CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Alex
Then
Graduation day arrived without fanfare. Four years had gone faster than that first summer week. Twenty-two still startled me when a calendar told the truth.
My parents did not.
I’d sent the information weeks earlier. Dates, times, the specific parking details my mother had asked for twice, as if the logistics were the part she meant to get right. I told myself I wasn’t expecting them. I have never been a convincing liar to myself, in particular.
Riley found me before the ceremony, in the crush of families and gowns and someone’s toddler already melting down over the heat.
He was wearing the same dark jeans he always wore, and a button-down that told me Della had been involved in the getting-dressed part of his morning.
He looked good. He always looked good. But there was something almost boyish in the care he’d clearly taken, like showing up pressed and combed was the only part of this day he could actually control on my behalf.
“You nervous?” he asked.
“No.”
He smiled, slow and knowing. He’d caught the lie the same way he caught all of them by then, without needing to say so.
The club was there in full. They’d taken up an entire section of bleachers without apology, the way they took up space everywhere.
Not aggressively, just completely, as though the idea that they might not be welcome had simply never occurred to them.
Della sat in the middle of them like a queen holding court, in a yellow dress that made her impossible to lose in a crowd, which I understood later had probably been the point.
She waved when she spotted me in the procession line, both arms, unembarrassed.
Something in my chest loosened that had been wound tight since I’d checked my phone one last time that morning and found nothing on it.
Riley’s father stood when I walked past. He didn’t call out or wave the way Della had. He just rose to his feet, quietly, and stayed standing until I’d passed, the way you’d stand for something that deserved it.
I let my eyes go, briefly, to the block of empty seats I’d reserved in my head weeks ago without meaning to. Then I looked away and didn’t let myself look back.
My name was called somewhere close to the beginning.
I crossed the stage on legs that felt like someone else’s, shook the hand that was extended to me, and took hold of the leather folder that represented four years of a life I’d built almost entirely without the two people who were supposed to have built it with me.
Behind me, the club erupted. Whistles. Someone’s air horn, absurd and glorious in a gymnasium built for polite applause. Della’s voice cut above all of it, unmistakable, shouting my name like it was the only name in the room.
I laughed, in spite of myself, all the way back to my seat.
Afterward, Riley pulled me into him before I’d even fully cleared the crowd, his chin dropping to the top of my head the way it did when words felt insufficient to him.
I let him hold me longer than I normally would have, right there in front of everyone, because for once I didn’t care who was watching.
“Proud of you,” he said in half a whisper.
I didn’t trust myself to answer. My throat was doing something inconvenient, and I was not going to cry in a cap and gown over people who hadn’t shown up to see it.
His father shook my hand next. Firm. Two pumps, the way men shook hands when they meant it and didn’t need to say anything else to prove it.
“Your folks couldn’t make it?” he asked.
There was no pity in it, just a question a man asks because he already suspects the answer and wants to give you room to say it plainly if you want to.
“No,” I said.
He nodded once. He didn’t ask why, and he didn’t offer some soft, useless comfort about it either. He just let the nod be enough.
Somehow it was.
Della wrapped both arms around me and squeezed until something in my back popped audibly. “Don’t you dare cry,” she said into my hair, which was always her first line of defense against her own.
“I’m not crying.”
“Good.” She squeezed harder, like that settled it. “Neither am I.”
We went to dinner after. The whole club, Riley’s parents, a handful of my classmates whose own families had already scattered to the airport or the highway.
It was loud and crowded in the happy way a restaurant gets when nobody’s watching the clock.
Someone ordered enough food for twice our number, and Riley’s father told a story I’d already heard twice before that made the whole table laugh anyway, because the version he told at a table full of people he loved was always a little better than the one he’d told before.
I sat there and watched all of it happen around me.
The noise, the borrowed chairs dragged over from other tables, Della correcting someone’s grammar out of pure reflex.
I understood, plainly, for maybe the first time all day, that this was a family.
Not the one I’d been born into. A different one, built out of people who’d simply decided, at some point without asking my permission, that I belonged to them.
