“I’ll be fine, hon.” Dad points his fork at me. “I’ll be better when you come home rich.”
I refuse to allow him to deflect. “And you’ll go to the hospital if anything happens? And you won’t cancel your doctor appointments?”
He laughs. “Which one of us is the parent, again?”
I stamp my foot beneath the table. “Dad, I’m serious! You’re stressing me out.”
His head falls to one shoulder as he regards me. “I’m going to be fine, I promise.”
“You can’t promise that,” I insist, driving a sausage link around the perimeter of my plate using a knife.
“I can promise anything I feel like promising,” he says. “I swear, I will be careful. Plus, Rommel called me this morning.”
Yumi’s dad? Surprised, I ask, “Rommel Panganiban?”
“How many other Rommels do we know?”
I shrug. He makes a good point.
“Seems like Yumi told Rom and Jubylyn about everything.”
“Everything?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t investigate. I didn’t want to…What do the kids say now? ‘Blow up your spot’?”
My face scrunches. “I think you’re about twenty years too late with that.”
“Whatever. I don’t know how much they know. But they did seem to think your relationship was real, and they were taking it surprisingly well.”
“Huh. That’s good, I guess.” I hadn’t bothered asking Yumi what she was going to tell her family. There’s been enough to coordinate and worry over in my life, I don’t have the bandwidth to handle hers, too.
“I thought so.” He exhales through his nose, amused. “Yumi told them about my condition, too. They offered to check on me and take me to the doctor while you’re gone.”
My eyes whip up from Sausage-apolis 500. “They did?”
“Yup. Apparently, Yumi made them a calendar of my appointments.”
I frown. She did? “How did she know when they were?”
My dad pointedly stares over my shoulder, and I follow his gaze to the obnoxiously color-coded whiteboard calendar on our fridge.
“Ah,” I say.
He crosses his arms. “So, don’t worry about me while you’re gone, all right? You’ll have plenty on your mind.”
I’m temporarily buoyed, knowing that Yumi’s protective parents have been sicced upon him. No one on the planet is more trustworthy; if they said they’d make sure Dad was okay, then he will be.
But when Anxiety closes a door, It opens a window. And then It waits until you’re in bed to ask if It actually locked that door earlier. You should probably go look. And while you’re at it, you might as well check that the stove is off.
“Am I making a mistake?” I ask the sausages.
His brows knit together in concern. “What, by eating? Do you feel nauseous?”
“No, no.” My focus drifts to the blue bag on the couch. “Doing this.The Adventureverse. What happens if they find out we’re lying?” More pressingly, how am I going to deal with Yumi actively despising me to my face?
His shoulders lift. “I don’t know, honey. If we could tell something was a mistake before we did it, nobody would ever make a mistake.”
“You’re no help,” I grumble. “Aren’t you supposed to know things?”
