Chapter 6 #2
Their house was about twenty minutes from the training facility, a two-story place in a nice neighbourhood with a yard my mom had turned into a garden that looked like it belonged in a magazine.
I pulled into the driveway and sat there for a minute, trying to get my head together before I walked inside and had to pretend everything was normal.
My mom must have seen me pull up because the front door opened before I'd even made it halfway up the walk. “Rowan! I didn't know you were coming by today.”
“Surprise visit,” I said, letting her pull me into a hug that smelled like lavender and the vanilla candles she kept burning in every room. “Thought I'd stop in.”
She stepped back and looked at me with that particular mom expression that said she could tell I was off but wasn't going to push yet. “Come in, sweetheart. You look exhausted.”
I followed her inside and immediately heard my dad's voice from the kitchen. “Is that my boy? Ro, come look at this.”
“Come look at what?” my mom called back, already suspicious.
“I've been teaching myself to bake.”
My mom stopped walking. “Martin. We talked about this.”
“We talked about the incident with the stand mixer. This is completely different. I'm doing it by hand.”
I walked into the kitchen and found my dad standing at the counter with flour on his forearms, a mixing bowl in front of him, and an expression of extreme concentration that suggested the situation was either under control or about to become catastrophically not.
He looked up when I came in and his face split into a grin.
“Rook. Perfect. I need a second opinion.”
“On what?”
“On whether this looks like cookie dough or cement.”
I looked at the bowl. It was a legitimate question. “What were you going for?”
“Chocolate chip. Your grandmother's recipe.” He held up a handwritten index card that had clearly survived decades of kitchen use, the edges soft and the writing faded. “I found it in the back of the recipe box last week and I thought, how hard can it be?”
“How hard can it be,” my mom repeated, in the tone of a woman who had heard that specific sentence many times and knew exactly where it led.
“It's a cookie, Martha. It's not engineering.”
I looked at the bowl again. “What step are you on?”
“Step four of seven.” My dad held up the card. “It says to cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. I did that. Then add eggs. Did that. Then it says to fold in the flour gradually and I may have done it all at once.”
“That's why it looks like cement,” I said.
“See, but here's the thing.” He held up one finger. “If you add a little more butter, does it not just—”
“No,” my mom and I said simultaneously.
My dad looked between us with the expression of a man outvoted on something he still believed in. Then he set down the mixing bowl with a kind of dignified resignation. “Fine. We start over.”
“I'll help,” I said, mostly because it gave me something to do with my hands.
My mom put the kettle on and pulled up a stool at the counter and watched the two of us with the particular expression she reserved for situations that were either going to be fine or going to require cleanup.
My dad washed the bowl, found the butter in the fridge, and handed me the recipe card with great ceremony.
“You read, I'll do,” he said.
“You'll do what I tell you.”
“That's what I said.”
We started over. I read out each step and my dad followed with the focused attention he usually reserved for things he genuinely cared about, which turned out to include his mother's chocolate chip cookies.
He creamed the butter properly, added the eggs one at a time, and stood back with visible satisfaction when the texture came together the way it was supposed to.
“There,” he said. “See? Engineering.”
“You just followed instructions.”
“That's what engineering is.”
My mom laughed from her stool and poured her tea.
While the first batch was in the oven my dad leaned against the counter with his arms crossed and looked at me in the direct way he had when he was done being funny and had switched over to paying attention.
“Talk,” he said.
“About what.”
“About whatever's got you sitting in our driveway for four minutes before you come in.”
I hadn't known he'd been watching. I should have. He always watched. “I found Soren,” I said.
The air in the kitchen changed immediately. Not in a bad way, just in the way it did when you dropped information that mattered and everyone had to recalibrate around it. My mom set her mug down carefully, and my dad stopped where he was and looked at me.
“Soren Vale?” my mom asked quietly. “Your friend from high school?”
“Yeah.” I tried to figure out how to explain this without making it sound as messy as it felt. “I hired a private investigator a few years ago to look for him. They finally found a lead. He's been here in Toronto the whole time, playing drums in a band. I went to see him last night.”
My dad stared at me. “You saw him? Like, in person saw him?”
“Yeah. I talked to him. Gave him my number.” I pulled out my phone and set it on the counter like evidence. “He hasn't called or texted yet.”
My mom crossed the kitchen and covered my hand with hers, her expression careful and full of the kind of love that made my throat tight. “How do you feel about seeing him again?”
“I don't know,” I said honestly. “It was good to see him. But it was also really hard. He didn't apologize or explain anything. He just acted like it was no big deal that he'd vanished for over a decade.”
“That must have been frustrating,” she said gently.
“It was.” I ran a hand through my hair and tried to organize the mess in my head into something coherent. “And now I'm just waiting to see if he'll reach out or if that was the last time I'll ever talk to him.”
My dad leaned forward with his elbows on the counter, his expression serious in a way I didn't see from him often. “Can I be honest for a second?”
“Yeah.”
“I'm glad you found him. I know how much it messed you up when he disappeared, and I think getting answers will be good for you.” He paused, choosing his words carefully.
“But I don't want you building a whole future in your head based on one conversation.
You don't know what his life looks like now.
You don't know if he wants the same things you do.
And you definitely don't know if reaching out again is going to make things better or just reopen old wounds.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “I'm trying not to get my hopes up. It's just hard when I've been looking for him for so long and he's finally here.”
My mom squeezed my hand. “We're not saying don't hope, sweetheart. We're just saying be careful with your heart while you figure out what this is.”
I nodded and tried to swallow past the tightness in my throat. They were being kind, trying to protect me from getting hurt again, and I loved them for it even though part of me wanted to ignore the caution and just dive headfirst into whatever this was with Soren.
The oven timer went off, and my dad grabbed the mitt and pulled the tray out, and for a few minutes the kitchen just smelled like warm chocolate and butter, and nobody said anything, and it was enough.