Jack.
I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for it to become real, which took longer than it should have. My brain kept trying to find another explanation, kept reaching for something. Maybe this was a friend, a cousin, someone I didn't know about, some innocent thing I was misreading in the dark. But there was nothing innocent about the way his hands moved. Nothing innocent about the sound she made, low and quiet, when he pressed her further back against the wall.
The cold had stopped registering. I couldn't feel my fingers, couldn't feel the ground under my feet. I was aware, distantly, that I was still holding my phone. That the prosecco was sitting in our fridge. That the letter was still on the counter where I'd left it, folded in thirds,Johns Hopkins University School of Medicineembossed across the top.
I thought about that letter for some reason. I thought about the kitchen floor and the space heater and the dish towel stuffed in the window frame. I thought about the application fee I'dscraped together shift by shift, and the essay I'd written at midnight on his cracked laptop, and the way I'd laughed alone in that kitchen because I couldn't help it, because it was too big to hold.
The first thing I'd wanted to do was call Jack.
Now all I wanted to do was run.
So I did.
Chapter Two
Jack
SIX HOURS EARLIER
The thing about working with your hands is that your head never really switches off.
It was mid-afternoon and I'd been on my back under a Tacoma for the better part of two hours. Exhaust manifold. Whoever had touched it last had made a mess of it, and now it was my problem. I didn't mind. Worse things than having a problem you can actually fix.
The radio had been going all day. I wasn't really listening until Bill Withers came on—Lovely Day, that long held note—and I thought of Maddie. That happened sometimes. A song, a smell, or even nothing at all. She'd just show up in my head and I'd let her stay there.
I didn't have the words for what Maddie was. I just knew she was the kind of person who belonged to a bigger world—one with more oxygen than there was in this town—and I was just lucky to be breathing her air for a while. I tried not to think about that part too hard.
I felt my phone buzz somewhere around three but my hands were deep in the engine and I let it go. When I finally got to itthere were two notifications: a missed call from Maddie and a text.
Call me when you get this. I have news!
I read it twice. Stood there with my thumb over her name and grease on my hands.
I knew what the news was. Maddie was the smartest person I'd ever met. She’d been grinding through her bio degree for years, balancing labs with double shifts and living on peanut butter while she typed out med school applications on my cracked laptop until three in the morning. I'd never doubted her for a second. Not once.
I set the phone down and went to find Hector.
"I need to head out early," I said. "Something I've got to take care of."
He looked up from the parts catalogue, assessed me for a second, and nodded. "Go on then."
I grabbed my jacket and my keys and walked out into the afternoon. The bike was where I'd left it. I stood next to it for a second, helmet in my hands, and thought about what I was about to do.
I hadn't been to my father's house in eight months. Hadn't had a reason to. The man had a phone and he knew how to use it when he wanted something, which was the only time we talked anymore. Eight months was the longest stretch in a while and I hadn't lost any sleep over it.
But I had to do this. Today of all days, I had to do this.
I put my helmet on and rode.
His place was twenty minutes out of town, down a road that got narrower the further you went. A small house with a porch that sagged on one side, a field behind it that nobody farmed.It had always looked like it was waiting for something that was never going to come.
He was on the porch when I pulled up.
Two cans on the railing, one in his hand. He watched me cut the engine and take my helmet off without saying anything. That was his way—let you come to him, let you feel the distance.
"Jack." He looked me over. "Didn't think you still knew where this was."
"Dad."