23. Nathan Sr
NATHAN SR
The first week after the arrests is a slow crawl through pain medication, police statements, and the particular insult of needing help to sit upright like a normal man.
Beacon Harbor keeps me longer than I want, and Daniel enjoys that far too much. “You’re healing,” he says one morning, adjusting the bed slightly. “Try not to ruin it by being yourself.”
I glance at the ridiculous scrub cap on his head and decide I still have enough strength to be offended. “That’s rich coming from a man wearing cartoon kidneys.”
“They’re educational,” he replies, then looks toward the door. “Your girls are here.”
That shuts me up fast.
Athena walks in first with coffee and a tote bag, and Ivy comes in right behind her holding a folded drawing and the kind of expression that says she already has opinions.
The room changes the second they enter it.
The monitors don’t sound different. The light doesn’t shift. Still, the room changes.
“Morning,” Athena says in a warm, soft voice.
“Morning,” I reply.
Ivy climbs onto the chair beside my bed with careful determination, then unfolds the drawing and pushes it toward me. It’s three stick figures standing in front of a house. One of them is very clearly me, though I’ve been given impossible shoulders and what appears to be a cape.
I hold it up. “I’m touched by the realism.”
“You’re welcome,” she says. “That’s our family picture, but I didn’t know if I should make your hair silver or gray.”
Athena laughs into her coffee, and the sound catches low in my chest. I look at the page again, then back at Ivy, and there’s something about hearing our family picture spoken out loud that makes everything inside me go very still.
“Our family picture,” I repeat.
Ivy nods like that should’ve been obvious from the first line. “Yes.”
Athena sits down in the chair by the window and watches both of us with that guarded softness she gets now, the one that still looks slightly surprised every time it shows up.
She’s tired. I can see it around her eyes.
She’s also beautiful enough to be distracting in a room where I’m supposed to be recovering.
Daniel notices where my attention goes and rolls his eyes. “Great,” he mutters. “He’s definitely fine.”
I don’t even look at him. “Leave.”
He snorts, yet he does. The door shuts behind him, and the quiet that follows feels earned.
I set the drawing on the tray table carefully. Ivy is already talking about something that happened with a stuffed animal in the gift shop yesterday, and Athena is stirring sugar into her coffee like she’s trying not to say something bigger than that. I know the look now.
I wait. Eventually, Ivy pauses long enough to look at her mother. “Can I say it?” she asks.
Athena blinks. “That sounds ominous.”
“It’s not ominous,” Ivy says, offended. “It’s planning.”
I have to bite back a smile. Athena glances at me once, then at her again. “Go ahead.”
Ivy turns back to me and folds her hands in her lap with terrible seriousness. “Mom and I were talking,” she says, “and I think maybe we should stay here.”
I look at Athena. She holds my gaze this time. No dodging. No pretending this is only Ivy talking. “We were talking,” she admits. “And before you say anything, I know you already offered to go wherever we needed. I heard you.”
I settle back against the pillows. “Then I’ll say it again anyway.”
Athena’s mouth twitches. “Of course you will.”
Ivy leans closer. “I like Boston,” she says. “The pigeons are worse, but everything else is good.”
“That’s a ringing endorsement,” I murmur.
She ignores that. “And you’re here,” she adds. “And I think if we go back and then come here and then go back again, that sounds annoying.”
Athena presses her lips together, trying not to laugh. “That is, unfortunately, a strong logistical argument.”
I look between them, and something about the two of them presenting this to me, calm and careful and trying not to ask too much too fast, makes my eyes sting.
“You really want to stay?” I ask Ivy.
She shrugs one shoulder. “I want us together.”
Athena looks down at her cup for a second, then back at me. “I’m not talking about tomorrow,” she says quietly. “I’m talking about soon. Once you’re steadier. Once we know what our lives look like after all this. There are branch campuses of Ivy’s school network here. It wouldn’t be impossible.”
I study her face. “Would you want that?”
Her eyes don’t move from mine. “I think,” she says slowly, “I spent six years building a life alone since I had to. That’s not the same thing as saying I want to keep doing it if I don’t have to.”
I let that sit there, let it land everywhere it needs to. Ivy looks between us like she’s waiting for one of the adults to stop being emotionally constipated and say the obvious thing.
So I do. “I’ll live wherever the two of you build your life,” I say. “Boston. Portland. The moon if your school has a campus there. I’m not precious about geography.”
