Page 46 of Roadrunner

He leaned forward across the table. “You’ve worked too hard, Alex. You’ve built something real — a degree, a career ahead of you that could take you anywhere. You cannot simply—”

“I can,” I said. “And I am.”

He fell quiet at that, the argument running out from under him.

I softened, slightly, not because he deserved it in that moment but because he was still my father. That fact had never once stopped meaning something to me no matter how many times he’d given me reason to let it.

“Riley is a good man,” I said. “He works with his hands and he’s honest about every part of who he is, and he loves me in a way I genuinely did not know was possible until I experienced it firsthand.” I paused, choosing the next part carefully. “His family has been more of a family to me in four years than—” I stopped myself before I finished that sentence too, because some things, once said out loud to your own father, can’t be unsaid.

He looked down at the table.

“I’m not trying to wound you,” I said. “I’m trying to explain.”

He was quiet for a long moment, turning something over. When he finally looked up, something in his face had genuinely shifted. He looked older than he had the night before, worn down in a way I wasn’t used to seeing on him. “Your mother and I want you to come home.”

“I am home.”

“To California,” he said. “Now that you’ve graduated. We’re done traveling. We’re going to stay.” He held my gaze in a way that felt, for once, serious. “Permanently.”

I studied him for a moment.

Permanently. It was a word my own parents had never once successfully applied to themselves in my entire life.

“For how long?” I asked.

“Permanently means—”

“I know what it means,” I said. “I’m asking how long you’ve actually committed to the idea, as opposed to how long it will feel true this time.”

He straightened in his chair. “We’re serious, Alex.”

I thought about Riley. About Sunday dinners at Della’s table and the desert at dusk and a motorcycle sitting in pieces in a garage and the whole quiet, unglamorous life I had assembled here for myself, piece by piece, out of almost nothing my parents had ever given me.

“A weekend,” I said.

He looked at me, waiting.

“I’ll come for a weekend, in a week or so,” I said. “To see if you actually mean it this time. And then we’ll talk about what comes next.” I pushed back from the table and stood, because I needed to be on my feet for what came next. “But I want to be clear about something first.”

He waited, quiet.

“Riley is not negotiable,” I said. “He is not a phase I’m going through, and he is not something I will eventually outgrow the way you seem to be hoping. Whatever happens between the two of us going forward happens with that understanding fully in place.” I met his eyes and held them. “Are we clear?”

He didn’t answer right away.

“We’re clear,” he said quietly, after a moment that went on too long for my comfort.

I wasn’t sure, even then, that he meant it.

Two weeks later, I packed a bag, nevertheless.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Alex

Now

Three weeks in, the hospital stopped feeling like an emergency and started feeling like a job.