When I pull into the driveway of the house that I’ve spent the past year unsure of whether to call mine, hers, or ours, I’m surprised to see my dad’s Tahoe parked out front, illuminated by the coach lights on the garage. Considering the day’s events, he’s the last person I expected to be visiting.

I kill the engine, and the disappearing headlights leave the pavement in the dark. Maybe he and Paige have already had a discussion about what we did to her? He could be helping me out right now. In his thirty years with the SDPD, he was often the guy they relied on to defuse a situation. He has a calm, level-headed, and persuasive way about him that people tend to respond to.

Which is why the idea that he might’ve hit my mom still makes so little sense to me.

Since it’s past the kids’ bedtime, I use the knocker instead of the doorbell. I do have a key and could use it—there was no way I was giving up the keys to the house that I’m still paying the mortgage on—but antagonizing her by barging in seems self-defeating at this point.

She knows I’m coming, though, because I texted her this afternoon and told her I would. This was after I decided not to go back to work, instead heading back to my condo and hitting the gym to try to work out some of my agitation and despair. I never got a reply from her, but I’m sure she saw it.

Twelve hours was as long as I was willing to heed Sharon’s warning to give Paige space. At some point, letting her sit and stew in her fury has to be doing more harm than good.

A shadow approaches behind the stained-glass windows of the double doors, and the deadbolt clicks, the door opens, and there stands…my dad, his dog padding up behind him.

“Where’s Paige?” I ask, frowning.

Pop shakes his head. “No idea.”

“What?” When he steps back to let me in, I enter the foyer, and he shuts the door behind me, flicking the lock back into place. “What do you mean?”

Shrugging, my dad shoves his hands into his shorts pockets. “She called me this afternoon and asked me to pick up the kids and stay the night. That’s all I know.”

“What the hell?” I blurt out. Where is she? What is she doing? As I pull my phone out of my pocket and start typing out those questions in a message to her, I’m vaguely aware of my dad walking off, his flip-flops and Baldwin’s claws tapping toward the kitchen.

I remain where I am, frozen to the spot while I wait for her to respond.

Seconds tick by. Then minutes. And still nothing from her.

God dammit. Furiously, I write another message: You need to reply so I know you’re alive and okay, or I’ll have to try to find you.

As I stare at the phone, willing her to answer, I’m trying to figure out how I might accomplish that. The advantage to us not having separated our finances is that I still have access to the bank and credit card accounts. First thing I’ll do is log on and check for recent charges. Wherever she is, she’ll have to be spending money on something, even if it’s just food.

A message slides onto the screen. I’m fine, it says. Chillax.

Chillax?

Is she drunk?

Jesus. She’s behaving like a little kid, ignoring me until I’m forced to pull out the threats.

I’m going to check those accounts, anyway. This is so far from normal behavior from my steady and dependable wife that it’s burning me to not know what she’s up to. Moving over to the staircase and plopping myself down on the second step, I navigate my phone until I find the bank app.

I tap the icon.

I log in.

The home screen pops up, and my thumb hovers over the link to view account details.

Then I hesitate.

What the hell am I doing?

I’m sorry for having you followed, baby, I imagine telling her. It’s the biggest regret of my life. But I’ve learned. I’m not that person anymore. Oh, by the way, I was checking up on you by monitoring the credit card online. So that I could find out where you were and what you were doing.

Yeah. That’ll convince her.

With a grunt of self-disgust, I close the app and get to my feet. Guess I’ll have to be satisfied for now just knowing she’s safe. Ambling into the kitchen, which sits in semidarkness, I see the porch light is on out back, and so I open the French doors and go outside.

Near the light, where moths and other flying bugs are fluttering around, my dad sits in the cushioned wicker patio recliner with a can of ginger ale in his hand. On the small glass-top table, the wireless baby monitor connected to Elliott’s room buzzes with static. On the wooden deck next to Pop’s chair, Baldwin’s head bobs up as I approach, his eyes following me.

“Well, she’s alive,” I announce as I take a seat in the chair next to his. “How did she sound when you talked to her?”

“Pissed off,” he says without looking at me. “Heartbroken.”

Yeah. That sounds about right. Leaning back into the cushion, I rub my neck. “I’m sorry you’re being dragged into all of this.”

My dad takes a swig of his can. “Pretty sure I deserve it. Maybe next time I’ll say no to you.”

“There won’t be a next time,” I say, vowing to myself that I’m telling the truth. “I’m sorry about asking you to find Mom, too. I know I shouldn’t have. But I appreciate that you did it.”

