“I was supposed to give you everything, dear,” I finally said. “That was my job.”
“I wanted to surprise you today.”
Ainsley came around the table and knelt in front of my chair, placing both hands over mine.
“You did, Dad. Now let me give something back.”
One of the officers near the doorway made a small sound that I’m going to generously describe as clearing his throat.
I looked at my daughter and saw someone I hadn’t fully seen before: not my kid, but a person who had chosen me right back.
I looked at my daughter and saw someone I hadn’t fully seen before.
“What if I fail?” I asked. “I’m 35, Bubbles. I’ll be in class with kids who were born the year I graduated.”
Ainsley smiled, and it was her best one, the full one, the one that looked like her Saturday morning cartoon self. “Then we’ll figure it out,” she said. “The way you always did.”
She squeezed my hands once, then stood up.
The officers said their goodbyes shortly after, the taller one shaking my hand at the door and saying, “Good luck, sir,” in a tone that meant it.
I watched their cruiser pull away from the curb and stood in the doorway for a minute after the taillights disappeared.
“What if I fail?”
***
Three weeks later, I drove to the university campus for orientation. I was nervous.
I was older than everyone in the parking lot by at least a decade. My boots didn’t belong on a college campus. I stood outside the main entrance with my folder of documents and felt more out of place than I had in a long time.
Ainsley was beside me. She’d taken the morning off her part-time job to drive over with me, which I’d told her was unnecessary and for which I was privately grateful. She was already set to enroll there on a scholarship.
I was nervous.
I glanced at the building. At the students were moving through the doors. I looked at the whole, large, unfamiliar, slightly terrifying thing I was about to walk into.
“I don’t know how to do this, Bubbles.”
Ainsley tucked her hand through my arm.
We walked in together.
My father’s boots clicked heavily against the hardwood floor of the entryway. It was a familiar, rhythmic sound that had always brought a sense of safety to our home. Now, it sounded like the steady, methodical ticking of a time bomb.
My mother lay unconscious at my feet, her pale face illuminated by the harsh, flickering blue light of the television. On the screen, the broadcast had transitioned to a frantic studio discussion, but the microphone on my phone was still live. My sister’s ragged breathing whispered directly into my ear, a lifeline stretching across seven years of lies.
“Listen to me carefully,” her voice hissed, trembling but urgently sharp. “The old fishing cabin. The one near the abandoned mill by the state line. Not the one Dad took you to—the hidden one half a mile further upstream, buried in the brush. I’m hidden in the root cellar beneath the floorboards. You have to get here before he—”
“Where is your mother?”
