Chapter Twenty-Four—Andrew
I've been watching her sleep for twenty minutes.
Maybe longer. I stopped tracking time when her breathing evened out and her head dropped sideways, settling against the headboard at an angle that's going to hurt her neck in the morning.
I thought about moving the pillow. Decided against it.
If I move, she wakes up. If she wakes up, she remembers to be careful around me.
So I stay.
The design sketches cover almost the entire wall opposite the bed.
I've been looking at them since she fell asleep.
Dozens, different sizes, but the same hand.
Hers. Some have notes in the margins, quick pencil marks I can't read from here.
One has a yellow sticky note attached, a word circled twice. I can't make out what it says.
I want to.
She kept drawing, even after everything. She was studying design when we were together, always pulling the world apart in her sketchbooks, finding the structure underneath. I didn't know she stuck with it.
There were a lot of things I made sure not to see.
That's mine to carry.
The thing I regret most isn't the morning I left.
It's that I never said why.
I got up before sunrise and gathered my things with the efficiency of someone who'd been preparing for it all week—the slow withdrawal that preceded the exit—and walked out and let the door close behind me without a word. Without a note. Without anything.
She would have tried to make sense of it. That's what Riley does—pulls things apart until she finds where they broke. She would have found reasons. Probably the wrong ones. Probably ones that landed on her.
I should have told her. That I was twenty-one and terrified and absolutely certain that everything I touched eventually broke. That leaving wasn't a statement about her—it was a statement about what I was. That the wreckage was mine to own, not hers to explain.
I didn't tell her. I let her carry seven years of not knowing, and that's the part that sits in my chest like something with corners.
I'm telling her now. Everything. That's the deal I'm making in the dark. Every true thing, even the parts that don't reflect well on me. Starting tonight and for however long it takes until she believes me.
The coffee mug on her nightstand has a chipped handle.
I noticed it the first morning she came into the kitchen at the penthouse, the same mug every time, never swapped for any of the matching set in the cabinet.
The chip runs from the base of the handle down about an inch. She keeps using it anyway.
I don't know why that detail stops me.
Maybe because it’s just one example of all that I missed.
We talked for a long time tonight. More than I've said out loud to anyone in years that wasn't about a deal.
She told me things she didn't owe me. I told her things I've never said.
About the group home on Adams Street. About being twenty-one and so sure I was one mistake from being sent back that I got ahead of it. Torched everything first.
She didn't flinch.
She listened. Her face changed while I talked. She stopped being wary of her expression, and for a little while I could see exactly what she was thinking.
Then she said, “I'm having your baby. Maybe,” like she was still working out whether she was allowed to.
I meant what I told her. I'm staying.
The mistake I made at twenty-one was thinking that leaving would protect her. Turns out leaving just steals time.
Time missed not knowing about the coffee mug or seeing the wall of sketches. Not being in this room.
That's what the wreckage looks like. Not the moment you run. The life you lose while you're gone.
I'm not losing more of it.
I don't know how to be a father.
That's the fear I haven't said out loud yet. I will. I'm building up to it. Right now, with her asleep and the city still moving below like it never stops, I sit with the fact that my entire model for fatherhood is the absence of it.
I grew up in a series of houses where adults made decisions about me from behind closed doors.
Some of them were good people. Most of them were trying.
None of them were mine. I learned early that permanence was a story other people told about their lives, and I spent the next two decades turning that lesson into an asset—always ready to move, never over-invested, no roots I couldn't pull without bleeding.
That ends here.
I'm looking at the wall of sketches and trying to picture a version of myself I don't know yet.
The one who stays. Who shows up on a Tuesday for no particular reason except that's where his family is.
Who knows what a bedtime routine looks like because he's done it a hundred times.
Who has a person in the world—small, completely unimpressed by the things I've built—who needs me to be something I have never been.
I want it.
That part still surprises me. Six months ago I would have said fatherhood was a future-tense concept. Something that happened to other people at the right time in the right life. I didn't have a right life. I had a sequence of deals and cities and thoroughly limited investments of myself.
And then somehow here I am.
I want to be the man that kid grows up knowing was there. Not the cautionary tale. Not the ghost. The one whose name they say without complicated feelings attached to it.
I'm staying because I love her—complicated and seven years overdue and completely true.
And I'm staying because of who I want to be.
She shifts in her sleep. I go still. She doesn't wake. Just adjusts, her cheek dropping toward her shoulder, and settles again. The light catches the line of her jaw.
At twenty-one she used to fall asleep exactly like this. On the couch in her apartment, textbook open, and then suddenly not. I'd take the book out of her hands and she'd never stir.
I thought about that a lot in the first years after I left. Not the big things. The specific ones. The way she slept. The cold coffee on her desk. The sound of her pencil when she was working through a problem.
She looks different now. Her face has settled. The kind of beautiful that comes from going through things, not from being untouched by them.
She's still—
I stop.
It doesn't matter what she still is. That's not what tonight is.
Tonight is me staying beside her.
Her shoulders are still slightly tight, even in sleep. Like she's braced for something to go wrong.
She deserves someone who notices that and makes her feel safe instead of bracing for the worst.
I'm not sure when I drift off.
I come back to the sound of movement, quiet and careful. The room is still dark.
Riley has opened her eyes.
Just for a second. Half a second. The moment before she gets her bearings, before she remembers what day it is and what happened and why she has to be cautious.
For that half second, she looks at me the way she did at twenty-one. Open. Like my being here isn't a problem. Like she's glad.
Then she remembers, and it’s gone.
“You should sleep,” she says. Her voice is rough at the edges.
I nod.
I don't move.