Page 108 of Roadrunner

From her.

At a kitchen table in California with a notebook in front of me and everything uncertain.

I picked up my coffee.

“Okay,” I said.

She nodded.

We sat in the quiet kitchen and drank our coffee and waited for the living to catch up to us.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Alex

Now

The results came on a Tuesday.

Not dramatically. Not at a moment designed for revelation. They came the way most important things came. Quietly. In an ordinary moment when I was doing something unremarkable and the world shifted anyway.

I was in the kitchen. Coffee going. Arthur at school. Martina somewhere in the back of the house. The morning was doing what mornings did.

My phone lit up on the counter.

An email. The lab’s name in the sender line.

I looked at it for a moment.

My thumb hovered over the screen. I thought, absurdly, about every version of this exact motion I’d made over the past years without ever once having an actual answer waiting on the other side of it.

Searching Riley’s name in the dark of my bedroom. Checking for rental listings. Refreshing a flight confirmation I’d booked and then stared at for two days before working up the nerve to board the plane.

This was the same motion.

It just had real weight behind it this time.

The kind that would still be there no matter how long I let the phone sit on the counter.

I picked it up anyway. There wasn’t a version of my life left where not knowing was still an option I got to choose.

The language was clinical. Expected. Dense with the vocabulary of science that wraps simple truths in complicated packaging. I read through it. My eyes found the relevant section. The number.

99.9998%.

I sat down at the table with the phone still in my hand. If I had even suspected, I would have left years ago. I didn’t suspect. I built a whole life on not suspecting.

I thought about calling her. I got as far as opening her name.

Then I set the phone face-down on the counter.

Years, I thought. Years of not showing up, not calling, not once making the drive that would have cost me nothing but the courage to make it. I wasn’t going to hand her the single most important sentence of the last years over a phone line. The easy way, the way that let me deliver it and hang up before I had to watch what it did to her face. She deserved better than shallow. She deserved me, in her kitchen, saying it to her directly.

I got in the car.

Della opened the door before I finished knocking, the way she always did, like she’d been standing just on the other side of it.

She took one look at my face.