Page 68 of Roadrunner

“Yes.”

“How old is he?”

“Ten.”

He nodded.

“Do you want to know about him?” I asked. “Really know, not just the thirty-second version.”

Something shifted behind his eyes, careful and unhurried, a man deciding how much of himself to hand over before he knew what it would cost him. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose so.”

I told him. Small things first, because they were safer. That Arthur read constantly and finished books other kids his age hadn’t heard of. That he had a habit of setting things by the door the night before he needed them, neat and decided, and that I’d never once had to remind him of anything twice in his life. That he asked questions like he was building a case, methodically, one fact laid carefully on top of the last.

Riley listened without interrupting, the quality of listening I remembered from years ago, like the rest of the world had been muted for the duration of my sentence.

“He sounds like he pays attention,” he said finally.

“He notices everything,” I said. “It used to worry me. Now I think it’s just who he is.”

Riley nodded slowly. Something crossed his face that I couldn’t fully name. Not yet grief, not yet hope. Something suspended between the two, a man doing arithmetic he wasn’t ready to say out loud.

He looked up. His eyes were steady. “What do you want, Alex?”

It was the most Riley question he could have asked. No preamble. No anger. No recrimination. Just the question that cut to the center of things.

What do you want.

“I want to find out if there’s anything left,” I said. “Between us. After everything.” I held his gaze. “I want to know if it’s still there.”

He looked at me for a long time.

“It’s still there,” he said.

He said it the way he said most things. Simply. Without decoration.

I let out a breath I’d been holding for approximately eleven years.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Alex

Now

We sat in that back room for three hours.

The coffee went cold. Neither of us moved to refresh it. The two men in the front room filtered out at some point and the building went quiet and neither of us noticed or commented on it.

We talked.

I hadn’t anticipated it. Not the seeing him or the telling him or the way his face had looked when I said I left because I was pregnant. Those things I’d rehearsed in some form or another for years. What I hadn’t rehearsed was this. Just talking. The way we used to. Easy and unhurried with long silences that didn’t require filling.

He asked more about Arthur.

I told him. All of it. The solar system project and the soup and the way he shook hands with strangers at his father’s funeral and the bossy quality he’d developed somewhere around age nine that I suspected was permanent.

Riley listened the way he always listened. Completely. Like what I was saying was the only thing happening.

“He sounds like a good kid,” he said.