Dad looked up as she walked me to the table and opened his mouth like he was about to say something, but the nurse spoke first, her smile practiced and contagious—my own and Dad’s stretching in return.
“Patrick, your daughter’s here. Nicolette,” she said, facing me, “it’s been so nice seeing you again.”
“Nic,” I said to the nurse. My heart squeezed in my chest as I waited, hoping the name caught, contagious as a smile.
“Nic,” Dad repeated. His fingers drummed on the table, slowly, one, two, three, one, two, three—and then something seemed to click. The drumming sped up, onetwothree, onetwothree. “Nic.” He smiled. He was here.
“Hi, Dad.” I sat across from him and reached for his hand. God, it had been a long time. A year since we’d been in the same room. Calls, for a time, when he’d drift in and out of lucidity, until Daniel said they were making him too agitated. And then just letters, my picture enclosed. But here he was now. Like an older version of Daniel but softer, from age and a lifelong appreciation for fast food and liquor.
He closed his hand around mine and squeezed. He was always good at this part. At the physical affection, the outward displays of good-fatherhood. Hugs when he stumbled in late at night, half drunk. Hand squeezes when we needed groceries but he couldn’t pull himself out of bed. Hand squeeze, take my credit card, and that should make up for it.
His eyes drifted to my hand, and he tapped the back of my ring finger. “Where is it?”
Inwardly, I cringed. But I smiled at Dad, glad he’d remembered this detail. It made me happy to know he remembered things I told him in my letters. He wasn’t losing his mind, he was just lost within it. There was a difference. I lived in there. Truth lived in there.
I flipped through my phone for a picture and zoomed in. “I left it at the house. I was cleaning.”
He narrowed his eyes at the screen, at the perfectly cut angles, at the brilliant stone. “Tyler got you that?”
My stomach dropped. “Not Tyler, Dad. Everett.”
He was lost again, but he wasn’t wrong. He was just somewhere else. A decade ago. We were kids. And Tyler wasn’t asking me to marry him, exactly—he was holding it out like a request. Stay, it meant.
And this ring meant . . . I had no idea what this ring meant. Everett was thirty, and I was closing in on thirty, and he’d proposed on his thirtieth birthday, a promise that I wasn’t wasting his time and he wasn’t wasting mine. I’d said yes, but that was two months ago, and we hadn’t discussed a wedding, hadn’t gone over the logistics of moving in together when my lease was up. It was an eventually. A plan.
“Dad, I need to ask you something,” I said.
His eyes drifted to the papers sticking out of my bag, and his fingers curled into fists. “I already told him, I’m not signing any papers. Don’t let your brother sell the house. Your grandparents bought that land. It’s ours.”
I felt like a traitor. That house was going to get sold one way or the other.
“Dad, we have to,” I said softly. You’re out of money. You spent it indiscriminately on God knows what. There was nothing left. Nothing but the money tied up in the concrete slab and four walls and the unkempt yard.
“Nic, really, what would your mother think?”
I was already losing him. He’d soon disappear into another time. It always started like this, with my mother, as if conjuring her into thought would suck him under to a place where she still existed.
“Dad,” I said, trying to hold him here, “that’s not why I came.” I took a slow breath. “Do you remember sending me a letter a few weeks ago?”
He drummed his fingers on the table. “Sure. A letter.” A stall tactic—I could feel him grasping, trying to remember.
I pulled out the paper, unfolded it on the table between us, saw his eyes narrow at the page. “You sent this to me.”
His gaze lingered on the words before he looked up, his blue eyes watery, slippery as his thoughts. That girl. I saw that girl.
I heard my heartbeat in my head, like her name, knocking around. “Who did you mean? Who did you see?”
He looked around the room. Leaned closer. His mouth opening and closing twice before the name slipped through in a whisper. “The Prescott