Page 185 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Like father.

My father, who I barely remember past a truck door slamming and a taillight shrinking down our road. My father, who my mother never once badmouthed, not in thirty years, not even when the mortgage was late, and the winters were long.

Did he do this? Did he do exactly this?

I've built my whole life around never asking that question.

My father is a taillight and a slammed door and a chair at this table nobody ever filled again.

I turned him into a cautionary tale, a thing that happenedtous, and it never once crossed my mind that I might be repeating him word for word — the late nights, the reasons that all sound so reasonable out loud, the woman standing at a sink pretending it's only water in her eyes.

My mother has spent twenty-five years refusing to say his name in anger. She just said four words in its place, and they land harder than his name ever could.

"We need eggs." My mother's voice snaps back into place, brisk, brittle, a lid pressed down hard over a pot about to boil. She unties her apron and loops it over the chair. "For the pancakes. We're short. I'll run out to the coop."

"Mom—" I start.

"It's fine, honey. I just need the eggs."

Neither of us fights her on it.

What is there to say?

She's out the back door before I can find a single word, the screen clapping shut behind her, and through the window I watch her walk down the yard toward the chicken coop with her arms wrapped around herself in the warm morning air like she's cold.

Theo curses under his breath.

When he turns back to me, his eyes are hard again.

"You fucked up," he says.

"I didn't mean to upset her." It comes out small. "I swear I didn't. I don't even know what I?—"

"She's not upset about the past, you idiot." He shakes his head slowly, and there's something almost sad in it now, sadder than anger. "You think she's back there crying over a man who left twenty-five years ago? She made her peace with him a long time ago. She's ashamed because she just watched you do thesame damn thing he did, and you're standing here so sure you're the hero of it that you can't even see the wreck you're making of your own future."

I have nothing.

For the first time all morning, I have absolutely nothing.

Theo pushes off the counter and heads for the back door after her. At the threshold, he stops. He doesn't turn all the way around — just enough that I catch his profile, the set of his jaw, the morning light catching the side of his face.

"You let fear run your whole life," he says, quiet. "And one day soon you're going to wake up and realize it cost you everything you actually wanted. I'm not built like that. I'd rather fight for the future I want than cower to a bunch of people who'd be thrilled to see me end up miserable and alone."

Then he's gone too, the screen door clapping a second time, and it's just me.

Me, a cold griddle, and the smell of pancakes I'm not going to get to eat, in a kitchen that suddenly feels three sizes too big.

I look down at my own forearm, at the ink I got at nineteen because it sounded like a promise back then. Three words, faded blue-black, curved along the muscle where I see them every single day and mostly don't.

Run toward home.

I've spent five years running.

I just never once checked which direction.

Out the window, my mother is a small figure at the coop, gathering eggs into the hammock of her shirt, taking her time so the red will be gone from her eyes before she comes back in.

Theo's already down the yard to her, shortening his long stride to match her slow one. The two of them fit out there. They fit at that table.