Let’s count the ways one man can fuck up his own life.

One: take on a job you know you have no business taking, because the money’s good enough to pay off your dead wife’s chemo bills and make sure your genius daughter can afford to go to college. Be an arrogant shit. Think you can honestly protect your family from the hell that’s going to come.

Two: blur the lines between professional and personal until a client job somehow turns into a fling, only for your coworkers to find out. It’s just a matter of time before your boss finds out, your career is ruined, and you’re lucky if you only take a pay cut instead of getting thrown out on your ass with a black mark on your resume and no references.

Three: let your daughter get so attached to your client-slash-fling that when you chase said client-slash-fling out of your life for her own safety, your daughter will never forgive you, still will barely speak to you, and will hold a grudge forever.

Bonus points if you also embarrass her in front of her crush and then forbid her from attending his scum-sucking father’s classes ever again, making sure you’ll be paying for this mortification until adulthood. Extra bonus points if your daughter pointedly takes over making breakfast each morning to remind you of who’s missing, and why the house no longer feels like home.

Four: fall for a girl you have no business having feelings for, because she’s too damn sweet and magical and vulnerable – too fucking good for you – and you’re too much of a defensive, snarly asshole to ever fall in love.

It's incredible I'm able to keep the list down to four.

I’m tempted to write them in the back of Liv's journal. She left it at the cabin and never came back for it, and I keep thinking I should call her to tell her I have it.

Of course, she wouldn’t want to hear from me. So it feels like writing those words in her journal would somehow bridge some connection between us, whenever I finally find a way to mail it to her.

Maybe because it’s hers, she’d feel those words as if I’d inked them onto her skin and know that I never meant to hurt her.

It just wasn’t meant to be.

Our fucked up almost-love is too much like her stories. Always meant for tragic endings.

I linger on those words she wrote. This story where somehow I live on the pages, but I’m a better version of myself than I could ever be.

I stare at those last few lines. They’re wrong. All wrong.

And I can’t help but uncap the pen she’s chewed to hell and back, the imprints of her teeth scratching against my hand as I scribble those lines out.

Guess I hope if I ever have the chance to give this back to her, I’ll also have a chance to tell her why.

So she’ll forgive me this one thing, even if I don’t deserve forgiveness for anything else.

I’m sitting in the car, waiting for Em to get out of school, once again paging through Liv’s notebook.

I’ve skipped over parts that aren’t her book – parts that are personal, about her, about me, about us. She writes down everything.

How she damn near lost her mind that first day we brushed real close in the kitchen.

How she thought she'd die during our shootout in Vancouver, how I saved her, how she knew I always would.

How hard she came the first night I had her sweet cunt. How she'd always remember being deliciously sore, eager to repay me a thousand times over with dirty, indecent, dick-killing shit I can't repeat, much less continue to read.

I slam the book shut with a sigh, feeling even more hollowed out.

I can’t bring myself to read more. I've already seen too much.

Hell, just reading her story feels like a violation of privacy, and now having her true, honest feelings about us carved into my soul that way...

Fuck.

I should be in the office, but the tension there has been stifling lately. I can just feel the other shoe waiting to drop. So I left early. Checked out.

Isn't that all I’ve been doing for the past few years?

Checking out, so I won’t have to face the pain of losing someone ever again?

I glance up as the school bell trills, and students come spilling out of the building. Em used to come tumbling out like an overexcited puppy, ready to tell me about her day.

Now she’s one of the last kids out of the building, shuffling slowly...and that Ryan boy is next to her, their pinkies linked while they lean in over a conversation that looks very private and miserable.

My jaw tightens. You did this, you fuck. Wasn't just Liv you crushed that day doing 'the right thing.'

It was your own stupid ass.

While I eyeball that kid hard any time he's up close and personal with my daughter, I’m actually glad she can still see him at school. I'm glad she has a friend.

I just don’t want her anywhere near his old man, Mike, when I clearly can’t trust him with anyone's safety. I wouldn’t even trust him with his own.

At last, she reluctantly peels away from Ryan and straggles over to the Wrangler. Instead of climbing in the front seat, she climbs into the back – just another wall between us, more distance to remind me that I’m not her friend anymore, I’m just her father, and her father is an asshole.

My jaw feels like it might break as I look up, watching her in the rear view mirror as I pull out of the parking lot. We’ve always had moments when I had to be the adult and the disciplinarian instead of her friend and confidant, but it’s never been because she shut me out and shoved me into that role.

I wish being Dad came with an instruction manual.

It’s a tricky line to walk when you have to be the adult, but also try to start off early respecting your daughter’s boundaries and making sure she knows she deserves it.

So I breach the silence with a simple, “How was school today?”

“It’d be a lot better if you weren’t picking me up,” she bites back, glaring out the window with her arms wrapped defensively around herself.

Fucking ouch.

Okay. Whatever.

I probably deserved that. I try again, “Look, Em. I get why you’re mad. But I think you understand why I had to take you out of karate class, too.”

She shoots me a furious look in the mirror. “You think I’m mad about class?”

I blink, splitting my attention between the road ahead of us and her. “You’re not?”

“Ryan still teaches me at school in PE. Big deal. Whatever.”

I shake my head. “Then I'm lost right now.”

“Of course you are.” She rolls her eyes. “You’re such a dad! No wonder Liv left. You were so stupid, and she ran away because you just don’t get it.”

That slams into me so hard, I almost hit the brakes, trying to keep my calm. “Em, love, Liv didn’t leave. I sent her away for her own safety. Had to. Enguard has more resources than I do alone. We couldn’t protect her anymore.”

