Chapter 2
I took the photo album. I took my mother's jewelry box, which had been in my closet since the funeral. I took my laptop and my school things and the sweatshirt she had bought me the Christmas before she died, which I had been wearing so often the cuffs were starting to fray. I left a note for my father that said I loved him and I was safe and I was going to Ryan's and I would call when I was ready. I left in the morning before either of them was awake.
My father called eleven times that day. I let them go to voicemail. The voicemails were the progression of a man moving through disbelief into panic, and I listened to each one and then put the phone face-down on Ryan's pullout couch and lay there looking at the ceiling of a room that smelled like someone else's life and felt, for the first time in eight months, like I could breathe.
Ryan enrolled me in the school three blocks from his apartment. He drove me to my first day and walked me to the office and gave them his number as the emergency contact without making a thing of it. He made dinner on the nights he was home and left money for takeout on the nights he wasn't and never once made me feel like I was a problem being managed. He let me put my mother's photo album on the lowest shelf of his bookcase, where I could reach it without asking.
I did not speak to my father for six weeks. When I finally called him back, he was at turns apologetic and defensive in the specific way of someone who wants forgiveness without having to understand why they need it. He said he had not known about the boarding school. He said Carla had only been exploring options. He said he had talked to her and it was handled. He said he missed me. I told him I needed more time.
Ryan met with a family attorney on a Monday morning in April. He told me about it that evening over dinner, the same way he told me most important things, without drama and without making me feel like it was being done to me rather than for me. The attorney had explained temporary guardianship, the requirements, the process, my rights as a minor, the circumstances under which the arrangement could be challenged. Ryan had decided it was the right step, not to punish my father, but to establish a legal clarity that protected me from being returned to a situation without my consent.
I agreed. We signed the initial paperwork the next morning.
My father arrived that night.
I heard the knock at eleven o'clock. Ryan looked up from his laptop. I went to the door and looked through the peephole before I opened it, because Ryan had taught me that even when you are expecting something, you check. My father was standing in the hallway with rainwater dripping from his hair, the charcoal suit soaked through, his tie hanging loose around his neck, one collar point folded inward. The hallway light above him flickered, pulling his face in and out of the shadow.
May you like
He looked smaller than I remembered. Nothing about him had physically changed. He was still tall and broad-shouldered. But there was something about the way he was standing, slightly forward, shoulders rounded, hands trembling at his sides, that made him seem like less than he had been. Like the certainty that had always filled the space around him had been left somewhere in the rain.
I opened the door.
