Page 45 of Roadrunner

“Thank you.”

He cleared his throat. “Alex.”

“Dad.”

He paused, choosing his next words with visible care. “I want to talk about last night.”

“Which part?”

He shifted in his chair. “All of it.”

I leaned back and crossed my arms over my chest. “You drove here from California. You arrived at two in the morning. You walked into my home through an unlocked door without knocking.” I held his gaze, steady. “That’s the part I want to talk about.”

“I knocked,” he said. “No one answered.”

“So you came in anyway.”

“The door was open.”

“That doesn’t mean come in,” I said. “At two in the morning, an open door means the person who lives there forgot to lock it. Nothing more generous than that.”

He touched the bruise on his cheek with two fingers and winced slightly at his own touch. “Your boyfriend is dangerous.”

“My boyfriend was protecting me,” I said, “from an intruder who turned out to be my father. Those two facts are related, not contradictory.”

“He could have killed me, Alex.”

“He could have,” I agreed. “He didn’t. You startled a man who sleeps with a gun for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and he responded the way that kind of man responds. That’s not a mystery. That’s just what happened.”

“He hit me with a gun.”

“He told me he told you not to move, and you did.”

He stared at me for a long moment. I stared back. I didn’t look away first, which felt like its own small victory even though I couldn’t have said over what.

A long moment passed between us. Outside, a car started somewhere down the street. The coffee maker on the counter finished its cycle and went quiet. For a second the whole kitchen seemed to be waiting on one of us to say the next true thing.

“He’s not what I expected,” my father said finally.

“What did you expect?”

He considered the question with more honesty than I’d braced for. “Someone less—” He stopped himself before he finished it.

“Say it.”

He set his cup down carefully, like he needed both hands free for what came next. “He is not the kind of man I envisioned for you.”

There it was. The whole reason for the flight, the two a.m. drive, all of it, finally spoken out loud in a kitchen that smelled like cheap coffee and leftover tamales.

“And what kind of man did you envision for me?” I asked.

“Someone who—”

“Someone with money,” I said, before he could dress it up. “Someone with a title after his name. Someone who looks right at a dinner party and doesn’t carry a gun to bed.”

“Is that so wrong?” he asked, and he seemed to genuinely mean the question.

“For me it is.”