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My throat does something. I hold it.

“Is this your dad?” he says. “The arrest. Is that what flipped it? Because Friday you were fine. Sunday your brother’s on my porch. Now there’s bags by the door. So it’s that. A thing happened two hundred miles away to a man you don’t even talk to, and somewhere in your head it became about us.”

“There’s no us for it to be about. That’s what I keep⁠—”

“Did I do something?” It’s quieter than the rest. It costs him to say it; I can hear what it costs. “Just tell me. I can take it. I’d honestly rather it was me. Tell me I did a thing and I’ll⁠—”

“You didn’t do anything.”

And that’s the one that nearly takes me down, because it’s true, because the unbearable center of all of this is that he did everything right, every single day, the shampoo and the heating pad and the hand on the back of my chair, and right is the problem. Right is the whole problem.

“You didn’t do one thing wrong,” I say. “Not one. Whatever you tell yourself after I’m gone, don’t tell yourself it was something you did. It wasn’t you. It was never going to be you.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“I know. You’re not supposed to. You’ve never had to.”

He’s quiet again. And then he finds the thing I didn’t armor for, because he’s the only one who could, because I handed him the key myself.

“You told me about this,” he says. “In Greenwich. You said you’re good at leaving rooms before the floor goes. You said it like it was just a fact about you, like your eye color. And you’re doing it. Right now. In front of me. You’re leaving before I can, and you’ve got it dressed up so nice I almost can’t see it’s the same old thing underneath.”

“Maybe it is.” I don’t flinch. I prepared for this argument. I just never thought I’d be having it with the person it’s about. “Maybe I’m exactly what I warned you I was. That should scare you more, not less. You want to build something with a person who’s already shown you she’ll do this? I’m doing you the one favor I’ve got. I’m doing it early. While it’s still small enough to survive.”

“It doesn’t feel small.”

“It will.”

“Stop telling me how I’m going to feel.” It’s the closest he comes to sharp, and even that he pulls, even that he gentles before it can land on me. He drags a hand down his face. Then he stops arguing the stack. I watch him decide to stop. He goes underneath it instead.

“What did your father do to you?” he asks, voice hoarse.

The question goes in somewhere I didn’t armor.

I prepared the holding cell. I prepared the wreckage and the blood and the door. I did not prepare this, because nobody asks this. People hear alcoholic father and they nod and look at their shoes and let you keep the lid on. That’s the deal. You give them the headline and they leave the box shut.

He’s just standing there holding the box open. Waiting. And his face isn’t horrified, it’s only open, only ready to hold whatever’s in there, and somehow that’s worse than horror.

“You don’t want the answer to that,” I say. Quieter. The volume drops. It always drops when it’s real.

“I do.”

“You really don’t.”

“Sloane.” He doesn’t move. “What did he do?”

So I tell him. Short. Short is the only way it fits through.

“He drank. My whole life. He’s a mean drunk and he was a meaner sober one, because sober he remembered to aim. He hit. Not every day. Enough of them. And he talked.” My voice stays level and that’s the obscene part, how level it stays. “He told me what I was. Over and over, until I had it memorized. Until I could say it before he got to. By the time I was ten I knew the whole script by heart. You asked where I learned to take a thing apart and stay calm doing it. There. I learned it from the man who taught me what I was worth by repetition, in a kitchen, with the door shut.”

Beau has gone very still.

I watch it move through him the way it would move through anyone with two little sisters he’d walk through a wall for. The hands. The set of the jaw. The careful, deliberate way he’s holding himself still, because the only thing on the other side of still right now is something neither of us wants in this room. He isn’t looking at me like I’m broken. That’s the thing I braced for, and it doesn’t come. He’s looking at me like he wants the address.

“Sloane.” A long, slow breath. He sets each word down like it might go off. “Did he ever⁠—”

He can’t finish it. His hands have curled.

“Did he ever touch you,” he says. “Like that. I have to ask you. I’m sorry. I have to ask.”