Time was up. Tonight it would go. It had to.
“You can set up over there.” I pointed at the desk at the back of the room.
Elizabeth’s pretty eyes widened. “At your dad’s desk?”
She gulped, almost frozen in place. I took a quick step toward her and lifted her chin, placing a soft kiss on her lips before removing her backpack from her grip. She watched me in complete silence while I undid the zipper and set up her workstation.
“When I started high school, my mom refused to buy me a desk and made me do my homework here.” I turned on her mouse. “I think it was her own version of exposure therapy. It was mostly effective.”
Elizabeth came around the small desk and rested her hand on my forearm. “The job applications aren’t urgent. I’m here if you need help with anything, okay?”
I nodded and swallowed, the hard lump in my throat immovable. I pulled open the drawer and scooped out the stacks of files he’d kept there.
“What did your dad do?” her soft voice asked from behind me.
“He was a construction worker. But he kept far too many notes and made copies of everything.” I flipped through the invoices and bank statements. I took out one of the garbage bags I’d brought along.
These are just papers. They’re not him. Just papers.
I blew out a long breath and started dumping them one by one. A strange pinch started in my chest but worked its way upward and out as I did it, leaving light in its path. With this newfound feeling, I tackled the bookshelf.
My dad had spent many hours in here reading. Some of those hours I had spent with him.
“He was a sci-fi and fantasy reader with political thrillerssprinkled in between,” I said. To my surprise, a smile curled onto my face at the memory. It wasn’t often I could speak about him like this. It hurt my mom. It hurt me.
Elizabeth hopped up and came toward me. Even while my focus was on the books, it was easy to see she hadn’t been working. Instead, she had been studying me from above her laptop screen. “Did he have a favorite book? Author?”
“This one.” I picked up the worn-out copy he and I had both read countless times, written by an author no one else seemed to have heard of. “It’s a satirical fantasy with a corrupt government so it somehow ticked off everything he enjoyed.”
She watched me leaf through the pages. The blue ink in the margins made my chest flutter.
“Was this him?” She dragged her finger across one of the notes. “Looks like your handwriting.”
A laugh escaped me. “It is mine.”
She raised a brow. “I’ve had to study your handwriting to make any sense of the comments you’ve scribbled onto my drawings.”
She said nothing further, allowing me to continue talking about my dad if I wanted to. And I did want to. I leaned down and kissed one of those bloodred cheeks. There was no way she’d ever know how much this moment meant.
“He read it first, loved it, and gave it to me to read. I annotated it and then I gave it back to him and he annotated it, but it was mostly him replying to my notes.”
The book was cracked open on one of the fight scenes near the middle. I’d underlined the sentence that didn’t make sense to me. The logistics of the fight weren’t working out. My dad had left a note to say:Don’t you dare point out errors in this scene, Link. It’s perfect. In all of its chaos and disorder.
My throat tightened, and yet I still laughed, blinking away thetears threatening.
We fell onto the couch and read through all the comments, the conversations recorded in between the stories I’d escaped in.
“I think I’m going to keep this copy.” I turned it around in my hands.
“You absolutely have to,” she said. “You know, if you wanted, you could keep everything. No one would judge you for it.”
“Maybe I should keep this couch. It’s really comfortable,” I replied, curling an arm around her and pulling her as close as possible.
“It is.” She tilted her head up and kissed my cheek.
The act was so soft, so out of the blue that my heart skipped.
Before us, the TV and console lay waiting. With the burst of strength her kiss gave me, I leaned forward and picked up one of the controllers. I turned it around in my hands. The remote for the TV lay beside it, but it didn’t work. I reached around the TV and found the dip of the button. I was surprised that after all these years it turned on.
