The phone calls from my dad are bad, but they’re not the worst calls I get. No, the worst are the ones from my mom, telling me my father never came home from work and won’t answer his phone. Those are the nights I spend driving to Denver, with every car accident I pass sending my heart rate into the red zone. It hasn’t been him yet, but one day it will be. It’s only a matter of time.

Tonight the call comes just after 2 AM. My mother, crying so hard she’s almost unintelligible.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says, again and again.

I’m already out of bed, looking for clothes. There’s no point in ever suggesting she go look for him herself. My mother only has two modes where my father is concerned: defensive outrage on his behalf or disabling despair.

When I was small and my dad wouldn’t come home, she’d cry and say, “He always said he didn’t want to settle down. I should have listened.”

Even as a small child, I resolved not to repeat her mistakes. If someone says they don’t want a relationship, you take them at their word.

Sleep dazed, I have just opened the garage door when Brendan appears, so unexpected that I gasp in fear.

“Where you going, blondie?” he asks.

The person in the world I most do not want to know about these trips is Rob. The person right after him is Brendan, as he won’t hesitate to run and tell Rob everything.

I swallow. “Nowhere.”

“You’re going nowhere at 2 AM?”

Every bone in my body wants to lie to him, yet my brain is blank, without a single plausible excuse. Maybe I’m just too tired to lie, exhausted not just from tonight but from all of the past years, all the lies I’ve told and the effort it takes.

Standing under Brendan’s penetrating gaze, I just don’t feel capable of lying even one more time. “My dad had a little too much to drink. He needs a ride home.”

“Isn’t he in Denver?” Brendan asks. “Can’t he just take a cab?”

“We don’t actually know where he is,” I mumble.

I see understanding dawn on his face. “Does he do this a lot?”

“No, of course not. I think he just had a bad day.” My answer is too hasty and too defensive. I sound like I’m lying. Which, obviously, I am. “But can you…can you not mention this to Rob?”

I can’t imagine why I’m throwing myself at his mercy here. Brendan doesn’t like me. He has no reason to show me any kindness, and I’ve never gotten so much as a hint that he’d be willing to.

“Okay,” he says, putting a hand on the small of my back. “But I’m driving. You’re half asleep, and my face is way too pretty to wind up smashed into a tree.”

“You don’t need to come with me.”

“You’re not going alone.” Something in his tone tells me this is non-negotiable. He’s coming, or he’s telling Rob.

“You’re not going to get any sleep.”

“My dad used to drink a lot too,” he says quietly.

I finally meet his eyes, wondering if he’s making this up, if this is all some elaborate ruse to pry my secrets from me so he can offer them on a platter to Rob, in a file titled See? I told you I was right about her. But his face is open and honest and serious in a way it isn’t normally.

He leads me to his car. I don’t resist.

* * *

We are silent as he takes back roads to the interstate. I don’t know how to be around him anymore unless I’m being spiteful or guarded, which I don’t entirely understand. It’s not like I’m cruel by nature. Why is it so hard with him?

He yawns. “Okay, blondie, you’ve got to keep me awake here. Tell me something.”

“Like what?”

“Tell me something no one knows about you, not even Rob. Other than this.”

I wouldn’t normally engage in this kind of game with him—or any game, really—but I’ve already handed him one of my worst secrets. The rest seem minor by contrast.

“Every time I go to Denver to visit my parents, I stop by the Ducati dealership and test drive one.”

He laughs. “Bullshit.”

I shrug and stare out the window. I’m not sure if I’m insulted or just relieved that he doesn’t believe me. Both, perhaps.

“You were serious?” he asks.

“Whatever.”

“You? You, Erin Doyle, ride motorcycles.”

“Is it really that unthinkable? You’re making it sound like I’m Queen Elizabeth.”

“Come on, Erin… I mean, you’re not exactly the type.”

Okay. Now I’m offended. “In what way am I not the type?”

“Perky little blondes in marketing don’t drive Ducatis. They drive something sensible, like a Prius.”

“Yeah, well, Rob agrees with you, so please don’t say anything.”

Rob’s like a grandmother about a lot of things. If he knew about this, I’d never hear the end of it. He’d come home with a report about the dangers of motorcycles, peppering every conversation with crash statistics.

“There’s nothing wrong with driving a motorcycle.”

“There’s nothing wrong with lots of stuff,” I reply. “It doesn’t mean you want the whole world knowing.”

“Except Rob’s not the whole world. He’s your fiancé. And that isn’t something you should feel you have to hide.”

I say nothing, but the truth is this: Rob is a big part of my world, and he would not accept this or so many other things if he knew.

* * *

Thanks to Brendan’s tendency to drive at least 20 miles over the speed limit, we are in Denver in less than an hour. With shame rising in my chest, I direct him to a particularly rough section of the city, a section neither of us would choose to enter under normal circumstances.

“Let’s try Slaney’s first,” I say, sounding, unfortunately, like someone who’s made this desperate search before. “You can wait here, and I’ll run in.”

