Blue

EPILOGUE

TWENTY-SIX|FIVE YEARS LATER

· · ·

The thing about living with my dad is that he has opinions about breakfast.

Specific, extensive, deeply held opinions about breakfast that he is not shy about sharing at seven in the morning when you are trying to make coffee in peace and process the fact that you are a functioning adult human being who has existed on this earth for twenty-six years.

"You need protein," he says, from where he is already standing at the stove, spatula in hand, entirely too awake.

"I have protein."

"Coffee is not protein."

"Coffee is survival."

He points the spatula at me. "You sound like your mother."

I take my coffee and sit down at the table.

· · ·

We moved in three years ago.

Not because we had to. Because we wanted to.

Because after everything — the hospital, the grey year, the eight hundred miles, the letters and the silences and the long way back — there was a version of the future where my dad was alone in this house with her garden and her chair and her book still on the nightstand, and none of us could stand the thought of it.

Cassian was the one who said it first.

He said it the way he says things — quietly, like it was obvious, like the decision had already been made and he was just telling me the outcome.

"We should move in with your dad."

I looked at him.

"Our lease is up in two months," he said.

"I know."

"He's alone."

"I know."

"And I like his cooking better than yours."

"That is genuinely hurtful."

· · ·

My dad flips something in the pan that smells incredible. He is wearing the apron my mom bought him fifteen years ago that says GRILL SERGEANT and he has never once grilled anything while wearing it.

"Is he up?" he asks.

"Probably not."

"He has the Moretti job today."

"He knows."

"The east wall framing —"

"Dad. He knows. He's been doing this for three years."

My dad looks at me over his shoulder with the specific expression of a man who has completely lost the ability to not worry about the people in his house and has accepted this about himself.

"I know he knows," he says. "I'm just saying."

· · ·

Cassian didn't go back to school.

He thought about it. We talked about it.

I told him I'd support whatever he wanted and I meant it, and then one afternoon about four months after we moved back he disappeared into the garage of one of our neighbors — a man named Hank who was trying to restore a 1972 Chevelle and failing badly — and didn't come out for six hours.

He came back with grease on his forearms and something different in his eyes.

Not fixed. Not healed. Just quieter. Like something had been turned down to a volume he could actually stand.

He didn't explain it. He didn't have to.

He's always worked things out through his hands.

Always. He just needed time to figure that out about himself, and we needed time to figure out that therapy gives him a place to say the things out loud, and the work gives him a place to put the rest of it.

The stuff that doesn't have words yet. Maybe never will.

So he fixes cars now. Restorations, mostly.

And renovation work on the side — the Moretti job, a few others.

He comes home every evening with grease under his nails or sawdust in his hair and a look on his face that is, I will go to my grave maintaining, deeply, profoundly attractive in a way I have chosen not to fully communicate to him because I don't want him to know that power.

He goes to therapy on Tuesdays.

He hates it.

He comes home from every session looking like a man who has survived something, drops onto the couch, puts his head in my lap and says nothing for approximately forty-five minutes.

I run my hand through his hair and do not say I told you so.

I think it extremely loudly.

He always knows.

· · ·

"Morning."

He comes into the kitchen in a gray shirt and worn jeans, hair still slightly wrecked, and I have been in love with him since I was eight years old so I'm immune to this by now.

I'm extremely not immune to this.

"Coffee," I say, pointing.

He goes for the coffee. My dad slides a plate toward him without being asked. Cassian sits down across from me and eats like someone who has been awake for hours already, which he has — he gets up before the sun and runs, which is a personality trait I respect and do not share.

"Moretti job today," my dad says.

"I know."

"East wall."

"I know, Daniel."

My dad beams at him. He loves when Cassian calls him Daniel. I don't fully understand it, he just does. He has been quietly, relentlessly adopting Cassian since that boy was eight years old and he acts like each individual new development is a personal victory.

"You could call him Dad," I say. "Really complete the bit."

Cassian points at me without looking up from his plate. "Do not."

"Just saying."

"I will move out."

"You absolutely will not."

My dad is laughing. The big easy laugh — the one that fills the kitchen. The one that sounds, more and more, like the version of himself he's growing back into.

He's seeing someone.

Her name is Patricia and she teaches third grade and she laughs at all his jokes, which is either love or a very specific kind of patience. She comes over for dinner on Thursdays. She brought homemade pie last week.

My dad talked about the pie for four days.

I think he's happy.

I think it's okay that he's happy.

I know my mom would think so too.

· · ·

I'm off the medication.

Have been for a year and a half.

It wasn't dramatic. It was slow and careful and supervised and sometimes I took a step back before I took a step forward and my therapist said that was normal and I mostly believed her.

There are still bad days. There are still mornings where the weight of everything sits on my chest and I have to remind myself it's just weather, not climate. Not permanent.

But they're fewer now.

And on the days they come, Cassian is there.

He doesn't say much. He never has. He just shows up — sits down next to me on the floor, or brings me coffee I didn't ask for, or puts one hand on the back of my neck the way he does, steady and certain, like he is telling me something without words.

I'm here.

I'm not leaving.

You're okay.

· · ·

I'm also, for the record, now technically the primary breadwinner of this household, which is information I bring up constantly and with great enthusiasm.

"I'm your sugar daddy," I told Cassian last Tuesday.

"Please stop saying that."

"I provide for this family —"

"You work from home in sweatpants."

"From HOME. In COMFORT. Because I can AFFORD to."

He looked at me for a long, patient moment.

"I'm going to therapy," he said. "This is my real trauma."

· · ·

I work in product design now. Remote. I took the job two years ago and I still sometimes have to stop and realize that I get to do something I love in a house I love with people I love and that this is real and it is mine and I don't have to be careful with it.