That earns me a real laugh from Athena, warm and helpless and exactly the sound I wanted.
Ivy nods like I finally got to the point. “Good,” she says. “Then it’s settled.”
Athena rubs a hand over her mouth, still smiling. “You are six.”
“I’m clever,” Ivy replies.
That conversation opens the door to the real one.
Athena comes back the next afternoon with a legal pad, her laptop, and the kind of expression that means she has already made peace with hard work if the outcome is worth it. Ivy sits at the foot of my bed with a packet of crayons and intermittently contributes opinions no one asked for.
We talk through everything.
Housing first.
Athena doesn’t want to stay in the Airbnb forever, which is fair. I tell her my place is too far from where she’ll likely want Ivy’s school and too tied to old routines anyway. That surprises her.
“You’d leave it that easily?” she asks.
I glance at her over the top of the discharge packet Daniel insisted I read. “Athena, I nearly got beaten to death and all I could think when I woke up was your name. My attachment to a zip code is not the headline here.”
She gets teary but doesn’t show it.
School comes next.
The Boston branch of Ivy’s school network is real, and better, there’s room mid-term because one family relocated abruptly two weeks ago.
Athena has already looked into the transfer policies, which does not surprise me at all.
She’s got the intake forms half-filled before I finish reading the first page.
Ivy peers over the bedrail. “Do I have to wear a different uniform?”
Athena glances at the form. “Looks like same colors. Different logo.”
Ivy thinks about that. “Acceptable.”
I have to turn my face slightly so neither of them sees me smiling like an idiot.
Then there’s me.
I still have Hawthorne calling, emailing, circling politely around the question of when I’m coming back. The answer grows clearer each day I lie in that hospital bed watching Athena sort school paperwork and Ivy draw animals that all somehow resemble me.
One evening, after Ivy falls asleep in the recliner with her cheek against Athena’s arm and her shoes still on, Athena looks at me over our daughter’s head and says, “You don’t have to decide everything for us.”
I keep my voice low. “I know.”
“You sound like a man about to do it anyway.”
“That’s since I am.”
Her eyes narrow slightly, though there’s no heat in it. “Nathan.”
I lean forward as much as the bruising allows. “I’ve given enough years to work that would replace me in six weeks and miss me in twelve. I’m not sentimental about that anymore.”
Athena studies my face in that quiet, exacting way she does when she’s deciding whether I’m saying something dramatic or something true. “So what are you sentimental about.”
I look at her. At Ivy. At the paperwork spread across the tray table. At the half-finished drawing with three figures standing in front of a house.
“This,” I say.
She goes still. I don’t dress it up. I don’t give it a speech. I’m too old and too tired for performance.
“I want mornings,” I tell her. “I want school lunches and bus stops and your hand finding me in the kitchen without thinking about it. I want to be where Ivy forgets to ask if I’m coming back since I already did. And I want you in my bed for reasons both noble and absolutely not noble.”
That blushes Athena beautifully.
Ivy lifts her head slightly from where she’s half-asleep and mutters, “Ew.”
Neither of us laugh until she falls fully asleep again. Then we both do, quietly enough not to wake her.
Athena shifts carefully, easing Ivy’s legs farther onto the recliner while our daughter sleeps through all of it with the heavy trust children reserve for people who haven’t failed them recently.
Then she looks back at me, still half smiling from Ivy’s interruption, and the room goes quieter than it already was.
I study her for a second, then glance at Ivy, then back at Athena.
“What?” she asks softly, reading my face too easily.
I don’t answer right away. My hand moves instead, reaching for the plastic drawer built into the side table.
There’s nothing romantic about hospital furniture, and the fact that this is happening beside a blood pressure cuff and a half-empty water pitcher should probably bother me more than it does.
Athena’s brows draw together. “Nathan.”
I pull open the drawer and take out the small velvet box I asked Daniel to pick up two days ago after he insulted me for twenty straight minutes and then, being Daniel, went anyway.
Athena goes perfectly still.
For a second neither of us says anything. Ivy sleeps on, one arm flung over her head, oblivious in the way only children can be when adults are about to alter the architecture of their lives.
“You are not,” Athena whispers.
“I am,” I reply.
Her lips part then close. The color in her face shifts, and her eyes start shining before I’ve even opened the box.
“Nathan,” she says again, quieter this time, like the name itself has become fragile.
I flip the box open.