Page 23 of My Unfinished Heart

I buy the most expensive bike that makes sense. Then, not far from my parents’ house in Tarrytown, on Mountain View Road, I pull up to the house where Tristan is waiting on the front porch.

It’s a very small house in comparison with the other homes in this upper class neighborhood. I don’t know what it was about my dad that he lived so far beneath his means, but it’s just one more question I’ll never get an answer to. And the house is one more thing I’ll have to deal with before I can be free of this legal bond between us.

Tristan looks good. His hair is pulled back, and he’s wearing a snug fitting white t-shirt and loose cargo pants that hang low on his hips, revealing a strip of his abdomen. He and my brother are a total mismatch. Tristan is taller and covered with a layer of lean muscle. He also looks like he spends more time in the sun than Connor does. Everything about Tristan looks natural while Connor’s hair dye and piercings look almost like a costume. Something he’s hiding behind.

“You look nice,” I say as I walk up the winding path beneath the live oak tree in the front yard. Honestly, I noticed how he looked before I noticed the house.

I was talking about his face, but he looks down at what he’s wearing before giving me half a grin. “Thanks. Tiny house, right?”

“What’s the deal with that?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Your dad was weird.”

I try out the fourth key on the key chain the lawyer gave me. “Like a mad scientist?”

“More like a shut in. Like a hacker,” he says.

I grunt a laugh as the doorknob turns. “I wouldn’t know.”

Tristan shoves his hands in his pockets as he steps up next to me. “Well, in case you think this house will spill all his secrets, don’t get too excited. He bought it about a month before the accident. He was gonna move in at the beginning of June. There won’t be much of him here.”

“That’s fine by me,” I say. “Less to pack.”

I let Tristan go inside first. He enters a tiny foyer that opens to a small den on the right. The refinished red oak hardwoods gleam in the late morning light streaming through the back windows. “Screen porch? Nice,” I say. I cross the floor to the French doors leading outside.

“Connor was really excited about this place,” Tristan says from behind me.

“It’s nothing like the house on Pecos.”

“He loved it.”

I can see why. It’s very small, but it’s been well taken care of. The floor plan is simple, two bedrooms, a study, one bathroom. It’s nothing outstanding, but I get this feeling as I walk through the pristine rooms. Like I’ve been here before. Like I’ve missed it.

I find Tristan in the kitchen, his hands on the edge of the sink, peering out the window facing the street. “Expecting someone?” I ask, and he startles. When he turns to smile at me, something massive unlocks in my chest.

His words from the other day come back to me like a whisper.

I sometimes think we’re not our own best judges of where we belong.

One year isn’t so much when I think about it. People leave their lives for a year all the time to study abroad or work in another country. Baseball players do their time in the Dominican Republic and come back to start their real careers. People leave for college and come back to their hometowns. There’s a weight on my shoulders. Obligation. Guilt. Closest living relative.

I owe Connor.

I can do this. I can stay. I can give him a year. He doesn’t have to like it, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to live with myself if I go back to Seattle and abandon him again. My apathy does have its limits.

Tristan says, “No, I just like it here. Good vibes.”

“Thanks for telling me about it. I own so much property now, it probably would have been a month before I realized this was here.”

“It’d be a good house for Connor, maybe…”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t have to decide now.”

“Okay,” I say.

He blinks rapidly. “Right. I should probably go. I told Connor I’d get him some food.”