By ten o’clock most everyone had filtered out into the parking lot in twos and threes. Riley drove me home. We sat in the driveway afterward with the engine off for a few minutes, not talking, just letting the day settle around us the way days like that need to.
“Stay,” I said.
He looked over at me.
“Stay tonight,” I said, in case the first time hadn’t been clear enough.
He stayed.
Kissing, and touching, and celebrating, we stumbled into the apartment.
The gown went over a chair. The kutte went over the gown.
He shut the apartment door with his boot. He looked at me like I was the answer. “Come here.”
I did. The kiss had none of the mountain in it and all of the mountain in it. My back hit the wall. A frame knocked crooked and stayed that way.
“If you tell me to stop,” he warned. “I will throw you down the stairs.” He laughed into my throat. Then he didn’t laugh.
We didn’t make it to the bed on the first try.
The couch caught us. His belt. My dress shoved up.
Four years of knowing his mouth and I still went stupid when he put it on my neck. Graduation was still on my skin. The heat of the gym, Della shouting my name, a cap I had already lost. This was the part of the day I had been waiting for without letting myself name it.
I got his belt open with fingers that were not as steady as I wanted them to be. He made a sound that was almost a laugh and then wasn’t. His hands found the zipper of the dress like he had been thinking about that zipper since the parking lot.
“Look at me,” he said, half demanding. “I want to see your face.”
I did.
He pushed in slow enough that I felt every inch of the decision, then he stopped being slow. The couch complained. Someone downstairs turned a television up, which was the most dignity the afternoon was going to give us.
He said my name like it was the only word he trusted.
I had learned his body in rooms that were not this one. The Jeep. My apartment. His. This was different. This had an ending attached to it I had not said out loud yet. College was over and I had no idea what was next. I dug my heels into the couch and pulled him deeper.
I let the thought go.
He hooked my knee with his hip and changed everything. I came apart first, as always, a little angry at how easy he could still do that. I shook through it with my mouth on his shoulder so I would not say anything true.
He followed with his face against mine. It was a sound I knew, half growl and half prayer, the same one from a church parking lot that had started everything.
The crooked frame watched us like it had opinions.
I put my palm on his chest and felt his heart argue its way back down. Twenty-two years old and I still didn’t have a better word for what that did to me than the one I had used at eighteen.
It just fit better now.
“Root beer,” I said, because if I said anything else I was going to cry on his unbuttoned shirt.
“Predictable,” he said with a laugh.
“I’ll go.” I took his shirt and put it on. Nothing else. The machine hummed. Two bottles dropped. I felt numb. Mindless. My body had not caught up to the rest of the day.
His arm found me in his sleep.
I woke abruptly. What I heard was Riley.
Not his voice. The sound of him moving. Fast. Purposeful. The specific absence of hesitation in it raised the hair on my arms before I was even fully awake, some older, more animal part of me understanding the danger before the rest of me caught up.
I sat up.
The bedroom door was open, hallway light spilling in around Riley’s shape.
He was already on his feet, arm extended into the dark of the hallway. The ankle holster he never talked about and never let me forget sat empty on the nightstand. He held the gun steady in his hand like it weighed nothing.
It was pointed at the dark silhouette of a man.
I filled with every emotion known to man, all at once. A prickly warmth washed over me. Petrified, I stared. I rubbed my eyes.
Just beyond the bedroom threshold stood my father.
He was still in his travel suit, tie loosened, jacket rumpled from a flight and a long drive after it.
His face, in that first frozen second, was doing something I had genuinely never seen it do before.
The specific, undefended terror of a man realizing, in real time, exactly how badly he’d miscalculated.
“Then who the fuck are you?” Riley’s voice was flat. It wasn’t a question so much as a demand dressed as one.
My father’s hands came up slowly, palms out. “I’ve been trying to explain—” He rubbed blood from his cheek with the web of his left hand.
“Don’t fucking move.”
“I’m her father.” His voice cracked on the second syllable. His usual composure was absent. “I’m Alexander Carver. I’m her father.”
