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I mechanically meet the driver at the base of the fucking driveway. “This has to be a fucking mistake.” I forget to chew him out about nearly running over my daughter. My head pounds, and my skin has turned ashen white.
“You’re Ryke Meadows,” he states, not asks, grinding coarsely on a piece of gum. He unclips an envelope, hands it to me. My name scrawled over the front.
Ryke
I can’t place the handwriting with anyone I know.
“I just need you to sign off here, and I’ll unload the Jeep.”
The Jeep.
The forest-green Jeep that I’ve ridden in hundreds of fucking times towards cliffs, quarries, the shittiest climbs and the greatest ones.
I can barely think. I don’t know what else to do. So I sign my name on the line and then watch as he fucking unloads my history.
An arm curves around my waist. My muscles unbind by Daisy’s presence, and I find some words. “I can’t take Sully’s Jeep.” What the fuck am I supposed to do with it? How can I ride in it?
Sulli slips between us. “I have a Jeep?”
It fucking guts me for a second.
I pinch my eyes—I just can’t hold it in anymore. What the fuck am I going to do? Daisy wavers, unsure of what to say since we agreed not to bring up Adam Sully until our daughter was older. She’ll ask what happened to him, and death can be petrifying for five-year-olds.
He died really fucking young.
“Daddy?” The fear in her voice splinters down my spine.
Eyes burning, I drop my hand to her head. She peers up at me, tearful and confused. Daisy whispers in her ear and rubs her arm.
“Hey, Sul,” I say in the softest tone I can muster.
“Hey, Daddy.”
I wipe my eyes, and then I tell her, “You’re named after one of the greatest guys I’ve ever fucking known. He was a rock climber. That’s his Jeep.”
Awe brightens her green eyes.
“Adam Sully,” I tell her his name, and just as the Jeep reaches the pavement, I rip open the envelope. A letter inside.
Ryke,
We’re moving this week. We don’t have space for his Jeep anymore, and we can’t bring ourselves to sell it. He’d want you to have it. Take care.
Barbra Sully
He’d want me to have it.
I turn to Daisy. “I’m keeping the Jeep.”
She smiles. “He always said he had the better car than you.”
I laugh because it never felt fucking true until now. This Jeep has more value than any other material possession I own. And I’ll take care of it. Yeah. I think he would want me to.
* * *
“Quickdraws, honey, bananas, chocolate-covered espresso beans,” Daisy reads a receipt, one of many stuffed in the fucking glove compartment of Sully’s Jeep. I parked in the garage, still behind the wheel while Daisy sits cross-legged in the passenger’s seat.
I sift through his old CDs on the visor: Oasis, No Doubt, Héroes del Silencio, a band he introduced me to when we were eight or nine. We learned Spanish around the same fucking time.
No one cleaned his shit out, so after years’ worth of time, it stands like a relic of my long-lost friend.
“For fuck’s sake, Sully.” I find dried fruit beneath his car mat, moldy like it’d been stuck there a long time while he was still alive.
Daisy passes me a few receipts. We spend the next thirty minutes just fucking remembering him. I break a smile at a few National Park maps, areas off-the-beaten path circled with a dull pen. He wrote my name beside the ones he wanted to bring me to.
When Sully fucking called me to climb, I went. All these places with my name—I’ve been there with him. I catch Daisy’s eyes clouding, and I reach out, my hand on the back of her head. She leans into me, and I hold my wife. I’m not even fucking thinking anymore.
I just exist in this moment, as tranquil as I’d be on a crag. Scaling thousands of fucking feet towards the sky. I look down at Dais, and her eyes flit up to me.
“Every day that I grow older is a fucking blessing,” I say lowly, my voice hushed in this Jeep. Next to the sun of my life. “But every day that I grow older with you is fucking priceless.” I watch her chest rise high. “I’ve been so fucking lucky.”
Lucky to be with Daisy.
Lucky to be alive.
Lucky to hold my daughter.
Lucky that we have two chances to have another baby when we could’ve easily had none.
When we mention surrogacy to one another, we talk about not being able to squander this gift we’ve been given. We talk about how we live our lives taking one fucking risk after the other. This’ll be the same. And I fucking worry about Daisy and Rose—but today, I’ve been reminded of something.
“Whatever happens, Daisy, this—all of this…” Look at my life. Look at how long I’ve lived. Look at the sun right next to me. “It’s fucking priceless.”
She has to sit up, her eyes glassing more. She smiles with a short laugh, but both fade too fast. She rubs the corners of her eyes and tries to give me a smile. It’s weak. I can tell that she wants to share my sentiments, but she struggles to.
In this second at least.
“Hey.” I pull Daisy onto my lap, and she buries her face in the crook of my arm. “I don’t need fucking pompoms and confetti.” I kiss her head. “If you’re sad, you can be fucking sad.”
Daisy rests her chin on my chest, and I toss a strand of hair in her face. The sun has set somewhere between the surrogacy talk with Rose and Connor, our daughter almost getting crushed by a fucking tractor-trailer, and digging through the contents of this Jeep.
I see the I’m sorry on her lips, but she doesn’t utter the words. Instead she says softly, “I’m just as lucky to be growing old with you.” Her smile lasts a fraction longer, and I hang onto every fucking second. When depression leeches onto Dais, she usually tells me, I feel heavy. What I suggest next might not help completely, but it’s enough to shorten the wait.
“Run with me, Calloway?”
She nods, and not a moment later, we’re out of the Jeep—and I throw Daisy across my shoulder. Breath ejects from her lungs, and she swings her head back to me, light bursting in her eyes.
I raise my brows at her.
“This must be that ‘can’t-eat, can’t-sleep, reach-for-the-stars, over-the-fence, World Series kind of stuff.’” She quotes It Takes Two often.
“No,” I deadpan.
“Just no?”
“Fuck no.”
Her lips pull upward. “Then what is this?”
“It’s so much more than that.”
She gasps. “It’s chocolate.”
I drop her down my back and grab her ankle, stopping Dais before her head meets the floor. She’s safe and out of breath.
When I pick her back up, when she’s upright in my arms, I fucking tell her, “It’s us at one-hundred-and-fifty miles per hour without brakes.”
Daisy says as softly but more tearfully, “I really fucking love you.”
“You going to be saying that after I run your fucking ass, Calloway?”
“Oh yeah. I might even add another fuck.”
“You really fucking fucking love me?”
She smiles, the biggest one so far. “Fucking fucking fucking yes.”
[ 31 ]
March 2023
Hale Co. Offices
Philadelphia
ROSE COBALT
I vaguely concentrate on my work.
Do not fuck this up for your littlest sister. She deserves everything. She deserves the entire world.
Every waking minute, I try to annihilate self-doubt that muddles my thoughts in a pool of you will fail, Rose Calloway Cobalt.
You will fail miserably and excruciatingly.
Shut up.
My eyes narrow at the uncomfortable stabbing insecurity. Pressure mounts on my breastbone. I let out a tight breath and stiffly sip my ice water. I have reason to be concerned. I’m waiting for the results—whether or not the fir
st embryo took.
There are only two chances.
I hone in on that word: chance.
I can’t study harder. I can’t prepare. I was told to just hope for the best—that my body would either accept or reject the embryo. And that will be that.
This is just a semblance of what Daisy must’ve experienced when she first tried to conceive. I never felt the painful uncertainty and lack of control, not until I stepped into this position, side-by-side with her.
I might be older, but in this process, she’s my confidant. My coach. My role model. I want to do right by my sister, and all the risk is on me, the outcome is on me—do not fuck this up.
