend that he regrets what he has asked of his daughter today; it is by the grace of his selfishness that this act of departure, no doubt long imagined and grimly accepted, has been deferred until now.
Phoenix wants, more than anything else, to be selfish. Phoenix wants him and Trucy to be selfish with each other if no one else. I am, I am, I am. He says what through Trucy cannot be spoken. "Trucy, don't leave me."
"I don't want to." Trucy's eyes are kind, as the morning after that nightmare years ago, as she always has been. And, softly: "But I'm not your little girl anymore, Daddy."
And Phoenix looks at Trucy and sees her, as he has done for the past seven years but as if for the first time: a girl, standing almost regal against the light, fifteen years old, never quite her age with her strange eyes and stranger blood. Trucy who is not above begging and stealing if it means not owing a debt and who does not care for fathers really but had readily called him 'Daddy,' for she had seen through his greatest bluff: the offer of his name and his hand, the only belongings of a broken man. Trucy with her lies, with her love, with her gaze unclouded, undeluded.
Phoenix wants to believe, then, that despite everything, what Zak Gramarye did he too had done out of love, twisted and selfish and blinding. That perhaps it was not Zak Gramarye who had escaped the stage before the poison struck the heart, before the illusion tore asunder. Phoenix wants to believe that Zak Gramarye was a good man, almost as much as he wants to believe that Kristoph Gavin could be a good man. Phoenix wants to tell her that he wants to believe, there and then, in the tender, and for a moment it seems true, that tell of the dead, and the locket is heavy in its nest.
Trucy understands as she always does. She stands before him, at the border, ready to take the fall. Brave, brave Trucy, the kindest person he has ever known.
Phoenix does not say anything to his daughter whom he loves.
"What, Daddy," Trucy calls, hesitant between the acts. Having taken the lead, she is now waiting for Phoenix's return. "What is it?"
It is the turnabout. It is the magic, the evidence irrefutable, the trinket in his hand to be proffered and taken: the gold breaks, almost inevitably, between his fingers to reveal the girl within smiling out at another who has taken her place.
"Your father," he starts, the locket an offering and a key, a choice; no longer an illusion. Trucy's wide eyes like dubloons drop before him, into his hand, at the girl she once was and the girl she has chosen to become, staring and glittering, that gift of the Gramarye, and she knows, she knows—yours, Trucy, everything yours—their shared glance falls onto the weight in his hand, and shifts. Coins stacked on top of another, a fortune, a debt: theirs, together, the reclaimed exchange. She looks, and she smiles.
It is a rare and wondrous thing.
Phoenix smiles back equally; there is nothing more to give. The evening light slants alongside the quiet; the reflection is harsh, but he continues to look: still a poor man perhaps a little richer, everything beyond draped in the setting sun but him. For his daughter is coming towards him. And so they stay, her grieving embrace a solid mantle and shroud around his shoulders, the locket now buried warm in his hand. There is work to be done. The night is opening.
"Your father," he tries again; the words come brave and willing and in the distance he can see everything made golden, before the sight fades. "Your father, Trucy, made the payment in full."