Chapter 13
MAC
Arek left around noon. I walked him to his car the way I always did. He looked at me with those green eyes that were so warm and kind, and I nodded because I didn’t have words for what he’d given me that morning. Then he drove down the mountain, and the silence came back.
But the silence was different now. It had a pulse, a low electric hum that centered on the phone in my pocket.
I’d sent the text. Four words, traveling through the air toward San Francisco, toward a woman I’d once loved and deliberately freed, toward a house I’d never seen where my son was living a life I knew nothing about.
Jesus, the fear inside me was brutal. It sat in my chest like a fist, tight and heavy, and every time I moved, I felt it shift.
I tried to sit on the porch but couldn’t stay still, so I walked the campground perimeter, making a list of repairs I could make with one hand.
It was a short list. I came back to the porch and checked the phone.
Nothing.
I made lunch. Didn’t want to eat it but did anyway because otherwise, Arek would get on my case again. Made another cup of coffee with the good stuff Arek had brought. Checked the phone.
Nothing.
The afternoon fucking crawled. I sat in my chair—the one next to Arek’s chair—and stared at the valley.
San Francisco was in the same time zone.
If Fay had seen the text, it would’ve been hours ago.
If she was going to respond, she’d have responded by now.
If she wasn’t going to respond, that was an answer too, and I needed to be ready for it.
Maybe she’d deleted my number. Maybe she’d looked at those four words after five years of silence and felt nothing but anger, exhaustion, or contempt.
After all, I had filed for divorce. I had made the decision not to ask for custody or visitation because I’d decided unilaterally that my absence was better than my violence.
I had disappeared so completely that my own son had no way to reach me, even if he wanted to.
I’d told myself it was the right thing. Filing the papers, making it clean, not dragging Fay through a process she’d never have initiated.
She’d have stayed out of loyalty, guilt, and the stubborn, loving refusal to abandon someone who was struggling.
She’d have stayed, and it would’ve destroyed her.
I’d taken the choice out of her hands because I knew she wouldn’t make it for herself.
I’d told myself it was mercy. Sitting on this porch five years later, I wasn’t sure it hadn’t been fucking cowardice.
At three forty-seven in the afternoon, the phone buzzed.
The sound went through me like a live wire. My hand jerked toward my pocket so fast that I grabbed with the wrong hand, and the stitches screamed. I swore, switched to my right, and pulled the phone out. The screen was lit with a notification.
Fay.
I stared at her name for three full seconds before I opened the message.
He’s doing well, Mac. He’s tall now, almost six feet. He’s been playing guitar for about a year and is getting really good at it. Made the honor roll last semester. He joined the debate team, if you can believe that. He argues like a lawyer, which I suppose he comes by honestly.
I read it twice. Three times. Each detail landed separately, like stones dropped into water, each one sending out its own set of ripples.
Almost six feet. My son was almost six feet tall.
He’d been small at ten, not short but compact, all energy and no height yet, and now he was nearly as tall as me.
I tried to picture it and couldn’t, tried to map the boy I remembered onto a frame that was six feet tall, played guitar, argued on a debate team, and the image wouldn’t come.
He was a stranger wearing my son’s name.
Guitar. Boden played guitar. When he was little, he’d been obsessed with drums, banging on pots with wooden spoons until Fay hid them and I bought him a practice pad.
But guitar, that was new, that was something that had started and grown in the five years I’d been gone, a whole dimension of my son that existed without me.
Honor roll. Debate team. Argued like a lawyer. Like his mother. Fay was a lawyer too, now teaching law at a community college. Boden took after her then. That was good. Better than after me.
My eyes burned, and I blinked hard to keep reading because a second message had come through while I was drowning in the first.
He asks about you. Not often, but he does. Usually around his birthday or Father’s Day. He wants to know if you’re okay. I tell him what I can, which isn’t much.
He was asking about me. My son, whom I left, who I chose to leave because I was afraid of what I might do in the dark, asked about me. Not with anger, not with accusation, but with a child’s irreducible need to know that his father was alive and okay somewhere in the world.
And Fay couldn’t tell him much because she didn’t know how I was doing.
I’d given her no forwarding address for the first year, no updates, no birthday cards, no Christmas calls.
I’d severed the connection so completely that the woman who’d shared my bed and my life and my son had nothing to tell that son when he asked about his father.
I’d made her carry that. On top of everything else I’d done to her, I’d made her sit across from a boy with her eyes and be unable to answer his honest questions. Jesus, I was such a bastard.
A third message appeared.
I won’t pretend I’m not surprised to hear from you. It’s been a long time. I understand why you left. I understood then, even when I was angry about it. I know what you were trying to do. But, Mac, he needed his father. He still does.
And then, a minute later:
Why now?
Two words. The same question I’d been asking myself since I’d typed those first four words on this porch with Arek’s hand on my arm.
I set the phone on my knee and looked at the valley. The afternoon light was bright, and the shadows of the firs stretched across the campground like fingers reaching for something. A hawk circled over the drainage, riding a thermal, patient and unhurried as it searched for prey.
Why now?
Because my son was turning sixteen, and I’d missed five years of his life, and every one of those years was a weight I could feel in my spine.
Because I moved to a mountain to disappear and instead, I found a town that kept pulling me in.
Because a man with green eyes sat on this porch and told me to take the first step.
Because a fourteen-year-old named Kace asked me to come to his basketball game, and I had promised I would.
It had cracked something in me that I’d been holding together with silence and distance and the stubborn belief that absence was the same as protection.
I couldn’t say any of that. Not to Fay. Not in a text.
Because his birthday’s coming up. Because I should’ve reached out a long time ago, and I’m sorry I didn’t. Because I think about him every day, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.
I sent it before I could edit it into something safer. The words were raw and graceless, but they were true, and Fay had always been able to tell the difference.
