CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Alex
Then
He was already seated at the kitchen table when I came downstairs the next morning. I regretted leaving the door unlocked the night before.
His tie was gone. His jacket hung over the back of the chair with the neatness of a man who maintained appearances even in the middle of a disaster of his own making.
His cheek had swollen further overnight into something dark and unmistakable, the kind of bruise that would require an explanation to anyone who saw it and knew better than to ask.
A cut that looked like it needed stitched reminded me of the severity of the situation.
I put coffee on without speaking, because I hadn’t yet decided what I wanted to say and a task gave my hands somewhere useful to be.
He watched me move around the small kitchen. I could feel it on the back of my neck the whole time, the old familiar sensation of being assessed.
Riley was already gone. He’d left before sunrise, quietly, without being asked to and without asking my permission to go.
That was simply his way. He understood, better than almost anyone I’d known, the difference between a situation that required him standing in it and one that required me to handle alone, on my own terms, in my own kitchen.
I set a cup in front of my father and sat down across from him.
He looked at the cup for a moment, then at me. “Where is he?”
“Gone,” I said.
He gave a short nod, as though that fact settled something for him.
“Don’t,” I said.
He looked up. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
He wrapped both hands around the cup instead. Outside the window, the morning was already doing what Arizona mornings did best. Arriving bright and immediate, with no gentle easing into the heat of the day.
“You look well,” he said finally. “Healthy.”
“Thank you.”
“The apartment is nice.”
“Thank you.”
He cleared his throat. “Alex.”
“Dad.”
He paused, choosing his next words with visible care. “I want to talk about last night.”
“Which part?”
He shifted in his chair. “All of it.”
I leaned back and crossed my arms over my chest. “You drove here from California. You arrived at two in the morning. You walked into my home through an unlocked door without knocking.” I held his gaze, steady. “That’s the part I want to talk about.”
“I knocked,” he said. “No one answered.”
“So you came in anyway.”
“The door was open.”
“That doesn’t mean come in,” I said. “At two in the morning, an open door means the person who lives there forgot to lock it. Nothing more generous than that.”
He touched the bruise on his cheek with two fingers and winced slightly at his own touch. “Your boyfriend is dangerous.”
“My boyfriend was protecting me,” I said, “from an intruder who turned out to be my father. Those two facts are related, not contradictory.”
“He could have killed me, Alex.”
“He could have,” I agreed. “He didn’t. You startled a man who sleeps with a gun for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and he responded the way that kind of man responds. That’s not a mystery. That’s just what happened.”
“He hit me with a gun.”
“He told me he told you not to move, and you did.”
He stared at me for a long moment. I stared back. I didn’t look away first, which felt like its own small victory even though I couldn’t have said over what.
A long moment passed between us. Outside, a car started somewhere down the street. The coffee maker on the counter finished its cycle and went quiet. For a second the whole kitchen seemed to be waiting on one of us to say the next true thing.
“He’s not what I expected,” my father said finally.
“What did you expect?”
He considered the question with more honesty than I’d braced for. “Someone less—” He stopped himself before he finished it.
“Say it.”
He set his cup down carefully, like he needed both hands free for what came next. “He is not the kind of man I envisioned for you.”
There it was. The whole reason for the flight, the two a.m. drive, all of it, finally spoken out loud in a kitchen that smelled like cheap coffee and leftover tamales.
“And what kind of man did you envision for me?” I asked.
“Someone who—”
“Someone with money,” I said, before he could dress it up. “Someone with a title after his name. Someone who looks right at a dinner party and doesn’t carry a gun to bed.”
“Is that so wrong?” he asked, and he seemed to genuinely mean the question.
“For me it is.”
He leaned forward across the table. “You’ve worked too hard, Alex. You’ve built something real — a degree, a career ahead of you that could take you anywhere. You cannot simply—”
“I can,” I said. “And I am.”
He fell quiet at that, the argument running out from under him.
I softened, slightly, not because he deserved it in that moment but because he was still my father. That fact had never once stopped meaning something to me no matter how many times he’d given me reason to let it.
“Riley is a good man,” I said. “He works with his hands and he’s honest about every part of who he is, and he loves me in a way I genuinely did not know was possible until I experienced it firsthand.
” I paused, choosing the next part carefully.
“His family has been more of a family to me in four years than—” I stopped myself before I finished that sentence too, because some things, once said out loud to your own father, can’t be unsaid.
He looked down at the table.
“I’m not trying to wound you,” I said. “I’m trying to explain.”
He was quiet for a long moment, turning something over. When he finally looked up, something in his face had genuinely shifted. He looked older than he had the night before, worn down in a way I wasn’t used to seeing on him. “Your mother and I want you to come home.”
“I am home.”
“To California,” he said. “Now that you’ve graduated. We’re done traveling. We’re going to stay.” He held my gaze in a way that felt, for once, serious. “Permanently.”
I studied him for a moment.
Permanently. It was a word my own parents had never once successfully applied to themselves in my entire life.
“For how long?” I asked.
“Permanently means—”
“I know what it means,” I said. “I’m asking how long you’ve actually committed to the idea, as opposed to how long it will feel true this time.”
He straightened in his chair. “We’re serious, Alex.”
I thought about Riley. About Sunday dinners at Della’s table and the desert at dusk and a motorcycle sitting in pieces in a garage and the whole quiet, unglamorous life I had assembled here for myself, piece by piece, out of almost nothing my parents had ever given me.
“A weekend,” I said.
He looked at me, waiting.
“I’ll come for a weekend, in a week or so,” I said. “To see if you actually mean it this time. And then we’ll talk about what comes next.” I pushed back from the table and stood, because I needed to be on my feet for what came next. “But I want to be clear about something first.”
He waited, quiet.
“Riley is not negotiable,” I said. “He is not a phase I’m going through, and he is not something I will eventually outgrow the way you seem to be hoping.
Whatever happens between the two of us going forward happens with that understanding fully in place.
” I met his eyes and held them. “Are we clear?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“We’re clear,” he said quietly, after a moment that went on too long for my comfort.
I wasn’t sure, even then, that he meant it.
Two weeks later, I packed a bag, nevertheless.