“No. No, it isn’t,” I said, realizing for the first time that it wasn’t. Not anymore.
I’d made a home elsewhere, and everything in me was sick with missing it.
“New York is home,” I added, and then more quietly, as it dawned on me, “Andy is home.”
A silence stretched out as Father sipped his tea. The fire crackled. The snow kept falling outside.
The world kept spinning, presumably, but I felt as though I was frozen in time.
Andy was home, and perhaps I could never go back to him, and I’d never feel like anywhere was home again.
“Kit,” Father said. “I lost my father when I was your age, and it ruined my entire life, quite aside from losing a man I’d always looked up to. I’d just moved into a little flat with your mother and she was pregnant with you, and we were so happy I never stopped smiling. I was building a career in communications, I was even quietly writing a novel. Do you know what happened to it?”
I shook my head, stomach twisting.
“I threw it in the fire, half-finished, five years after I started it. By then, you were in kindergarten. And don’t... don’t for a moment think I regret you,” he added, soft and kind. “You have been the light of my life since the first moment I held you. I’m so grateful for you that if you asked me for the moon I would find a way to pluck it out of the sky and gift-wrap it.”
I pulled the blanket I shouldn’t have been using as a blanket closer around my shoulders. “I love you, too,” I said.
I wasn’t sure my father had actuallysaidthat he loved me, but I’d always known he did. Never doubted it for a minute.
“Do you know what I do regret, though?” he asked.
I shook my head again.
“I regret not sitting down to help you with your homework,” he said.
“Oh.”
“I regret not picking you up from school every day,” Father continued. “I regret the performances and birthday parties and quiet Sunday afternoons I missed with you, and if I could do it all again... if I could do it all again, Kit, I would have disclaimed my father’s title before he was cold and stayed in that little flat in London, and I would’ve dedicated my life to my wife and son instead of to this,” he said, waving theatrically. “Because it doesn’t bloodymeananything. But you do, and she does. I love her too, you know. I can see the pressure I put her under, I can see why she resents me, and if you’ll forgive me for saying, Andy’s a clever boy for not wanting anything to do with it.”
“Andy has always been the brains of the operation,” I murmured, looking down at my knees. “I wish he could see it, he doesn’t think nearly enough of himself.”
“Kit, I want you to answer something honestly for me. If you could have anything in the world, damn the consequences, what would it be? The title? Or the boy?”
“The boy,” I said without hesitation, tears welling up in my eyes all over again. “I’d rather be penniless with Andy in New York than the bloody King of England and have to live without him.”
“I thought you might say that,” Father said, reaching over to the folder. “I don’t think we need to go so far as penniless, but Stanley is waiting in the car for you. I’ll have your things sent as quickly as possible.”
I blinked at him.
He set the folder in my lap, and I instantly knew what the papers were.
“It’s time for you to go home, Kit.”
I opened up the folder as Father handed me a pen, and almost forgot to uncap it before I started signing furiously, one page after another.
“You might have read them,” Father said, taking the whole stack from me once I was done.
“I know what they say,” I told him, looking up as tears welled up in my eyes. “They say I can go to Andy.”
Father smiled a warm, soft smile at me.
“You know, I’ve always been proud of you,” he said. “But never more than I am in this moment.”
I stood, throwing my arms around my father and sobbing into his shoulder, letting him squeeze me tight.
“Will I make it on time?” I asked. “What if he leaves without me?”
