CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MERRITT
Blythe was waiting on the porch when the taxi from the train station pulled up just after seven in the morning, still in the sweatshirt she must have slept in, coffee already made and waiting on the kitchen table before I'd even gotten my suitcases through the door.
"You look like hell," she said, which from Blythe was the closest thing to tenderness she knew how to offer before eight in the morning.
"I feel like hell."
"Good. That means you're paying attention.
" She pulled me into a hug that smelled like the same shampoo she'd used since high school, and for a moment I let myself simply stand there, in a doorway I'd walked through a thousand times as a kid, and feel the specific relief of being somewhere nobody needed anything strategic from me.
My mother came down twenty minutes later, still in her robe, and she didn't ask me a single question before wrapping her arms around me at the kitchen table. Della had never been a woman who needed the whole story before offering comfort, a trait I'd forgotten I missed until I felt it again.
"You'll stay as long as you need," she said. "Your old room's got a bed frame that squeaks, but it's yours."
"I don't know how long that'll be."
"Doesn't matter. This is still your house too."
My father came down last, moving slower than I remembered, and when he saw me at the table with my suitcases still by the door, his whole face folded into something I recognized immediately as guilt, the specific kind he'd carried for thirty years and never fully set down.
"I saw the news alert last night," Mercer said.
"About the gala. I didn't know you'd left until Blythe called this morning.
" He sat across from me carefully, like the chair itself might object.
"This is my fault. If that photo of my sentencing hadn't gone around, if my whole history hadn't turned into something for reporters to dig up, none of this would have touched you at all. "
"Dad, no."
"Merritt, I know how this works. I've watched it happen before, my past reaching forward and taking something from you and your sister that you didn't earn and shouldn't have to pay for. I ruined your marriage."
"You didn't ruin anything." I reached across the table and took his hand, weathered now in a way it hadn't been when I was young, decades of honest work since the year that photograph was taken.
"Whitaker ruined our marriage. Not you. Whitaker made a decision, over and over again for two months, to let his advisers treat me like a liability instead of standing beside me the way he promised he would the day he married me.
That's on him. Not on you, not on a mistake you made and paid for before I was even old enough to understand what it meant. "
"If I'd made better choices back then..."
"You made a choice thirty-one years ago and you served your sentence for it.
You've spent every year since then making it right, in every way that actually counts.
You drove three hours to see me graduate on a truck that barely ran.
You worked two jobs so Mom didn't have to carry everything alone.
You've been exactly the father I needed for twenty years, and none of that gets erased by one bad decade before I was old enough to remember most of it. "
He was quiet for a long moment. His expression changed slightly, enough to tell me the argument had reached him in a way it hadn't before.
"You sound sure of that," he said.
"I've had a lot of time to think about it lately. More than I wanted."
We sat together at that table for the better part of the morning, my mother moving quietly around the kitchen, Blythe interjecting occasionally with the specific bluntness only a younger sister could get away with, and by the time the sun had fully come up, something loosened in my chest that had been tight for so long the tightness had stopped registering as anything unusual.
My mother made eggs the way she'd always made them, too much pepper and slightly burnt at the edges because she believed a little char built character, and set a plate in front of me without asking if I was hungry, because in this house you ate whether you were hungry or not, and somehow that felt like exactly the right amount of care.
"Your room's still your room," she said, sliding a second plate toward Mercer. "I never did anything with it. Your father wanted to turn it into an office once and I told him absolutely not."
"I use the desk sometimes," Mercer admitted. "For the crossword. That's it."
I carried my suitcases upstairs after breakfast, and my old bedroom looked exactly as I'd left it a decade earlier, the same faded quilt my grandmother had made, the same water stain on the ceiling that twelve-year-old me insisted looked like the state of Florida.
My high school diploma still hung crooked on the wall beside a corkboard covered in photographs, Blythe and me at prom, a church youth group trip to the shore, a version of myself I hadn't thought about in years but recognized instantly, the girl who'd grown up in this exact room dreaming about a life that looked nothing like the one I'd built and then lost in the span of nine years.
I sat on the edge of the bed, the frame squeaking exactly the way my mother had promised, and for a moment I simply let myself be nineteen again, before Whitaker, before any of it, in a room that had never once asked me to be smaller than I was.
Blythe found me there twenty minutes later, flopping onto the bed beside me without asking permission, the way she'd done since we were children sharing this same house.
"Remember when we used to sneak out that window?" she asked, nodding at the one above the desk. "You'd go first because you were the oldest, and then I'd chicken out halfway down the drainpipe and you'd have to catch me."
"You broke Mrs. Halloran's birdbath doing that."
"I broke Mrs. Halloran's birdbath because you told me it was sturdier than it looked. That's on you, technically."
"Everything's on me, apparently."
"Not everything," Blythe said, more gently than her usual register allowed. "Not this. Come on. Let's go for a walk before Mom puts you to work in that garden. You look like you could use ten minutes where nobody's watching your face for what you're going to say next."
We walked the four blocks to the corner store where we'd spent our childhood allowances on candy and slushies, and Blythe bought us both the cherry kind out of habit rather than actual preference, and we sat on the curb outside like we had as kids, ankles bumping, saying nothing important for a while, which turned out to be exactly the medicine I hadn't known I needed.
The town looked the same as it always had, small and a little tired at the edges, nothing like the marble and gala lights I'd spent nine years learning to navigate, and I found myself grateful for every bit of its ordinariness.
"You okay?" Blythe finally asked, watching a kid ride past on a bike two sizes too big for him.
"Getting there. Slower than I want to be."
"That's allowed."
"I know. Doesn't make it easier."
"Nothing worth having is easier," she said, which sounded suspiciously like something our mother would say, and when I pointed that out, she just shrugged and finished her slushie, unbothered, exactly like herself.
My phone had been buzzing since eight that morning.
I let it buzz. Whitaker's name appeared and reappeared on the screen, calls and texts arriving in a rhythm that grew more frantic as the morning went on, and I read the first three messages, please call me, I'm sorry, tell me you're safe, before I turned the phone face-down on the table and left it there.
"You're not going to answer?" Blythe asked, watching me do it.
"Not yet. I need a few days where the only thing I'm thinking about is what I actually want, without his voice in my ear explaining why what he did made sense."
"Fair," Blythe said, and refilled my coffee without another word about it.
I turned the phone off entirely by that afternoon, and no urge to check it followed me for the rest of the day.
I spent the rest of that day helping my mother in the garden, sitting on the same porch steps I'd sat on as a teenager dreaming about a life bigger than Brackenridge, and understood, with a strange and unhurried clarity, that whatever came next for my marriage, I needed to build it from somewhere solid, and Brackenridge, peeling paint and all, had never once stopped being that.