Page 19 of Keep Me

I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window. The trees along the highway were that blinding May green, the kind of color that feels too bright after months of winter gray. The kind of green that belongs to the hummingbirds from my porch.

“It must be nice,” I murmured, watching the white lines on the asphalt blur into a solid stream. “Knowing exactly what is waiting for you when you get back. No surprises.”

Cassidy was quiet for a mile. The humor didn’t leave her face, but it shifted. I had come to learn this duality of Cassidy, though it took me a while. When I first met her, she was always still. She was always calm. She was patient and loving and kind. And, of course, she still is all those things. But Cass is also funny, and vibrant. She is witty and sharp. It felt like she could only be those things when the ground beneath her was solid. Like she could only shine when she knew her friends were okay, too.

It took me longer than it should have to understand that was the way grief moved through her. First, O’s and Gavin’s and Zane’s. Then her own, then mine. When the ghosts were haunting, she shifted. Maybe they didn’t throw her things around while she slept, so the only thing she could do was help pick up everyone else’s stuff off the floor.

“There are always surprises, Seren,” she said softly, her eyes navigating a semi-truck in the right lane. “Even with the people you have known since you were in braces. But… yeah. It is nice. It’s the only place where I don’t have to pretend I know what I’m doing with my life.” She glanced over at me then, just a quick flick of her eyes before looking back at the road. “Your dad’s better than he was. That’s something. You know that, right? Even if he texts like a Victorian ghost who just discovered a Nokia.”

“He’s texting because his lawyer told him he had to,” I said, the defense mechanism clicking into place automatically. “As for the boxes, he doesn’t want them, Cassidy. He just knows he can’t tell me that. He wants the space in his office back. He wants to clear out the reminders, so he doesn’t have to look at them anymore.”

“Maybe,” Cassidy said, not pushing it. She knew where my bruises were. She’d helped me paint over some of them. “But you’re going anyway.”

“Because of the papers,” I insisted.

“Right,” she said, her voice dripping with that gentle irony she used when she knew I was lying to myself. “The urgent, weekend-ruining paperwork.”

She reached over and turned the music back up, an old Fleetwood Mac track filling the small cabin of her sedan. I didn’t protest this time. I just watched the mile markers count down, twenty, nineteen, eighteen, each one dragging me closer to the house with the flickering lights.

When we reached the final mile, the regret of my choice to come started to kick in. Zane was right, my mind returning to his words from this morning. That town was never good to you. And, in a way, he was downplaying the truth. Not only was the town never good to me, but it had tried to kill me. Over, and over again. That is what made my chest start to hurt. It wasn’t just the ghosts that scared me. I associated West Bridge with death. My mom, Henry, Jax. Almost me.

I closed my eyes, but instead of hiding these feelings in the places of my mind I never visit, I breathed through my nose. Three times, slowly. Three times, quickly. I reached my hands to the door beside me, concentrating on the way the warm plastic felt on my fingertips. I silently listed four other things I could feel. The seat on my back, seatbelt on hip, sun on my skin, my phone against my leg. I counted to ten. I counted to ten again. I opened my eyes, my chest did not hurt, and I could breathe again.

Therapy, I thought. It works. Sometimes.

The tires groaned against the gravel as Cassidy pulled into my dad’s driveway. She cut the engine, the sudden absence of the music leaving a ringing silence in my ears. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice dropping all its highway energy. She was looking at me in a way that felt personal.

“Yeah,” I said. The plastic of the armrest was still warm under my fingertips. “I’m good. Go see your mom. Eat some stolen pantry food for me.”

“Eleven out of ten on the recovery,” she smiled, but her eyes stayed soft. “I’ll be back by four. If you need it, text me the code word and I will stage an emergency.”

“Deal.” I committed to her conspiracy, remembering the time we dubbed rubber-duck as the sacred word.

I grabbed my coffee, stepping out into the heavy noon air of West Bridge. The house looked the same, a colonial that had always been too big for three people, sealed two, and was now an ocean for one. When I let myself in through the front door, the first thing I noticed was the quiet. It was not the tense, suffocating quiet from high school; it was something else. Slower. My dad was sitting at the kitchen island, a folder of legal documents open in front of him. He didn’t jump when the wooden door banged shut behind me. He just looked up, his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose, and offered a small, unhurried smile.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said. His voice was lower than I remembered, or maybe just less sharp. The word sweetheart was new, too. It landed strange in my ears, but I left it untouched. It made me wary. “You made good time.”

“Cassidy drives like she’s trying to beat a personal record,” I said, dropping my bag onto the entryway chair and walking into the kitchen.

He didn’t get up right away to grab my bag or make himself busy over the lunch he had promised. Usually, Tom Garcia dealt with discomfort by moving. He would be pacing, adjusting the blinds, opening, and closing the refrigerator just to have something to do with his hands. Trying to fill the awkward silence that was permanent between us. I noted all these things, and I hated that I had to have a pad and paper ready for a simple interaction with my own father.

“Good of her to bring you,” he said, his thumb slowly tracing the edge of a manila folder. “I put some turkey sandwiches in the fridge. Mustard is on the door.”

“Thanks.” I opened the refrigerator, pulling out the plate. When I turned back around, I noticed his coffee mug sitting next to the paperwork. It was half-full, the liquid dark and stagnant, the steam long gone.

I took a seat on the stool across from him, setting the sandwiches down between us. “You’re home on a Friday. Don’t you usually have that weekly acquisition meeting at two?”

“Gave it to Weston,” he said mildly, taking a small bite of his sandwich. He chewed slowly, looking out the kitchen window toward the overgrown hydrangeas in the backyard. “Decided I’m stepping away from the heavy lifting for a while. Let the younger guys chase the deadlines. I’m leaning into the whole work-life balance thing.”

That phrase coming out of my father’s mouth sounded like it had been translated from a foreign language. This was the man who used to answer emails at the dinner table and took conference calls during my middle school graduation. A little too late. I wanted to ask him what life he had now that felt so important.

“Wow,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual, matching his slow, easy rhythm. “Who are you and what have you done with Tom?”

He let out a dry chuckle, the sound brief but genuine. “Just realized the world doesn’t fall apart if I’m not at my desk by seven AM. It’s peaceful.”

He seemed calm. Entirely different in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but it felt like a good kind of different. There were no outbursts, no sighs loaded with historical resentment. His phone sat face-down on the granite counter, completely silent. On a weekday afternoon, that was nothing short of a miracle. I watched him reach for his reading glasses, his movements unhurried as he slid the legal forms across the island toward me.

“Anyway,” he murmured, pointing to the bottom of the first page where a small yellow sticky note flagged the signature line. “Kal needs these signed for the trust accounts before Monday. We can look at boxes after we eat.”