Chapter 41
ROGUE
We're still in Renner's room. Nobody's moved.
The hard part's over. Vi told her father she was sticking with the Rot and he was cool with that, though I don't think it's as settled as it might sound. Not with the way she keeps looking at him, like she’s got to do a lot more weighing of her options.
For now, the two of them sit close, talking low, years of catching up crammed into whatever minutes we've got before we have to move. The case with the papers sits closed on the table beside them, hers now. I stay where I am, back to the wall, and watch.
This is the part nobody warns you about. Everyone braces for the big, loud moment. Nobody tells you the quiet afterward is the part that gets you, when it's over and done and all that's left is to sit there and steep in it.
Yeah, I’m steeping.
Vi says something I can't hear, and her father huffs out a short, rough laugh, like he’s out of practice. They've moved on, at least for now, from being a man and the daughter he wronged. At the moment, they're just a family, the way they must have been a thousand times before any of this.
Here's the thing I can't set aside. She forgave him.
Not out loud, not all at once, and not all the way.
But it's there in how she leans toward him, in the laugh she gives back.
This man let her believe he was dead. He let her grieve, let her lose everything, let her end up in a place like the Rot with nothing left to lose.
And she's sitting beside him anyway because he's her father, and she loves him, and somehow that is more important than what he did.
I didn't know people could do that. I'm not sure I can.
Because I had a father too, and I never figured out how to set my shit aside.
Watching Vi and her dad, I can't help but think about the motorcycle shop on Delaney Street.
It had lived through three generations of us, my grandfather's name still up on the sign when I was a kid, faded but there.
The back room was full of parts going back to the sixties.
Tools my great-grandfather hauled over from Germany.
My father in the middle of it with the radio going, singing along, massively out of tune.
Voss Property Group wanted the block, and he was in their way.
When the shop burned three weeks after a man suggested he consider selling the land his business had been on for years, my straight-dealing father, who figured other men were honest like he was, never heard the threat underneath it.
He’d said no thanks, not ready to retire.
He never saw it coming. I've made my peace with that, mostly.
He was a good man in a city that stopped rewarding good men.
It's the after I couldn’t swallow.
I was young and itching for a fight, and I begged him to make noise. He looked at me like I was a kid who didn't understand how the world worked. Maybe I was.
Two men, my father and Vi’s. Same machine. One sat in a hidden room for years and refused to let go, building a case nobody asked for. The other one walked away.
I'm looking right at the one who didn't quit. He's alive, gray and worn down, and his daughter found him and pulled the whole buried truth back into the open. It's all sitting in a suitcase on a card table because he never stopped fighting.
And I finally understand the thing I haven't been able to shake since we walked in. It isn't only that I'll never have what Vi has. It's worse than that. After the shop, after the giving up, my father packed what was left and went.
And I let him.
I told myself I was furious at him for quitting, and well, I was.
But under the fury was the part I've spent years refusing to look at.
I never went after him. I don't know where he is.
He could be in this same dying city, a few miles from here.
He could be a hundred towns away. He could be dead, and I wouldn't have heard.
Seven years, and I've been carrying a grudge instead of an address, because the grudge was easier.
Because staying angry meant I never had to admit I gave up on him the same way he gave up on the shop.
Vi crossed a ruined city for her father. She traded a man for the chance at him.
I never even crossed the street for mine.
That's what finally does it. Not the grief but the recognition. Watching a daughter forgive her father, I feel the armor I've worn for years start to give. It doesn't come off clean, and it hurts when it does.
I don't move. I don't make a sound. Nobody in the room knows anything's happening to me, which is how I'd want it if I were thinking straight, which I'm not.
Across the room, Vi laughs again at something her father says. She reaches over and squeezes his hand and doesn't let go.
I watch her hold on to him.
And for the first time in years, I let myself wonder where my own father is.