“Are you high?” He scowls. “I’m not letting you go in there at this hour alone.”

“I’ll be fine.”

He ignores me. And when we walk in and the bartender clearly knows who I am and who my father is, yet another lie is exposed. I’m so fucked. Of course Brendan’s going to tell. Since the moment we kissed at Will and Olivia’s wedding, he’s been gunning for me, the hypocritical bastard.

After three bars and 20 minutes of searching, we find my dad, slumped in the corner of a booth while the staff cleans up around him.

“It’s Erin, right?” the manager asks.

I avoid Brendan’s eye. “Yeah. I’m sorry about this.”

“We’d have called you, but I didn’t have your number. You want to write it down so we have it the next time?”

I continue to avoid looking at Brendan. “Yes. Thank you.”

Sometimes I feel like a sandbag with a pinhole leak. I’ve spent my entire life trying to erase the small trail of debris, evidence, I’ve left behind. Tonight that leak has become a full-fledged tear, and it’s as if I’m hemorrhaging now. I wonder how much more I’ll prove unable to contain.

We load my father into the passenger’s seat with some difficulty, and I direct Brendan to my parents’ neighborhood. Their standard of living dropped a fair amount after my dad lost his job in New Jersey. It’s not as if Brendan grew up with a ton of money, but I’m embarrassed anyway—by how they live, by my mother’s tears and by the way she reacts when she realizes I’m not alone.

“I didn’t know you were bringing company,” she says, as if this is a social call. She wipes her face on the inside of her robe. “You could have warned me. I’m not even dressed.”

I’ve broken the cardinal Doyle family rule: don’t let outsiders see the ugly underbelly. People who’ve met my parents generally come back raving about them. Back when my dad was still doing okay, my parents would fly out for track meets, take me and my friends to dinner. My dad was the life of the party. “You’re so lucky,” people would tell me when it was time to go. “Your dad is so much fun.” They never realized that my mother or I had cut the night short at the precise moment we saw my dad teetering on the edge, about to descend from fun and irreverent to sloppy and irresponsible.

“He’s not company, Mom. We’re not staying.”

Brendan helps my dad to his bed and then gracefully departs, telling me he’ll wait outside.

“What an awful thing to let a stranger see,” my mother says after he leaves. “What’s he going to think of us?”

She wants me to apologize, to agree that tonight is all my fault. It has to be my fault, the whole evening, because if it’s not mine, it’s my father’s, and we can’t have that. But I don’t have it in me to apologize or play this game right now. I pretend too much. I lie too much. I’ve been caught at it tonight, again and again, and I’m just too damn tired to keep going, to lie and pretend for her sake or my own.

“He’s probably going to think Dad’s sick, Mom. And he’s going to think you and I are pathetic and broken. And I’m not going to apologize, because it’s all true.”

I’ll pay for that comment, but right now I don’t care. I walk out, shutting the door behind me.

“Everything okay?” Brendan asks.

I nod, too choked up to speak. It’s not unusual to feel this way. When one of my familial crises ends, I often find I’ve been holding my grief at bay until there is room for it, but I don’t think that’s what this is. Not entirely. I think what’s making me tear up now is kindness. Because Brendan—beautiful, reckless, irresponsible, hateful Brendan, who I’ve loathed for so long—has been kinder to me tonight than anyone I can think of, ever.

I want to continue hating him, and I know I can’t anymore, not entirely. I handed him my secrets tonight—things I’ve never trusted to anyone—and I look at him and know with a certainty I have about almost nothing in this life that he will guard them as if they are his own. Brendan, who I wanted to believe was cruel, is actually kind. And Brendan, who I thought could not be trusted, is someone I trust implicitly.

* * *

Brendan parks on the street, and we walk toward the house together. “I won’t tell Rob, but I have one condition,” he says. “I want you to call me any time you have to go deal with your dad.”

“I’ve been making some version of that trip for a long time, Brendan.” No sense pretending at this point that tonight was a one-off. “I’ll be fine.”

“You know who says things will be fine?” he demands. “Every person who insisted they weren’t too tired to drive and then wrapped a car around a tree. Every woman who has ever been raped after figuring it was safe to walk home. Your belief that you will be fine is meaningless.”

A day ago I’d have expressed some surprise over the fact that he cares whether I’m injured, that he actually seems angry at the possibility. It shocks me less now, but it’s disconcerting, once again, to think I may have misjudged him.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask. “You’re barely ever home.”

“Just text me. By 1 or 2 AM, I’m usually in.”

“No, you’re sleeping at some girl’s place. You’re really going to leave that to come with me to Denver?”

“Yes.”

“No,” I reply. “No way. The whole thing is embarrassing enough without that.”

“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear,” he says, his eyes darkening. “You will text me the next time you make that trip, or I will tell Rob.”

“You’re blackmailing me.”

“If you want to call it that.”

“Only you would somehow turn an offer of assistance into blackmail,” I fume.

He opens the door to the house and shoos me inside.

“I’m gonna take that as a compliment.”

“It wasn’t!” I shout, but he’s already closed the door.