Chapter 48 Miguel
FORTY-EIGHT
MIGUEL
Thirteen weeks after Caleb graduates IOP, the treehouse vacation is forty-eight hours away and my stomach has decided to train for the Olympics.
Not Caleb’s stomach. Mine.
Which feels unfair, because I’m the one who booked the damn thing.
I’m at Mom’s kitchen table, laptop open, the confirmation email glowing at me like, You did this, pendejo.
The listing photo is still ridiculous: a treehouse wrapped around a redwood, all glass and warm wood and fairy lights.
The Big Sur coastline is in the background, all cliffs and fog and “one wrong turn and you die.”
Ten seconds in, my brain helpfully supplies, “What if it’s too much?” What if he freaks out? What if being away from routine makes everything worse and not better?
I shut the laptop before I can spiral. The screen snaps closed with a click.
Mom glances over from the stove, where she’s making enough carne asada to feed a small army. “What are you doing over there?” she asks. “You have your thinking face on.”
“My thinking face is hot,” I say automatically.
She snorts. “Your thinking face is your worried face,” she corrects. “Which is less hot.”
I rub a hand over my jaw. “Just… looking at the reservation again,” I admit. “The treehouse. Making sure the dates are right. Making sure I didn’t hallucinate the whole thing.”
Mom turns down the burner and comes to lean on the back of the chair across from me. “You could recite the directions in your sleep,” she murmurs. “You’ve checked it ten times.”
“Yeah, well,” I say. “It’s a lot of money to accidentally donate to some guy’s woodland fantasy.”
Her hand finds the back of my neck, thumb rubbing a little line, the way she’s done since I was eight and sweating over a math test. “?Estás nervioso?” she asks. “About the trip?”
“About all of it,” I say. “He brought it up. Not me. He looked at me with those big Bambi eyes and said, ‘Maybe we can still plan it for the summer.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure, totally,’ like my heart wasn’t doing cartwheels.”
“That’s good,” she says. “He’s asking for something.”
“I know,” I say. “And now he keeps saying it feels selfish.”
Her mouth flattens. “Selfish,” she repeats, like the word offended her personally. “Ay, Dios.”
“He said, ‘I almost died in our bedroom, I dropped out for a quarter, and now we’re using money to go sit in the trees? Shouldn’t we be… paying bills or donating to a crisis line or something?’”
Mom shakes her head. “Donating to the crisis line is staying alive and going on the trip,” she says. “That boy owes himself joy.”
“I keep telling him it’s not punishment time,” I say. “It’s… marker time. Dr. K actually suggested some kind of ritual or trip. He picked the treehouse. That’s the whole point. But you know how his guilt brain gets.”
She nods. “Te entiendo.” She squeezes my neck. “Miguel… you need this too.”
I look down at my hands. The pale scars on my knuckles are faint now, Caleb’s blood long washed away, but I remember the feel of it, like it’s embedded in the skin.
“I know,” I say softly. “That’s almost scarier.”
Her thumb presses, firm. “You boys want permission? Here it is. Go.” She jerks her chin toward the counter, where a half-packed grocery bag waits. “I’m already making snacks. Tortas. Fruit. Chicharrones. You’ll think you’re going for two weeks, not four days.”
The knot in my chest eases a millimeter. “Thanks, Mamá.”
“And Dad called from the office this morning,” she adds, like it’s an afterthought, which means it is absolutely not an afterthought. “He wants to talk to you before you go.”
“That sounds ominous,” I say.
“Relax,” she says. “He had his lawyer voice, but it’s fine.”
I groan. “Great.”
Dad’s at the condo when I get back, of course.
Because the universe likes to stack my anxiety appointments.
Caleb’s stretched out on the couch in sweats, laptop balanced on his stomach, his new glasses sliding down his nose.
There’s a stack of college class pamphlets on the coffee table next to an IOP discharge packet.
Ashton’s in the armchair like he came with the furniture, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up. He stands halfway when I come in.
“Hey,” I say, hanging my keys up. “You guys having a financial aid party without me?”
Caleb snorts. “Dad’s stressing about timelines,” he says. “I’m reminding him I’m allowed to take more than five minutes to decide if I want to go back full-time or not.”
“You’re allowed,” Ashton says, nodding. “I’m just letting you know what dates exist in the world.”
“Uh-huh,” Caleb says, giving me a look that says, Help, my father is hovering with a calendar.
“Hey,” I say, trying to divert his attention from the love of my life. “Mom said you wanted to talk to me.”
He clears his throat. “If you have a minute,” he says. “Before I head out.”
Caleb pushes his glasses up and sits up straighter. “If this is about money,” he says, “I already told you, I’m not just—”
“I know,” Ashton says quickly. He looks between us. “This is… tangentially about money. But also about support.”