I'm allowed to have this.

I'm allowed.

It was a Thursday when Cassian came home from his father's house.

Not a normal Thursday. A bad one.

This was eight months ago, just after the sentencing. His father had been in custody for six months by then — arrested after the teenage son of a long-term client came forward. The family had trusted him for years. The boy had been around him since he was small.

Cassian found out the same way everyone finds out things like that — a phone call, a name in a report, a terrible and unsurprising click of everything you have ever feared about the person who raised you finally snapping into focus.

He didn't cry.

He sat at the kitchen table for a long time.

Then he said, quietly, "I need to get my stuff out of there."

"I'll come with you," I said.

"No. I need to do this one alone."

· · ·

He was gone for four hours.

He came back with two boxes and a look on his face I had never seen before.

Not the locked-door look. Not the controlled-breathing, jaw-tight, keeping-it-in look.

Something else entirely.

Something open and devastated and very, very still.

He put the boxes down.

Stood in the hallway.

I waited.

"I found something," he said.

· · ·

His father had kept it in a shoebox at the back of the hall closet.

A letter.

Sealed. Addressed in handwriting Cassian recognized immediately even though he hadn't seen it since he was eleven years old.

His name on the front.

In his mother's handwriting.

His father had known it existed the entire time.

Had kept it.

Had never said a word.

· · ·

I sat with him while he read it.

I didn't read it myself — that wasn't mine to have. I was just there beside him on the couch, and I watched him read it twice and then fold it very carefully and hold it between both hands like something that might not survive being held wrong.

He didn't say anything for a long time.

Then: "She knew about you."

I didn't say anything.

"She — she says." His voice careful. Controlled. "She says she always knew. About me and you." A pause. "She called you the good thing." He stopped. Swallowed. "The good thing in my life."

I put my hand over his.

He let me.

· · ·

Later — much later — he let me read it.

It was dated the week she died. She had written it knowing.

My Cassian,

I don't know when you'll find this. I don't know how old you are now or what your life looks like. I hope it's good. I hope it's so much better than what I could give you.

I need to tell you things I was too afraid to say out loud.

I was not strong enough. That is the truest thing I can give you and I know it costs you to hear it.

I was not strong enough for the life I was living and I chose a way out that left you behind, and there is no version of that I can make okay.

I've tried to find words for it and there aren't any.

I'm sorry. That's all I have. I'm so sorry.

But I need you to know — you are not him. You are not your father. I watched you your whole life and I know what you're made of and it is nothing like him. He is cold in a way that goes all the way down. You were never cold. Even when you tried to be.

I know about the boy next door. The good thing in your life. The light you need.

Rowan.

I used to watch you sometimes from the window — I saw you cross the yard in the dark more than once, saw the light go on in his room when you got there. I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say. I just knew that you were different over there. Like you could breathe.

I hope you're still breathing.

I hope wherever you are, he's still there. I hope you let him. It’s okay to love him. I want you to be who you are. Whoever that is.

I know you. I know you will have spent years deciding you're too much, too dark, too broken to deserve something good.

I need you to hear this from me: that is not true.

That has never been true. You were the most tender thing that ever came out of my life and I failed you completely and you still chose to be kind. To show up. To care. To love.

Don’t let it break you. Don’t let that be your story. Be stronger than me.

You came from something terrible and you chose something different and I need you to know I saw that. I always saw that.

I love you. I have loved you every single day. I will love you from wherever I end up.

Be happy, baby. Please.

Be so unbearably, embarrassingly, completely happy.

That's all I want.

— Mom

He went to therapy the following Tuesday without me saying a word.

He came home and sat on the floor next to my chair and I moved down to the floor with him and we stayed like that until my dad called us for dinner.

That was eight months ago.

The letter lives in the drawer of his nightstand now.

He doesn't talk about it much. Sometimes I catch him just holding it — carefully, like he's still figuring out how to carry what's inside it.

I don't push.

I just stay.

· · ·

Later, I go to the grocery store.

This is not a romantic or significant thing.

We need milk. And my dad has been making pointed comments about the lack of decent coffee in this house for three days, which is ironic because I am the one who buys the coffee, so really he's making pointed comments about me, which I choose not to engage with.

I'm gone maybe forty minutes.

When I get back and put the bags down and go out the back door to check if my dad left the hose out again —

I stop.

The garden.

All along the back edge, tucked in between her existing rows like they were always supposed to be there —

Blue daisies.

Dozens of them.

New ones. Small, freshly planted, the soil still dark around their roots.

I stand there for a second, not fully processing.

Then Cassian comes around the side of the house, work gloves in his hand, dirt on his forearms, and sees me standing there staring.

He stops.

Doesn't say anything.

Just watches my face.

· · ·

"When did you —" I start.

"This morning. While you were asleep."

I look at the garden again.

All those small blue heads.

Hers, and now these. Side by side. Like they grew toward each other.

"Cassian."

"Mm."

"You planted blue daisies."

"I'm aware."

I turn and look at him. He's watching me with that expression — the careful one, the one that means he did something and isn't sure how it's going to land, which is a very rare and precious look on a person who is usually certain about everything.

"Why?" I ask.

He's quiet for a moment.

Then:

"Because they were hers," he says.

"And I wanted them to be ours too."

· · ·

I look at him for a long time.

He looks back.

Not nervous, exactly. Just waiting. The way he has always waited for me. Patient in a way that took him years to learn and costs him nothing now.

"I love you," I say.

Not dramatically.

Not the desperate kind or the please-don't-go kind.

Just the true kind. The kind that has lived in me since I was eight years old and never once asked permission.

Something in his face goes quiet and soft and entirely mine.

"I love you," he says back.

· · ·

Her daisies are all around us.

And now so are ours.

Blue.