father would have lied to me, not about something that important. “But Carla told me the truth—that you weren’t working late. You’d left hours ago. So you could have dinner with Joy.” I was speaking faster now, my voice rising. “And that’s how I found out that you lied to me, and that you cancelled my birthday dinner—” My voice broke and I stopped and took a deep breath, trying to get myself together.
My dad shook his head. “Stevie, wait a second. I know you’re upset,” he said, jumping in when I started to say something. “But listen to me. Around seven tonight, after I spoke to you, we received orders from the judge to remand all the files. There had been an issue with the chain of evidence. So I had been working late—until I was legally compelled to stop.”
“You—were?”
“And since I assumed you would be coming in with your mother, I didn’t think it would be a good idea—or fair to her—to tell you that since I was now free, we would go to dinner instead. So Joy and I went out to eat, because I didn’t think that I could have dinner with you any longer.”
“Oh.”
“I wouldn’t have lied to you,” my dad said, a half laugh in his voice somewhere, and I could tell how much he wanted to get this conversation back on ground we were both more comfortable with. “But I can understand why you would have been upset by that, honey. Of course I do.” He smiled at me, and it was like I could see the door that I was supposed to walk through. The one that let this go, that let us go back to who we’d always been to each other.
But I couldn’t do it. I’d come too far tonight to back down now.
“But I believed it,” I said, my voice shaky. I looked up at him and saw my dad frown. “When Carla told me. I was upset because I believed it. Because I believed that was something you would do. What does that say?” I could feel hot tears building up, but I just had to keep going—I knew that much. “I just feel,” I began, then had to stop and take a breath as the first tears started to hit my cheeks. “That I’m not—that important to you.” My dad was shaking his head, about to jump in, but I held my hand up, just like he’d done. “I never see you anymore, but you see Matty and Margaux all the time, and you never come to see me and I tell you it’s fine but it’s not fine. And you didn’t come to see me in my last—last play. And I miss you.” Tears were pouring out over my cheeks, and I wiped them away and made myself keep going. “And I’m going to go to college next year and I don’t know how often we’ll get to see each other and I…” It was getting hard to speak, but I took a ragged breath and made myself finish this out. “I just feel like I’m always the last thing on your list. And I hate it.”
I swallowed hard and looked up and saw that my dad’s eyes were red, that he was looking away and clenching his fist tight as a muscle pulsed in his jaw. “Stevie,” he said, his voice crackly. He walked over to me and hugged me tight. I hugged him back, and there was something about this—about being hugged by my dad, which had always meant that things would be okay, somehow—that made me cry even harder, right onto his cashmere sweater, which couldn’t have been very good for it.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” my dad said, his voice trembling as he ran his hand over my hair. “That I made you feel that way—I’m so, so sorry. I’m going to do better, okay? I promise.”
I nodded, and the tears were just falling now; I couldn’t stop them if I wanted to. I knew that somewhere, Joy was in the kitchen pretending to make tea, and that we had lots more stuff to figure out. But it felt like—in that moment—we had taken our very first steps toward doing just that.
CHAPTER 24
Kat
I stared out the window as the cab came to a stop. “Are we here?”
“Yep,” the cabdriver said, “18 Ninth Avenue. Gansevoort Hotel.” I stared at it, at this huge building, its purple neon columns bright against the night, wondering if