"Miss Callahan."
I looked up from the page I was still on. The lawyer waited with patient neutrality.
My father was looking at me now. His hands were flat on the table, very still, the way hands went still when they were done shaking. He had the expression I'd seen on him at the end of things, the end of apartments, the end of jobs, the end of relationships that had taken too much out of both parties. A kind of exhausted relief. The look of a man who had been carrying something for a long time and had finally, whatever the cost, put it down.
I looked back at the document.
The formal language was careful and cold: arrangement of alliance between the Callahan and Moreau families... terms to be fulfilled upon... the party of the second part, Avery MarieCallahan... My name in the middle of all that formal grammar. My name in a document I hadn't written and hadn't been asked to approve before last night, when the choice had already narrowed to this or worse.
I thought about worse.
I picked up the pen.
Signed.
The lawyer gathered everything with quiet efficiency, snapped his briefcase shut, and let himself out. My father and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table with nothing between us except two mugs of coffee that had gone cold and the particular silence that follows something permanent.
"Avery," he started.
"Don't." My voice came out even. I was grateful for that. "Not right now."
He subsided.
I got up and went to pack.
* * *
I'd been packing in my head since four in the morning, so it didn't take long. I was selective in the way that people are selective when they don't know how long they'll be gone and refuse to bring so much that it looks like surrender. Three changes of clothes. Two books. My grandfather's watch, which had stopped working years ago and which I'd never had repaired because I liked that it kept its own time. The photograph of my mother, taken before I was born, where she was laughing at something off-camera and her whole face was open in the way that faces are open before life teaches them to be careful.
The flash drive went into the inner pocket of my bag. Not the jacket this time, somewhere it wouldn't be found easily.
I zipped the bag. Sat on the edge of my bed. Looked at the room that had been mine for three years in this apartment:the secondhand desk, the bookshelf I'd built from wood and brackets, the window with the broken latch I'd never gotten around to fixing. I'd made it livable. I was good at that. Making places livable, functional, bearable, finding the usable version of whatever I was given.
I would do the same with this.
I picked up my bag and went back to the kitchen.
My father was still at the table. He'd wrapped both hands around his mug, though the coffee was long cold, and he was looking at the middle distance the way he looked when he was assembling sentences he didn't quite know how to deliver.
I set my bag down by the door.
"The rent is paid through next month," I said. "After that you'll need to handle it."
"I know."
"There's food in the refrigerator. Actual food, not just condiments. I bought groceries last night." I paused. "The yogurt is on the second shelf."
Something crossed his face. It might have been guilt. It might have been love. With my father the two were so thoroughly intertwined that I'd long since stopped trying to tell them apart.
"You don't have to be this calm," he said.
"I know."
"You could..." He stopped. Started again. "You have every right to be angry."
"I am angry." I said it the way I said most things, without weight, without performance, just the flat fact of it. "I've been angry since I was twelve years old, Dad. It's not new. It just doesn't have anywhere to go."
He flinched.