“Riley.” I said it once, quiet and clear, the way you’d say a word you needed to land exactly right the first time.
He didn’t lower the gun immediately. He held it a while longer, long enough for my father to understand something essential about the kind of man standing between him and his daughter. Then, slowly, he lowered it. He kept it in his hand.
My father exhaled like he’d been holding his breath since the flight into town.
I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and looked at the two of them. I understood that whatever happened in the next few minutes was going to matter for a long time afterward.
“The door was open,” my father said, his voice steadier now that the immediate danger of the gun had passed. “The front door. It was unlocked. I knocked and no one answered, so I—”
“At two in the morning,” I said.
He looked at me.
“It’s two in the morning,” I said again, because it seemed important that he actually hear it. “You drove here at two in the morning and walked into my home.”
He straightened. I watched the old composure begin creeping back into his shoulders and his jaw. I recognized it because I’d watched it happen my entire life. “I wanted to see you. I have every right—”
“Get dressed,” Riley said over his shoulder, still looking at my father and no one else.
His attention shifted to my father. He motioned to the kitchen table with the barrel of the gun. “Sit down.”
My father blinked. He was not, in the whole of his life, a man accustomed to being told what to do, especially in his own daughter’s home.
He did it anyway.
My father sat at the kitchen table afterward and looked around my small apartment the way he looked at everything that failed to meet his standards. Carefully, without visible judgment on his face, filing every detail away for later use.
Riley set three cups on the table and sat down without waiting to be asked. My father’s eyes moved from Riley’s face to the gun, which Riley had set on the counter within easy reach of neither of them, a fact I don’t think was accidental.
“You could have killed me,” my father said.
“Yes,” Riley said, without hesitation and without apology. “I could have.”
A silence settled over the table that was not the comfortable kind.
“The door was unlocked,” my father said, directing it at me now instead of Riley. “I wouldn’t have come in if the door was locked.”
I thought about the back landing. The warm night air. The root beer sweating in my hand while I stood outside not thinking about anything at all.
I had left the door unlocked.
I said none of it.
“You came at two in the morning,” I said instead. “Without calling. Without warning.”
“I wanted to surprise you.” He looked at me as though this were self-evidently reasonable. “You graduated today. I wanted to—”
“You weren’t there,” I said.
The words landed in the small kitchen and simply sat there, taking up all the air in the room.
He set his coffee cup down carefully. “Our flight—”
“Was delayed,” I said. “Or cancelled. Or rerouted. Or something.” I looked at him steadily. “There’s always something, Dad.”
He had no answer for that, which was itself an answer.
Riley drank his coffee and said nothing at all, watching my father the exact way I’d once seen Price watch a stranger at the clubhouse door. Quietly, thoroughly, filing away every small thing the man in front of him gave away without meaning to.
My father looked at Riley for a long moment. “You sleep with a gun.”
“I do,” Riley said.
“That’s—”
“Standard protocol,” Riley said, before my father could finish deciding what word he wanted. “In Arizona.”
My father’s gaze moved from the gun on the counter to the leather vest hanging over the back of the empty chair.
Then to the width of Riley’s forearms where his sleeves were pushed up.
I watched him build his case in real time, piece by piece, the way he built every case he’d ever made in a boardroom.
“You could have killed me,” he said again, as though repetition might land differently the second time.
“You’re lucky I didn’t,” Riley said. “You walked into someone’s home at two in the morning without an invitation. What you’re calling almost getting killed? I call it a natural consequence.”
My father’s jaw tightened.
I stared into my coffee and said nothing, because there was nothing I could say that would make either of them back down one inch. And because some part of me, God help me, didn’t want them to, not really.
The apartment was very quiet.
My father touched the bruise blooming along his cheekbone with two fingers and winced.
“You hit me,” he said.
“You moved,” Riley said. “I told you not to.”
My father looked at me for a long moment, his expression saying a great many things he didn’t have the words, or perhaps the courage, to say out loud.
I looked back at him and said nothing at all.