Page 70 of Carry on Wayward Son

I was the one who sat on steps and waited. I was the one who held the room steady and kept the forward momentum going, and made sure nobody went through the worst of anything alone. That was the position I’d occupied long enough that I’d stopped noticing I was in it.

Having someone sit next to me and simply be there, without pressing, without requiring anything, without making it a moment that needed to be resolved or explained or turned into something manageable—that landed somewhere unfamiliar.

She was quiet for a moment. The wind moved her hair across her face, and she pushed it back without looking away from the water. “You okay?”

“Getting there.” I meant it. “Keep your enemies closer, and all that. I haven’t entirely cut my parents off because it’s better to have a toe in than not. But that doesn’t mean I find it easy.”

“Is he an enemy?”

I considered it. “I don’t know what he is. That’s the problem. He’s my father, and he’s someone who made choices about my sister that I don’t know how to forgive, and those two things don’t resolve into something clean, no matter how long I sit with them.”

She looked at me with the full weight of her attention and didn’t try to fix it or reframe it or offer anything except the fact of being there and understanding something about carrying things that didn’t resolve cleanly. “No. They don’t.”

We sat with that for a moment. Below us, the Atlantic kept coming in and going out, completely indifferent to the Hollingsworth family and its complications, which was actually somewhat comforting.

“You wanna go to a New Year’s Eve party?” I asked.

“Will your father be there?”

“He will.”

“Will it be complicated?”

“Almost certainly.”

She looked at me, and the corner of her mouth finished what it had started. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

The wind blew in off the water, and she pushed her hair out of her face. I thought about all the things I didn’t know yet and how we were probably running out of time.

And I thought about how glad I was she’d be in that room with me.

Thirty-Six

LAYLA

I’d been putting it off.

Every time I picked up the phone and found his name in my contacts, I put it back down and found something else that needed doing. The records requests needed following up. The files needed organizing. Koa needed a run. The cottage needed cleaning. There was always something, and I was not a woman who hid from hard things, which meant I was aware enough of what I was doing to be annoyed at myself about it, and I kept doing it anyway.

The truth was, I wasn’t afraid of the conversation. I was afraid of disappointing him. Those were different things, and only one of them was worth being afraid of.

He’d been the one who’d shown up when nobody was supposed to show up, the FBI agent who’d taken one look at a sixteen-year-old girl in a hospital bed and decided she was going to be okay because he was going to make sure of it. He’d adopted me legally before I turned seventeen, which nobody had asked him to do and which he’d done anyway, without ceremony, as if it were simply the obvious next thing. He’d built a family around me. Taught me to fight. Drove me to my first college visit and cried at my graduation without apologizing for it.

He was going to be worried. He was going to be so worried, and I hated doing that to him. But I was going to do it anyway because I couldn’t do this without him knowing. He deserved to hear it from me.

I sat on the sofa with my phone in my hand. Koa settled his head in my lap. One hand stroking through his fur, I made myself dial.

It rang twice.

“Hey, baby girl.” The warmth in his voice hit me somewhere in the sternum the way it always did, the warmth of a man who answered his phone for his daughter with his whole heart every single time. “How’s your case going? Ashley said it’s been keeping you busy.”

So Ashley had kept the secret. I made a mental note to do something nice for my sister. “It’s going. I’m close to some breakthroughs. I can feel it.”

“You keeping Koa close? And your knives?”

“Yeah.” I looked down at Koa’s face, eyes half-closed, radiating contentment. “Both. Always.”

“Good.” I could hear him settle into his chair, the familiar creak of the leather one in his home office. “You never know what’ll come out when you start rattling cages. These cold cases, someone went to trouble to keep them cold.”