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“Yeah?”

“I’ll tell you in the car.” He reaches over without looking and takes my hand.

Chapter 9

The Agreement

PRESTON

We’re forty minutes into the drive home, somewhere in the pine barrens with the last of the sunlight fading behind us, when Luke says, “So what did he tell you?”

Ahead, the LIE unspools west toward a city that hasn’t missed us. I’ve been waiting for him to ask since the lawn, and now that he has, I find I’ve been rehearsing it wrong – I’d planned to perform it, do the voices, make it a story. Sitting here in the dark of the car with his profile lit by the dashboard, I don’t want to perform it. I want to hand it over the way it was handed to me.

“He told me he failed,” I say. “His word. Not mine. He sat there with a scotch he never drank and said he failed as a father, and that he let my mother write the script because it was easier than learning the lines himself.” The road hums under us. “My entire life, Luke. I’ve never heard that man use the word failed about anything. He once described a capsized catamaran as ‘an unscheduled swim.’”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. He wasn’t finished. He said being a father isn’t about getting it right. He said you will get it wrong, constantly, in ways you can’t predict and mostly can’t fix. He said the whole job is staying in the room even when you fuck it up.” My father’s voice, doing the thing it never does, which is get quiet. “Don’t leave, Preston. That’s the only rule. Just don’t leave.”

Luke doesn’t say anything. His hands stay at ten and two. A mile marker goes by, then another.

“He left,” Luke says.

He doesn’t mean my father.

I don’t fill the silence. Luke builds his sentences one at a time, and you don’t hand him words while he’s working.

“Your dad stood on that patio and told you the only rule is staying in the room,” he says finally, eyes on the road. “He got years of it wrong with the lights on and the door open, and he stayed for every minute. Mine barely got a single thing wrong, as far as I was concerned. But then he was gone before I had the chance to realize he didn’t have a perfect record.” A mile marker goes by. “The worst father money ever built still beat mine by a mile, Preston. All he had to do was stay.”

I reach over and put my hand on his knee, and I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing I can say.

“Miguel got me too,” Luke says. “In the kitchen.”

“What was the lesson?”

“That your family buys things because they don’t know how to say things.” He changes lanes, checks the mirror, comes back. “That I’ve been examining the objects when I should’ve been translating them. The helicopter. The cellar. The house.” A pause. “You.”

“Me.”

“The espresso machine,” Luke says. “Two years I’ve called it ridiculous. It was the first thing you ever said to me that I didn’t know how to hear.”

I look at him. He keeps his eyes on the road, which is how he says the big things – forward-facing, at speed, where nobody can make it a moment.

And this is where it happens. Not because we planned it here. Just us and the conversation we’ve been delaying.

“Luke,” I say. “Forget the money. Forget my mother’s chequebook and Mama Ortiz’s calendar and Elena’s spreadsheet and everything that’s ever been run at this marriage. If none of them existed and it was just us, in the walk-up. Would you want to have a kid with me?”

“I’m scared of it,” Luke replies, after a moment.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know what you asked.” His jaw works once. “I’m scared I’ll fail them. That’s the whole of it. I watched what leaving does, Preston, and I’ve spent every year since he left making sure I’d never be him – and somewhere in there I realized that staying isn’t the finish line. You can stay and still let everyone down. Leaving isn’t the only way to fail the people you love.”

“No,” I say. “It isn’t. But here’s what I know. You will fail them. So will I. That’s not a risk, that’s an inevitability – my father failed me at seventeen per cent efficiency for my whole childhood, and it was still enough to get me here. You fail, and you stay, and you try again in the morning. That’s the job. There’s no version of this where we’re fully ready. There’s only the version where it’s us, doing what we can and what we do best.”

Luke is quiet for three mile markers. I count them.

“Yes,” he says.