The response came faster this time.
I’m glad, Mac. I mean that.
I should tell you that I’m with someone.
We’re engaged to be married. His name is Greg.
We’ve been together for two years. He has two kids from a previous marriage, Lily and Sam.
They’re 13 and 9. Boden gets along well with them.
I’m telling you this not to hurt you but because you should know what his life looks like now.
I read that twice. It didn’t hurt the way I might’ve expected. Fay deserved someone. She deserved a full, warm, present life with a man who didn’t pin her to the mattress in his sleep. The relief of knowing she had that was genuine, even as the sting of being replaced sat quietly beneath it.
I’m glad, Fay. You deserve happiness.
Thank you. So do you, Mac. I want nothing more than for you to be happy.
Happy. I wasn’t even sure what that felt like anymore. But I appreciated the sentiment, even if I couldn’t wrap my head around how foreign that word felt to me. Happiness.
Thank you.
He’d want to hear from you for his birthday.
A text, a call, whatever you’re comfortable with.
But, Mac, I need you to hear me on this.
Don’t reach out to him unless you’re going to stay.
I know why you left. I know you were trying to protect him.
But he’s spent five years wondering why his dad disappeared, and I have done my best to help him understand, but there’s only so much I can do from my side.
If you come back into his life, you need to stay in it. He can’t lose you twice.
I read it four times.
He can’t lose you twice.
She was right. She was absolutely right. I couldn’t text Boden on his birthday and then vanish again. I couldn’t dip a toe into his life and pull it back when the water got cold. If I did this, if I reached for my son, I had to hold on.
I hear you. I won’t reach out unless I mean it.
Okay. I trust you, Mac. I always did. Even when I was furious with you, I trusted your intentions. Just make sure your intentions include actually being present this time.
I’m working on it.
That’s a start. I’ll send you a recent photo of him if you want.
Yeah. I’d like that.
The photo came through thirty seconds later. I opened it, and my son looked back at me from the screen.
He was beautiful. That was the first thing.
Dark-blond hair that had gone a shade darker than I remembered, falling across his forehead in a way that was achingly, unmistakably mine.
Fay’s brown eyes, warm and steady. A jaw that was still strengthening from boy to man, with the ghost of a chin that would sharpen in a few years.
He was smiling, a half-grin that was crooked and self-conscious, the smile of a teenager who wasn’t sure he wanted his photo taken.
He was wearing a T-shirt with a logo I didn’t recognize, standing in a backyard with a fence and a tree behind him. He looked healthy and whole and alive and like every good thing I’d ever contributed to the world concentrated into one lanky fifteen-year-old.
I put the phone down on the arm of the chair because I couldn’t see the screen anymore.
My vision had blurred and my throat had closed.
My chest was doing something that felt like breaking and rebuilding at the same time, demolition and construction happening simultaneously, the old grief crumbling to make room for something new and terrifying and alive.
My son. My boy.
I sat on the porch and let it hit me. I let the tears come, silent and hot down my cheeks, and I didn’t wipe them away. There was no one here to see them, and after five years, they’d earned the right to fall.
I didn’t know how long I sat there. Long enough for the light to change, for the shadows to shift, for the hawk to complete its wide, patient circle and disappear behind the ridge.
Long enough for my breathing to steady and the tears to dry and the new thing in my chest to settle into something I could carry.
Then I picked up the phone and called Arek.
I’d considered texting. It was easier, safer, the medium I’d grown comfortable with over the past weeks.
But this felt too big for a screen. This felt like something that needed a voice, specifically his voice, and I was done pretending I didn’t know who I wanted to talk to when the world cracked open.
He picked up on the second ring. “Mac. Everything okay?”
“Fay texted back.”
A pause. Then, warm and careful, “Yeah?”
“Boden’s doing well. He’s tall. Plays guitar. Made the honor roll.” My voice was rough but holding. “He asks about me, Arek. He asks about me.”
The silence on the line was the kind that held things. I could hear Arek breathing, could picture him wherever he was, holding the phone and letting my words land without rushing to fill the space around them.
“That’s good, Mac.” His voice was quiet and steady, and it went through me the way it always did, settling somewhere deep. “That’s really good.”
“She said I can reach out for his birthday. But only if I’m going to stay. She said he can’t lose me twice.”
“She’s right.”
“I know she’s right. That’s what scares me.”
“What scares you more? The staying or the possibility that you can’t?”
I closed my eyes. Everything I’d built on this mountain—the solitude, the distance, the careful architecture of a life designed for one—was shifting on its foundation. “Both.”
“Then we work on both.”
We. He’d said we.
“She sent me a photo,” I said. “He looks…” I stopped. Swallowed. “He looks good. He looks like a good kid.”
“I’d love to see it. If you want to share it.”
“Yeah.”
We talked for a few more minutes. Arek told me about his afternoon, a patient who’d brought homemade cookies to the clinic, Jules finishing the ninth book in his fantasy series.
Normal things. Small things. The texture of a life happening at the bottom of my mountain while I sat at the top of it, connected by a phone signal and a voice that had become the sound of safety without me even realizing it.
After we hung up, I sat on the porch with the phone in my good hand and the photo of my son on the screen. My boy. Playing guitar, arguing like a lawyer, and growing into a man I didn’t know yet.
If I were going to do this, reach out to Boden to stay in his life and be present, I had to be worthy.
Not the man on the mountain. Not the hermit.
Not the soldier who couldn’t turn off the war.
Someone better. Someone who’d done the work, whatever that looked like, to be safe enough and whole enough and brave enough to sit across from a sixteen-year-old boy and say sorry. To tell him I wasn’t leaving again.
I didn’t know how to be that man yet.
But for the first time in five years, I wanted to find out.