The Unexpected Everything

I let myself in and walked across the foyer, turning off lights while running through my checklist in my head. I’d get ready for bed, go over my packing list for Young Scholars one more time, then—I heard a creak of the floorboards behind me and whirled around, my heart hammering.

There was nobody right behind me, but in the long hallway that led down to my dad’s study, I saw my father standing in the study’s doorway, peering out at me. “Andie?”

I let out a shaky breath and took a step closer to him, squinting in the darkness. The only light was coming from the room behind him, stretching out a long thin line against the floor. “Hi,” I called, holding one hand up in an awkward wave and then immediately dropping it again. Now, in hindsight, it seemed ridiculous that I was that startled to hear someone else in the house. But I’d honestly forgotten he was here.

My dad took another step toward me, then stopped, both of us pretty much staying at our ends of the hallway. He ran his hand over the back of his neck, blinking at me like he was surprised to see me too. “I hadn’t realized that you . . .” He cleared his throat, then started again. “I guess I thought . . .” But this sentence trailed off too, and he pushed his shirtsleeve back to look at his watch. “It’s late, isn’t it?”

“Um, I don’t know,” I said, stopping myself before pointing out that he was the one with the watch.

“It’s after two,” he said, and I nodded, realizing that sounded about right.

“What were you doing up?” I asked, even though this really wasn’t that unusual. When my dad was home, he worked late most nights. And the weekends that I took the train to D.C. to stay in the apartment he kept in Dupont Circle—visits that always were accompanied by carefully crafted social media messages about how I was going to see my dad—I sometimes didn’t even see him; he was in his office or at meetings the whole time.

“I had to put some things in order,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “There’s a lot I’m leaving half-done, and I want to make sure that it’s taken care of.”

I nodded and took a step back toward the staircase. “So . . . ,” I started as my dad took crossed his arms over his chest.

“Is this when you normally come in?” he asked, sounding more confused than anything else. “Joy was okay with it?”

I bit my lip hard, to make sure I wouldn’t laugh. I’d never really had a curfew to speak of. Ever since I was twelve, there had been a revolving crew of vaguely related people who’d come to stay and help out with me. There had been an actual nanny hired when I’d first come back from Camp Stepping Stone, the summerlong grief camp my dad had sent me to right after the funeral. But when his opponent during that election found out about it, he started using it in his speeches as a way to trash my dad, saying that he would never hire outsiders to take care of his children. So the nanny had been let go, and I’d had the first of many distant relatives come to stay. This had ended the controversy, thanks to Peter’s spin—my dad was just bringing in family to help out during a difficult time. It was pretty hard to demonize that, the grieving widower doing the best he could, even though his opponent kept trying, which probably contributed to my dad’s keeping his seat that fall. They never stayed all that long, these second cousins and stepsiblings’ children—they moved into the house or the furnished apartment above the garage, drove me around, and for the most part, let me do my own thing.

Once I was able to drive myself, the job had pretty much become symbolic, there in case someone questioned whether the congressman’s daughter was living unsupervised by herself while he was in D.C. The most recent person had been Joy, my dad’s stepsister’s stepdaughter, but as soon as the scandal had exploded and my dad had moved back, she’d moved out, leaving a note on the kitchen counter telling my dad where to send her last check. But the high turnover of relatives meant I could tell them whatever I needed to when they moved in, and one of the first things I’d told Joy was that I had no curfew.

“Yeah,” I said now, taking another step toward the staircase. “She was fine with it.”

“Ah,” my dad said, nodding.

“Oh,” I said, remembering and turning back before I headed up the stairs. We were at opposite ends of the hallway now, and I couldn’t make out his expression clearly anymore. “Peter texted. He wanted to know how you were doing.”

My dad looked at me for a moment, then sighed, his shoulders slumping slightly. “I’m fine,” he said, even though I could hear the exhaustion in his voice.

“Well, you should probably tell Peter that. He seemed worried.” My dad and I just stood there until the silence between us started to feel suffocating. “Night,” I said, turning away and not letting myself look back, not even waiting to hear if he said it back to me. Then I hit the last light switch, throwing the foyer into darkness, and took the steps up to my room two at a time.



Chapter THREE



My phone rang the next morning at seven a.m.

I rolled over and reached for it, squinting at the screen. I didn’t recognize the number, but it was a Baltimore area code. I answered immediately. “Hello?” I asked, hating that it probably sounded like I just woke up.

“Good morning,” a woman’s voice on the other end said. “This is Caroline from the Young Scholars Program at Johns Hopkins. May I speak to Alexandra Walker?”