“Well,” he starts, staring down at the can in his hand, squinting as if reading the label but probably not seeing it at all. “Funny thing is, all these years, I didn’t think knowing what had happened to her would make a difference to me. But this past week…” He looks back up, rubs a fist across his mouth. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t say I’m relieved exactly. Maybe ‘unburdened’ is a better word. Like the uncertainty actually has been a much bigger load than I wanted to admit.”

“Doesn’t make me any less selfish for asking you to do it,” I point out, even though his words do give me some small measure of comfort.

“I guess,” he says dismissively, glancing at me. “I’m fine, though. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Yeah.” Do I ask him now? It’s a good time for it. Neither of us are going anywhere, because I’m not leaving this house until my wife returns. And our moods are already in the shitter.

So I might as well try to find out if the man I respect and love above all others is actually worthy of neither.

“So here’s the thing,” I start cautiously, clearing my throat. “After you called and told me on Sunday, something happened. I think it was a suppressed memory that suddenly came back to me.”

His brows knit, my dad peers sideways at me. “Of what?”

My whole body is tense, strung taut like piano wire. I feel like I’m about to ask a question I don’t actually want the answer to. “I think I remembered seeing you hit Mom,” I say quietly, forging ahead. “While you were arguing.”

Across from me, Pop goes utterly still, his dead stare betraying no emotion. I hold my breath as I await his reaction, expecting…what? Outrage, like when I learned Paige’s family thought I’d been abusing her? That’s what I’m hoping for, isn’t it? I want him to blow up at me, to cuss me out, ask me how I could even think for a second that he’d do something like that.

He doesn’t do any of those things, though. Instead he sighs, closes his eyes, and turns away. “You saw it…” he mutters, hanging his head and shaking it.

It’s like a sinkhole opens beneath me. No denial. No anger. Just…that response. Whatever that was.

Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.

“So that actually happened?” I hear myself asking as if I’m far away, disconnected from myself.

Setting his bottle down, my dad sits up and leans forward, putting his feet on the ground and his elbows on his knees. Then he folds his hands and rests his forehead against them. Letting his breath out along with a pained groan, he grits out, “Yeah. Yeah, it did.”

I swallow hard. “Did it happen a lot?”

“Once,” he says, brushing his hand down his face. “Just the one time. The night she left.” He straightens his spine and looks up to meet my eyes. His look glossy, shiny—with tears? I’ve never seen my dad cry. It’s a jarring, gut-wrenching sight.

“You never mentioned that part before,” I observe tightly.

“Well, yeah.” He snorts, and it sounds moist. “For the same reason you were never going to tell Paige about what you did. Some things are just too shameful, and you don’t want the people you love to know about them. Because you’re scared.”

Right. Scared to see the judgment in their eyes, the disappointment. Scared they’ll despise you and you’ll lose them.

Heavily, I ask, “What happened?”

The sigh that whistles out through his teeth is one of resignation. Settling back in his chair again, he picks up the soda can and rests it against his chest as he starts talking. “I’d stayed out drinking with the guys after work, like I did…way too much. Trying to play politics, to be one of them, everyone’s buddy. Because it was good for my career. So I took a cab home, and it was late, and I’d had a beer or two too many.”

While I sit there silently listening, he pinches the bridge of his nose, rubbing and grimacing. “Your mom, she wasn’t shy about sharing her opinions. She came at me almost before I even got inside the house. Going off about all of my faults, like coming home drunk too often and how I worked too much and had almost nothing to show for it, because I still wasn’t making enough money for there to be anything left over. She wanted a better life. A bigger, more decked-out house and nicer things for herself and expensive vacations. And when I suggested we could probably afford all those things if she’d go out and get a job, she completely lost her shit, because that was never something she was willing to consider.”

A noise grinds from my throat. He’s mentioned her discontent before but never in such harsh terms.

“So it was already a nasty fight,” he goes on. “And she kept saying, ‘This is why. This is why,’ after every point she made, which made no fucking sense to me, so I finally asked what she meant.” A muscle in his jaw jumps, flexes. “That’s when she told me she’d been having an affair. With a guy who actually appreciated her, she said. Then she said she was leaving me. And taking you with her. Said her new guy had enough money to hire a really good lawyer, to make sure she’d get full custody, and I’d never see you again.”

He twists to face me, looking me directly in the eye as he states, “That’s when I lost it. I don’t even remember doing it, hitting her. Just, one moment she was standing there spewing her hateful shit at me, and the next she was on the floor.”

I release my pent-up breath. He may not, but I remember it. I remember the sound of his fist connecting with her face—a dull, fleshy thump—and I recall what she looked like as she fell, collapsing like some hollow creature with no bones or muscles to hold her up. He didn’t knock her out. I can still see her, lying there on the floor, clutching her face, eyes wide and full of fear.

