“You think I came here for leverage,” Vanessa said. “You think I want something.”

“Don’t you?”

“I want him to know who his father was. The real one. Not the statue you built.”

“That statue is what got him through losing a dad at eight years old.”

“And what’s getting him through seventeen?”

I had no answer. I could not find one.

I thought of the garage light glowing until two in the morning.

The motorcycle that still would not start.

The silence at dinner.

The way he had stopped asking me anything. The names he never brought home.

A boy named Jamie I had heard about for the first time that night in the same sentence as a crooked tie.

“Five minutes,” Vanessa said again. “Or I will. Because he asked me to. And because I am tired of being the ghost in your story.”

The screen door groaned open.

Austin came out onto the porch holding a glass of water. He looked across the yard and saw us standing together. He did not seem shocked to find us there.

He was not scared. He was waiting.