Page 6 of My Girl to Take

I keep it in front of me like a hand raised against light, because it’s true and because I need it to be the whole truth. But it isn’t. Ivy took everything in this house that wasn’t nailed down, including him, including me. And her daughter is sitting on the edge of his bed with his hand in hers, and she knew which side to sit on.

I came here with a speech. I’ve had seventeen years to write it. I can recite it in my sleep, and every word of it is worthless in this room.

“You look bad,” I say instead.

I feel her go still. She asked me for one thing at the bottom of the stairs, and I’ve already ignored her words within the first minute.

My father laughs—actually laughs—and it turns into a cough that folds him forward. Kiera has a hand on his back before the second one lands, flat between his shoulder blades. She says something too low for me to catch, and he shakes his head at her, still coughing, still amused.

I stand there with my hands at my sides and let it happen because there is nothing else to do.

“Amyloid,” he says when he can. “Heart. The proteins fold wrong, and they stiffen it up until it can’t fill.” He touches his own chest, almost apologetic. “They’ve had me on everything approved. It stopped doing anything in the spring. There’s a trial back east, but I don’t tick their boxes.”

“How long?”

“They don’t like to say.” He looks at me steadily. “So you can take that as the answer.”

I don’t sit. If I sit, I’ve agreed to something. There’s a chair on the right side of the bed, which is the side nobody is using, and I understand exactly what it is. Instead, I stay on my feet.

“You came,” he says.

“You can thank her for that.” I don’t look at Kiera. “She’s the one who found me.”

My father’s eyes move to Kiera and soften into something I have no defense against because I remember it. It used to be pointed at me.

“Thank you, Kiera,” he says, and his thumb moves once across the back of her hand.

She says nothing. She just nods, and looks down at where they’re joined. I get the strong impression she’s been thanked before and has never once known what to do with it.

“I looked for you.” He’s talking to me again. “After. Almost straight away, Logan—weeks, not years. I want you to know that. But you were gone. Not moved. Gone.”

“I made sure of that.” I keep my voice level. “Changed my name. Closed everything. Went where you weren’t.”

“They told me that’s what you’d done.” His hands are on the blanket, thin enough that I can see every tendon. “Twice. Two different men, fourteen years apart, both of them telling me you’d almost certainly changed it, and there was no way on earth to find out.” He looks at me. “So I’m going to ask, and you can tell me to go to hell.”

I could. I’ve had seventeen years of telling him to go to hell in my head. None of them were ever said out loud.

“Blake,” I say.

The room does something. Kiera doesn’t know why—I can sense her not knowing. Off to my left, she goes very still because my father has.

My father’s face comes apart slowly, in stages.

“Her name,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“You took her name.”

“I didn’t have a lot else of hers.” I don’t say it kindly. “You had the photographs. You had the house. I had a surname I got a court to give me for four hundred dollars. So I took it, and I’ve been using it for seventeen years. Then, I built something with it that you’ll never see.”

He nods, slow, like it lands somewhere old. “I deserved that.” His hands tremble slightly on the blanket. “I failed you. I’ve had a long time to be sure about it, and I’d rather say it now than have you hear it from a lawyer.”

I don’t answer. I can’t. There’s a shape in my throat that has been there since Thursday at ten past six, and I’m not opening my mouth around it.

The cough takes him again, harder this time, and the nurse is already moving.

“He needs to rest,” she says.