Chapter 4
"We started the paperwork for temporary guardianship. Until I turn eighteen."
His face went through three things in the space of two seconds, disbelief first, then the specific blankness of a mind refusing to process, then something I had not expected, which was not anger but devastation. The deep and structural kind. The kind that happens when a thing you built reveals that you were not paying enough attention to it while you were building it.
"You did what?" he said.
"I'm staying here."
"Jason, you can't—"
"I can."
"You have a home."
"I have a house," I said, "where my bedroom still exists. That isn't the same thing."
His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Ryan spoke from behind me, and his voice was even and quiet. "He came to me because he didn't feel safe being himself in your house."
"He was never unsafe."
"You were talking about sending him away."
The word away sat in the hallway between us. My father looked at Ryan. Then he looked at me. His hands had stopped trembling, which somehow made him look more broken rather than less, the stillness of a person who has arrived somewhere they cannot move forward from.
"Jason," he said. Just my name. The way people say names when they have run out of everything else.
I looked at my father standing in the rain-soaked suit in the flickering hallway, and I saw all of him at the same time. The man who had carried me on his shoulders at the beach. The man who sat at his law firm desk until ten o'clock for two years after my mother died because sitting at home felt like admitting she was gone. The man who had watched Carla look through me for eight months and chosen, each time, to call it adjustment. The father who had let me leave with a backpack and my mother's photo album and still needed six weeks and a legal filing to understand why.
May you like
I reached up and put my hand briefly on the door frame where his hand had been resting. He looked at it. I pulled it back.
"You were too late," I said.
