I look at him. His face is bruised from the Lye, a fading yellow-green along his jaw, and his knuckles are still split from fighting his way out to reach me. He drove twelve hours on cracked ribs and no sleep and didn’t complain once.
“What if he’s not okay?”
“Then we deal with it.”
“What if he’s nothere?”
“Then we find him.”
Simple. Like it’s that easy. Like the world isn’t a machine designed to grind people like us into dust.
I take a breath and open the door.
The steps feel longer than they used to. I grip the railing because my legs are unsteady, and Lance is behind me, close enough that I can feel the heat of him without looking. I raise my hand to knock, and then I just stand there, fist hovering, because knocking on your father’s door shouldn’t feel like defusing a bomb, but here we are.
I knock three times.
Nothing.
I knock again, harder, and press my mouth close to the wood. “Papa. It’s me.”
Silence. Then a sound from inside. Shuffling. A chainsliding. A dead bolt turning, then another, then a third one that wasn’t there before.
The door opens four inches, and my father’s face appears in the gap.
He looks like he’s aged ten years. His skin is sallow, the hollows beneath his eyes deep enough to hold shadows. He’s thinner. His hair, always meticulously combed, is longer than I’ve ever seen it, curling behind his ears. He’s wearing a dress shirt, wrinkled and untucked, and his collarbone presses against the fabric in a way that makes my chest seize.
But his eyes. His eyes when they find me are the same. Dark and sharp and full of so much love it could drown me.
“Mon chou.”
The door opens the rest of the way. I don’t feel myself crossing the threshold. I don’t feel my legs moving or my arms reaching. One second I’m standing on the stoop and the next I’m pressed against my father’s chest, my face buried in the collar of his shirt, and he smells like coffee and old books and the faintest trace of the cologne my mother bought him for their anniversary thirty years ago that he’s never stopped wearing.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
I count, the way I always do, committing the embrace to memory. But when I get to seven, I don’t let go.
Neither does he.
“You’re here,” he says into my hair, and his voice breaks on the second word, and that breaks something in me, too, because my father does not falter. My father is a man who argues federal cases without raising his pulse. He negotiates with criminals over dinner and sleeps like a baby. He cooked me coq au vin every time the world got scary and never once let me see him afraid.
He’s afraid now.
I pull back enough to see his face. Tears are running down his cheeks, silent, and he wipes them with the back of his hand like they’re an inconvenience.
“You look thin,” I say, because it’s easier than saying any of the other things.
He chuffs. “You sound like your grandmother.”
“Good. Someone needs to.” I grip his arms. “Papa, what happened to you?”
His gaze lifts over my shoulder, and I watch his expression shift. The lawyer clicks on. The assessment. The calculation.
“Who’s this?”
I turn. Lance is standing just inside the doorway, hands at his sides, shoulders back. He’s reading the room the way he reads every room, cataloguing exits and threats and the distance between bodies.
“This is Lance,” I say. “Lance Calloway.”