“That makes it even worse!” Em fires back, her eyes brimming with big, fat droplets of angry tears. “Don't you see?! We were happy with Liv here. You were happy for the first time in years, and I had a friend, a real friend who likes all the same stuff I like, and she’s so cool and I want to be just like her, and you made her go away because you’re too scared of being happy! It’s like you wanted to die with Mom...you’re afraid being happy forces you to remember you’re alive!” She’s glaring at me, her face blotchy and red with fury and hurt, tears streaming down her little cheeks. “Mom’s dead, Dad. We've done nothing but dwell on it. We’re not. I'm so tired. I don’t want to be sad all the time, and I don’t want you to be sad all the time, either.”

I keep driving on pure instinct, focused on the road because I'm fucking gutted.

This is what having kids too smart for their own good means.

They're too smart for your own good, too.

Because while you think they’re off in their budding hormonal clouds stabbing at mundane teenage stuff, they’re seeing all the things you can’t even see yourself. They’re looking into you and understanding you and knowing you because even when they’re rebellious and wild and hateful and angry, they love you and need you to love them. They need to understand you, because you’re all they’ve got.

And my wonderful, amazingly smart, deeply hurting daughter clearly understands me better than I understand myself.

I wish I wasn’t driving so I could hug her, soothe her, tell her it’ll be all right. But I’m in the middle of traffic and can’t pull over, and I don’t know what to say.

I don’t say anything for a while as she sniffles and scrubs at her face and pulls herself back together as the sparks from that explosion start to fade.

But finally, I admit quietly, “You’re right, Em.”

She's too damn brilliant for me to patronize her. What else can I do besides be honest?

“I’ve felt guilty all these years, love. Guilty for surviving when your ma didn’t. Guilty helping you grow up because she didn't get a chance. So, yeah...you got me. If I was happy, if I had anything good, it wasn’t fair. Because I got to live and she didn’t.” I sigh. “But, you know, even thinking that way...I couldn’t help but be happy. I have you, Em, hands down the best thing in my life. Maybe I didn’t show it well enough, but I’ve always been happy to be your old man. And I always will be”

She meets my eyes in the mirror, a bit resentful but softening. “But Dad...I don’t get how feeling guilty is gonna change what happened. You can’t, like...suffer Mom back to life. And making Liv go away isn’t gonna do that, either.”

I smile faintly. There's a hot, red pain digging at my eyes, but fuck if I let it show.

“Got a better question, love. How did you get so smart?”

She offers a smile back, tired but genuine. “Mom lives on. She was a marine biologist, remember? I definitely didn’t get it from you.”

“Okay, that was below the belt.” But we’re both laughing – wearily, sadly, but suddenly we’re both father and daughter and friends again.

More than that, we're human. We're allies. We’re on the same side, locked in whatever this war of life is that we’re struggling to fight our way through.

But we sure as hell could use another friend down here in the trenches with us, and goddamn me if I don’t miss Liv with a physical ache.

I should have tried harder.

I shouldn’t have let my fear get in the way – my fear of losing someone again, my fear of not being enough to keep them here, keep them safe, keep them alive.

No, Liv isn’t Crystal – and I’m not the man I was when I was married to Crystal.

I’m someone new, someone better, someone stronger. And Liv was part of making me a new person as much as raising Em did.

The new man Liv taught me how to be wouldn’t walk away from her the way I did, when I’m not myself if I’m not protecting her.

I’ve got to go get her.

And then I have to do whatever it takes to end this, once and for all.

I catch Em’s eye in the rear view mirror. “Love, I need to fix some things,” I say. “Would you mind staying with your grandparents tonight?”

She worries at her lower lip, then asks softly, “You’re going to see Liv, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.” I smile. “Busted.”

Her little face lights up, the first time I’ve seen her truly smile since that terrible day at the cabin.

“Finally,” she says with exasperated amusement. “Sure. Let me just pack a bag when we get home, okay?”

“You got it.”

The air’s easier between us as I drive us home, and the moment we pull into the driveway she’s upstairs, rocketing away to pack an overnight bag. I settle on the couch with my phone to call her grandparents and make sure it’s all right to drop Em off on such short notice, but before I can pull up their contact, I see over a dozen missed calls and voicemails.

Damn. I’d fully muted my phone at work and forgotten to turn it off. But what starts as confused curiosity turns into hot, rushing alarm as I check the number on the calls.

They’re all either Milah or Landon.

As I wander into my workshop and idly drop Liv’s notebook on the table, I tap the voicemail button and lift my phone to my ear, heart cold and sick.

“Riker?” Milah gasps on the recording. “Riker, where’s Liv? Is she with you? We can’t find her. We can’t find her and –”

I barely hear the rest.

The canned voice recedes down a dark tunnel.

All I catch are words like “missing” and then, as it rolls over to Landon’s first voicemail, “whereabouts unknown” and “right under Sky and Gabe’s noses” and “have to assume the worst.”

The worst.

The worst is that the Pilgrims have Liv.

The worst is that she’s already far out of my reach, and there’ll be no protecting her, no saving her, no getting her back.

The worst is my stupidity sent the woman I love into mortal peril, and there may be nothing I can do.

No, that black and hateful thing inside me whispers, that beast of darkness that lives to hurt, to kill, anything to complete the mission at hand.

Its voice is all-consuming, drowning out the voicemails, rising up to pull me into its blackness and swallow me whole.

This time, I welcome it because its icy determination is the only thing giving me hope. She’s not gone. Not yet. You can find her.

And no matter what you have to do, bring her back.