Page 22 of York

I’d stopped in at a rest stop off the highway for a quick shower, then headed in to town to find some food.

I’d found it. At the many food trucks at the fair.

Then, well, I’d found her.

Standing at a shooting game, boasting to the carnie that she was going to win that capybara stuffed animal if it cost her all the change in her pocket.

Despite having decent form that suggested she had shot a gun or two in her life, as I watched it became clear that the stuffed animal would cost her all her money.

Those games might have been set up for people to fail, but I was a good shot. And I wanted to impress the gorgeous woman in her national park shirt with her husky voice.

So that was what I did.

She’d been impressed enough to bring me back to her hotel room. A night to remember took place. But then a call came in. And it was time to get moving again.

I should have left my damn number.

But it wasn’t exactly the first one-night stand of my life. We were adults. We knew what we were doing. We trusted the condom’s effectiveness.

It was clear she struggled, but equally apparent that Runa had done everything in her power to be a good mother. Which must have come with a lot of sacrifice, because from what little conversation she and I shared before we fell into bed, I knew she was a bit of a nomad, a wanderer, full of wanderlust and a love of the outdoors. And while I was sure there were some parents out there who still did the whole camping and hiking lifestyle with a kid, Runa had chosen to give up that part of herself to raise her daughter in a more traditional way.

I couldn’t help but wonder if all the moving around they did was simply a manifestation of Runa’s innate restlessness, or if it was something darker than that.

“Oh, hey,” I said as Huck’s wife, Harmon, came in the back door. Her blue hair was in a messy top-knot and she had an empty mug in her hand.

“Hey! Our coffee maker broke and I need to go to a child’s birthday party in forty minutes,” she explained. “Congratulations, by the way.”

“Thanks. Actually, while you’re here. What’s the best way to store a stuffed animal collection? They have these net things…”

“No. You don’t want the nets. The nets just make more work for you because they’re going to call every two minutes to get them something down because they can’t reach them. You know those things they have at stores where they keep the bouncy balls? They make those sort of things for home use now. Get one of those instead. They can pull all the stuffies out from between the elastic bands that run vertically. And cleaning up can be a bit of a game to see if they can get the toys in through the open top.”

“Like this?” I asked, turning it to face her.

“Yep. Those are the ones. You won’t regret that. And it has a matching system with bins—which is great if your little girl collects those little animal figurines.”

My little girl.

I added the bin system to my cart as well.

Harmon squeezed next to me as she sipped her coffee, helping me pick out more room decor as well as some age-appropriate craft kits, books she’d liked for her kids, and a little astronaut that projects lights on the ceiling and walls that looked like the Aurora Borealis.

I had a cart with a list of items as long as my arm that would come next-day shipping.

With that, I grabbed my phone with my screenshots of the apartments I wanted to look at, and a tape measurer, then I headed out to go find a nice apartment for my girl to live in with the mom who had been doing the heavy lifting for all these years.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Runa

There was something a little nostalgic about the game center. Flashing lights, the music, the sounds from the machines, the smell of pizza and cotton candy, the cheers as people won.

It reminded me in a small way of the night I’d met York.

Instead of playing to try to win a silly capybara plush, though, I was standing back holding three of Denny’s stuffed animals as she and York went from machine to machine. Until they got to Skee-Ball machine. Denny was in love with it.

And watching York show her how to throw the ball so it didn’t bounce or jump made my heart do all the bouncing and jumping instead.

I hadn’t anticipated how much it would impact me to see Runa with her father. I’d given them meeting some thought over the years, of course. But I think when I imagined it in my mind, I worried more about the ways it could go wrong—him not wanting her, being mean to her, making promises he didn’t keep. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about how it might go right. Or how good that would feel.