Page 5 of My Girl to Take

Ivy’s daughter.

Everything in me closes like a door.

“Where is he?” I ask.

She doesn’t miss it. I watch her not miss it, and I watch her decide not to say anything about it. Something in the way she absorbs it—without flinching, without arguing, like she’d budgeted for it and still came up short—snags on me and won’t come loose.

I don’t examine that either.

“Upstairs,” she says. “In his room.”

“Let’s get this over with.”

She doesn’t move.

“Before you go up.” Her hands come together in front of her, and I get the sense it’s a thing she does instead of something else. “He’s changed. Since the spring, mostly. It happened fast.”

“I’ve seen sick people.”

“Not him.” She says it without heat, which is somehow worse. “It’s the weight, mainly. And his color. It’s a lot to take in the first time, and he watches for it.”

“Watches for what?”

“Whatever’s on your face when you walk in.” She holds my eyes for a second longer than she needs to. “He’s been rehearsing this. He’ll be sitting up when you get there. He shouldn’t be.”

I look at her, and there’s a flare of something I don’t like, because I’m being handled. By a twenty-five-year-old in a quiet house who has decided I need preparation before seeing my own father.

Except she isn’t wrong that she’d know and I wouldn’t. And under the irritation, underneath it and moving faster, is the thing I don’t want to look at directly:

She’s delivered this before. Not to me. To someone. Possibly to several someone’s, standing right here at the bottom of these stairs, doing the arithmetic on how much of it a person can take.

Seventeen years, and somebody’s been doing this job.

“Noted,” I say.

***

I know before I’m through the door.

You don’t need a diagnosis. You need eyes. The man in that bed has been eaten from the inside out, and whatever he’s got left is being spent on sitting upright against the pillows because his son is coming.

She was right. It doesn’t help.

He’s my father the way a photograph is a person.

“Logan,” he says, and his voice breaks on the second syllable.

I stop a few feet from the bed.

Kiera doesn’t. She goes past me like the room belongs to her, and it does. She crosses to the left side without thinking about it, sits down on the edge of the mattress, and puts her hand over his where it’s lying on the blanket.

He doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t have to. His fingers turn over under hers and close, and the whole thing takes about a second, and neither of them registers it as anything at all.

The nurse near the window catches Kiera’s eye. Kiera gives her the smallest shake of her head. The nurse stays where she is.

I stand in the middle of the floor in a suit that costs more than the car outside and watch a language spoken that I don’t have a word of.

Ivy’s daughter.