I sink onto the arm of the couch, close enough that my knee brushes Caleb’s shoulder. “Shoot,” I say.
Ashton reaches into his briefcase and pulls out an envelope. This already feels like A Thing.
He holds it out. “For the trip,” he says.
My stomach drops. Caleb’s brows pinch. “Dad—”
He lifts a hand. “Before you argue,” he says, “this is not me trying to buy my way out of what happened. I know I can’t. This is me being practical in the ways I know how. I am… better with money than feelings.”
Caleb makes a strangled sound that might be a laugh. Ashton goes on, voice roughening.
“You boys have both been working hard,” he says.
“Paying bills. Going to therapy. Doing everything asked of you and more. If taking four days in Big Sur helps mark this… chapter”—he swallows around the word—“then I want to help make that possible. Consider it… an investment in my son’s continued existence. ”
He tries to smile, but it wobbles.
The envelope suddenly weighs a thousand pounds.
Caleb stares at it like it’s a live grenade. “Dad, I can’t—”
“Yes,” Ashton says. “You can. You don’t have to, but you can. It’s not all of it,” he adds to me, glancing over. “I know you already booked it. This is… chipping in. As your father.”
My throat goes tight. “You don’t owe me—”
“I know I don’t,” he says. “I want to.”
Silence hangs in the air for a second. Caleb looks at me, eyes wide, a question sitting in them.
I exhale slowly. “Thank you,” I say to Ashton. “Really.”
He nods once, like a verdict went his way. “Good,” he says gruffly, placing the envelope on the table, not forcing it into anyone’s hand. “Use it for gas. For food. For whatever. The only condition is that you both come back in one piece.”
“Morbid,” Caleb mutters.
“Accurate,” Ashton counters, so dry it almost makes me laugh.
Caleb’s shoulders slump. “Okay,” he says quietly. “Thanks, Dad.”
“You’re welcome,” Ashton says, and for once, doesn’t follow it with a caveat. He stands. “I’ll get out of your hair. Let you two pack.”
He squeezes Caleb’s shoulder on the way out. His hand hovers over mine for half a second before he pats my arm, awkward but sincere.
“Text us when you get there,” he says. “And… Miguel?”
“Yeah?”
“Take care of him.” The door clicks shut behind him.
Caleb blows out a breath and flops back against the couch. “Well,” he says. “That was… a thing.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We just got partial treehouse sponsorship from your dad. That’s definitely a thing.”
He side-eyes the envelope. “I hate that I’m relieved,” he says.
I nudge his knee. “Hey,” I say. “We were going either way. But it’s okay to let people who love you pitch in. That’s kind of the theme lately.”
He makes a face like he tasted a bad raisin. “Letting people help is still gross,” he mutters. “I’m working on it.”
“Good,” I say. “You can practice by letting me choose the playlist.”
He groans. “I suddenly regret staying alive.”
I flick his ear. “Not fucking funny.”
The night before we leave, there’s a half-packed duffel bag on the bed and approximately twelve piles of “maybe” on the floor.
“Caleb,” I say, staring at the chaos. “We’re going for four days, baby. Not moving to the woods permanently. You do not need… all of this.”
He looks up from where he’s kneeling by the open drawer, holding two nearly identical hoodies.
“I don’t know what temperature trees are,” he says.
“What if it’s hot during the day and freezing at night?
What if it rains? What if I sweat through everything because my anxiety is like, ‘Surprise, pit stains’? ”
I lean against the doorframe. “Babe, it’s the central coast,” I say. “So the answer is yes. To all of that. Layers. That’s the move.”
He tosses the hoodies on the bed and sits back on his heels, rubbing his hands over his face. The motion is familiar. I’ve watched him do it before games, before exams, and before therapy.
“Is this… stupid?” he asks, voice muffled. “The trip, I mean. I keep thinking about how much we’ve already leaned on our parents this year. On you. On… everyone. And now I’m like, ‘Let’s go sleep in a fancy fucking tree.’”
I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed. “Look at me,” I say.
He drops his hands and does.
“Do you want to go?” I ask. “No guilt. No shoulds. Just… yes or no?”
His throat works. “Yes,” he says immediately. “I really do. And I hate that I do. Like I’m not allowed.”
“You almost died,” I say bluntly. “You left school to better yourself. You go to group three times a week and talk about raisins. You got on meds. You let people help you. You haven’t hurt yourself since.
You’ve been doing the work. That doesn’t earn you a prize because life isn’t a points system, but it does mean you are absolutely allowed to enjoy four days in the woods with your boyfriend. ”
A laugh snorts out of him. “You sound like a therapist,” he says.