And right away something’s off. Not wrong — different. He doesn’t lead with anything. There’s a silence on the line, my father’s silence, except my father doesn’t do silence, my father fills a phone call the way he fills a bench. The first thing I feel, stupidly, is fear. Something’s happened. Someone’s hurt.
“Stanley was here tonight,” he says.
The floor tips.
What?
“He flew in. Sat on my couch. Told me everything, Aspen.” A pause. “The party. The arrangement. The whole — he told me it wasn’t real. That you two faked it.” Another pause, and then his voice does a thing I have never once heard it do, which is waver. “And then he took the worst of what I had to throw at him for it, and he asked me for my blessing. To go after you. The right way, he said. Out in the open. He had a red-eye to catch. He flew across half of the country and back in a single night to tell me the truth to my face.”
I can’t speak. The information is reordering the entire week as it lands — every piece sliding into a new place. His silence wasn’t him letting go. His silence was a man with a plan, on a plane.
“Dad—”
“Let me get this out, because I’m not good at it.” And he does the thing Stanley did to me once, the let me get all the way through it. I go quiet and let him. “That text I sent to you on Friday. I fired it off between periods. I wasn’t thinking. I’d got a notion in my head about that kid making a mistake, and I made it your job to fix it. And he told me tonight you had nothing to do with his decision. That you didn’t talk him into a thing, that you weren’t the reason, that he chose it himself for his own reasons — smart ones, the kind I respect — and that you didn’t even know until it was done.” A long breath, gone rough. “Which means I put a weight on you that was never yours to carry. I told you to go fix a thing you didn’t break. And I think — Aspen, I think I’ve done that before. More than once. I think I’ve been doing it your whole life.”
And there it is. I thought he had grown blind to his own ways and that I would never have a conversation like this. It’s the thing I waited years to hear from my father and stopped believing would ever come. My chest feels the weight come off, and tears stream down my face without me realizing.
And then — because the sky is already falling, because there’s nothing left to protect, because Stanley flew across a country to tell the truth and the least I can do is tell one of my own — I say the thing I would never say out loud to my father.
“I ended things with him because of your text.”
He’s quiet.
“I thought because you said it, you were right. I didn’t want to be the reason he didn’t take the deal, and even after he told me that I wasn’t the reason, you got into my head. I would never forgive myself if I were somehow the reason. I didn’t stop to check whether you were right. I never check whether you’re right, Dad. I just do what you say, because doing what you say is the only way I’ve ever known how to make you—” My voice breaks straight through the middle. “I’ve spent my whole life being exactly what you want. The major. The job. All of it for you, and I can’t keep doing it. I love you. But I can’t keep doing this to myself. It’s been killing me for years, and I only just noticed.”
I have never spoken to my father like this in my life. I brace for the clipped that’s enough, for the silence that means I’ve gone too far. It doesn’t come.
“I know. I know I did that. I learned it from my own old man, and I swore I’d be different, and I wasn’t. And you turned out so — God, you turned out so capable, Aspen, that I let myself believe you didn’t need the soft stuff from me. That was a lie I told because the soft stuff was always hard for me. You deserved it anyway. You deserve it.” A breath. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
I clutch onto my shark stuffed animal and cry.
And we sit there, the two of us, both of us crying on a Sunday night, and the sky does not fall. It just opens.
We talk for a long time. Longer than we’ve ever talked in my life. It isn’t all fixed, but something has shifted that is never shifting back, and when we finally hang up, I’m sitting in thedark of my house, a different person than the one whose phone rang.
Free. That’s the word, and I turn it over carefully, because I’ve never gotten to hold it before. The anchor-belief is gone — he said it himself, you weren’t the reason, it was his call, his own — Stanley took that wall down from the outside. And the other one, the older one, the living-for-his-approval, I just took down myself, from the inside, out loud, on a phone. Both walls. Down in the same hour.
And in the space where they stood, there’s only the simple thing left.
I want Stanley Ermington.
I’m the one who crashed it. I’m the one who has to reach.
I don’t wait. I put on shoes and don’t care what I look like. I walk out into the cold and walk three doors down.
Hawthorne House is lit up even on a Sunday night, and I stand on the porch I fled from once and make myself knock. It’s Benson who opens the door.
He takes one look at me and something in his face goes soft and knowing.
“He’s not here,” he says, before I can get a word out. “He’s on a red-eye. Won’t land till the middle of the night.” Then, reading whatever’s all over my face, “You should come in.”
They’re all there — Blue, Percy, and Rowan, scattered around the living room — and they all look up at me. Now I’m terrified of what I’m walking into.
And then Blue looks at me and says, “Oh, thank God, finally,” and it turns out they aren’t looking at me like an enemy at all. They’re looking at me like the last piece of a thing that’s been driving all of them up the wall.
“Wait for him,” Benson says.
“You guys don’t mind?” I ask. “It’s getting late.”
