Page 44 of Roadrunner

My father’s gaze moved from the gun on the counter to the leather vest hanging over the back of the empty chair. Then to the width of Riley’s forearms where his sleeves were pushed up. I watched him build his case in real time, piece by piece, the way he built every case he’d ever made in a boardroom.

“You could have killed me,” he said again, as though repetition might land differently the second time.

“You’re lucky I didn’t,” Riley said. “You walked into someone’s home at two in the morning without an invitation. What you’re calling almost getting killed? I call it a natural consequence.”

My father’s jaw tightened.

I stared into my coffee and said nothing, because there was nothing I could say that would make either of them back down one inch. And because some part of me, God help me, didn’t want them to, not really.

The apartment was very quiet.

My father touched the bruise blooming along his cheekbone with two fingers and winced.

“You hit me,” he said.

“You moved,” Riley said. “I told you not to.”

My father looked at me for a long moment, his expression saying a great many things he didn’t have the words, or perhaps the courage, to say out loud.

I looked back at him and said nothing at all.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Alex

Then

He was already seated at the kitchen table when I came downstairs the next morning. I regretted leaving the door unlocked the night before.

His tie was gone. His jacket hung over the back of the chair with the neatness of a man who maintained appearances even in the middle of a disaster of his own making. His cheek had swollen further overnight into something dark and unmistakable, the kind of bruise that would require an explanation to anyone who saw it and knew better than to ask. A cut that looked like it needed stitched reminded me of the severity of the situation.

I put coffee on without speaking, because I hadn’t yet decided what I wanted to say and a task gave my hands somewhere useful to be.

He watched me move around the small kitchen. I could feel it on the back of my neck the whole time, the old familiar sensation of being assessed.

Riley was already gone. He’d left before sunrise, quietly, without being asked to and without asking my permission to go. That was simply his way. He understood, better than almost anyone I’d known, the difference between a situation that required him standing in it and one that required me to handle alone, on my own terms, in my own kitchen.

I set a cup in front of my father and sat down across from him.

He looked at the cup for a moment, then at me. “Where is he?”

“Gone,” I said.

He gave a short nod, as though that fact settled something for him.

“Don’t,” I said.

He looked up. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

He wrapped both hands around the cup instead. Outside the window, the morning was already doing what Arizona mornings did best. Arriving bright and immediate, with no gentle easing into the heat of the day.

“You look well,” he said finally. “Healthy.”

“Thank you.”

“The apartment is nice.”