“I do remember telling her to get out of the house right then, and if she ever came back…I’d kill her.” My dad’s lips tighten, trembling. “Guess she believed me.”

Holy shit. It’s like, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been told the sky is blue, and now it turns out it’s actually composed of thousands, even millions, of different colors. What went down between my parents was a hell of a lot more convoluted than I’d ever imagined.

“She was gonna take me with her?” I ask as I replay his words in my head. Which is only one surprising new piece of information, but it’s definitely one of the most staggering ones.

“Yeah. And I couldn’t let her do that.” Nodding, he adds with a sad smile, “You’ve always been my Achilles’ heel, Logan.”

“God.” I press the balls of my hands against my eyes. She was gonna take me with her. Take me away from my dad.

“I fucking worshipped that woman,” Pop goes on, sounding like he’s on a roll now and finding it hard to stop pouring his heart out, “but we were like poison to each other. I had no idea, though, that I had it in me to lose control like that. It was fucking terrifying, the whole thing.”

My hands clasped in front of my mouth, I eye him blearily, this man who raised me and who I apparently don’t know as well as I thought—and I can’t help the resentment that creeps in. He should’ve told me. So many of the things he just revealed, I might’ve benefitted from knowing sooner.

“So I got to keep you,” he says, his shoulders sagging. “But that’s why I haven’t even so much as looked at a woman ever since. No way was I going down that road again.”

“Maybe you’ve served your time by now, though?”

“No,” he says. “It’s a life sentence. I just wish I could go back in time and beat the shit out of myself.”

I let out a humorless chuckle. That pretty much sums up how I feel about my past self, too.

“So yeah,” he continues, “I guess you could say she and I share equal blame for our marriage failing. But it’s my fault you lost your mom. My fault she never came back. I’m so sorry.”

And he’s been carrying that guilt—along with a great many others, probably—for a long damn time.

It doesn’t totally add up, though. My mom was clearly pretty smart, obviously resourceful, and definitely not a wilting flower. If she wanted to take me with her, why not get a restraining order against my dad and just come back and get me? Yeah, my dad was a cop, and I’m sure she was intimidated by that.

But if she truly cared, she wouldn’t have disappeared like that.

I attempt to revise history in my mind, trying it on like clothes in a store fitting room. What if she had taken me with her? I’d’ve grown up with her, a stepdad, and a half sister. My mom, who left my dad because she wanted much more from him than he was able to give, most of it of a material nature. Somehow I doubt a person like her could be happy, regardless of the comfort her husband could afford to keep her in.

“I don’t think it was much of a loss, Pop,” I say then, because I know in my gut that it’s the damned truth. I’m so fucking grateful he kept me, and I’m even relieved he scared her away for good, because if she’d had any part of our lives, there would’ve been nothing but drama and misery.

I still wish he’d told me the truth sooner.

Suddenly, Baldwin pushes up to his feet and comes strolling over to me, where he sits down, resting his head on my leg. His big brown eyes stare up at me, and with a small, involuntary smile, I pat him on the head and scratch behind his ear.

“You know, it’s been hell for me, watching you make a lot of the same mistakes I did,” my dad says. “And knowing a lot of your problems with Paige can be traced back to me.”

I shake my head. Because, no. He’s not to blame for that, at least. My marriage falling apart was all me. I’ve owned that shit for a while now.

“I don’t know what to do,” I confess miserably. “I think it’s too late. She’s gone.”

Mouth twisting, my dad says nothing, only watches me with pity, and I know that he’d give anything to be able to fix it for me. He’s shown time and again that it’s his mission in life to fix things for me. This time he’s clearly at a loss, though.

“What would you do?” I ask him, because why not?

Pop releases a bark of laughter, a bitter and incredulous sound. “You’re asking me for relationship advice, after all the shit I just told you?”

I heave my shoulders in a shrug. “Twenty-twenty hindsight?”

He scoffs, a derisive humph. Then he schools his expression, clearly pondering.

“I think…” His cheeks puff, and then, with the air coming out like a gust of wind, he pins me with a somber stare. “Whatever you do, it has to hurt. You’ve gotta show what she’s worth to you. Show her you’re willing to bleed for her.”

While I stare at him, nonplussed, he pushes out of his chair, and immediately Baldwin stands up, too. On the way past me, he squeezes my shoulder, and I put my hand on his, patting. Which I guess is our way of saying we’re good. He’s fucked up in the past. So have I.

As he disappears inside the house with the dog at his heels, though, his words stay with me.

Show her I’m willing to bleed for her? What the hell does that mean?

Sitting there to the sound of the cicadas in the bushes and feeling the air slowly chilling, I’m wondering if that’s the wisest or the dumbest thing he’s ever said to me.