He leans like he’s about to turn back toward the door, but something shifts in me before he can. It’s not that I need to tell him, or even that I want to. It’s that I’ve had enough secrets this summer to know that no good can come of them.
I take a breath, but it takes a few seconds for the words to follow. This secret feels every bit as much Georgie’s as it does mine. But when I follow myself all the way down to the root of it, it doesn’t feel like much of a secret at all.
“Dad, I already found her.”
At first he just stands there, one foot pointed toward the door and the other at me. His eyebrows lift, and after a moment he says, “Wow. Okay.”
I take a few steps closer to him, my hand grazing the box on the desk. “I didn’t mean to find her,” I tell him. “It was—Steph, the woman I thought was my mom? Georgie’s her cousin. Actually, I’ve been working for her this whole time.”
My dad blinks a few times as he walks over, settling on the edge of my bed. There’s this dazed look on his face like he’s trying to decide if he just stumbled into a weird dream. “I … didn’t see that coming.”
“Neither did I.” I sit down on the bed next to him, and he seems to come back to himself. “Neither did Georgie, for that matter.”
He shakes his head, like he can’t quite process her name coming out of my mouth, or maybe just hearing someone say it at all. “How did…”
“It’s a long story,” I tell him. “But we talked this afternoon. And I think—I think I understand it all a little better now. Why she did what she did.”
I’m expecting my dad to ask for the long story, already preparing to give him the play-by-play of the whole summer and the whole conversation Georgie and I had to boot. But instead he looks me squarely in the eye, fully back in the moment, and asks, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Actually—better than I thought,” I say. The relief in his face is palpable. It only occurs to me then that he’s probably been bracing himself for this for years. “I think we … get each other. We’re a lot alike.”
The smile on his face is every bit as heartbreaking as Georgie’s, almost like he is feeling the aftermath of hers. Like he was used to feeling the things she feels and is only just remembering how.
His voice is less firm when he asks, “So she’s…”
It’s a million questions at once, and he can’t seem to decide on one. Even if he could, I wouldn’t be sure what to say. I might understand Georgie, but I don’t know her. Not in the way he does, or the way I hope I might one day.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “But I do know she misses you.”
“Well,” he says, the word so thick that it seems to stop the rest of what he was going to say in its tracks.
But I know what he meant to ask, even if he can’t ask it. “I told her she knew where to find us, if that’s okay with you.”
He nods. “But if she doesn’t … will you be all right?”
I bite the inside of my cheek, mulling it over in a way I haven’t been able to yet. “I like her. I’d like to get to know her. So I’d be disappointed.”
My dad breathes out something close to a sigh, something resigned and a little bit sad. He wasn’t keeping this secret for her, or even for himself, I realize. This is what he’s wanted to protect me from all along.
I bop my head on his shoulder. “But mostly for you and Georgie,” I tell him. “I’ve already got everything I need.”
I smile at him, and he smiles back, and we both feel it then—not quite an answer to all the questions, but an understanding that we don’t need them right now. This story started seventeen years ago, and it’s far from its end. But it’s not just my story. It’s both of ours. And no matter where it leads us next, this time we’ll be ready to face it together.
TEN MONTHS LATER
Heather glances around Washington Square Park, hugging one of Farrah’s ginormous oversize sweaters to her body against the slight spring chill and looking at me, Teddy, and Chloe in turn. Farrah wraps her arms around her to help warm her up.
“Where did the two of you send Coop and Beth for this treasure hunt, the moon?” Heather demands.
“Just the Milkshake Club,” says Teddy.
“And then the High Line, and then the coffee shop where they had their first date as grown-ups, then the library where they used to do their homework together in college,” Chloe pipes up from her tracking app, which is, in fact, monitoring Beth and my dad’s movements through the city. Admittedly, dropping a tracker into Beth’s purse on her way to meet my dad today somewhat toes the line of acceptable teenage behavior, but in our defense, if we’d given it to my dad, he’d have lost it in the first ten minutes—and then we’d be flying the entire operation of “Fellowship of the Ring (Cooper Is Giving to Beth)” blind.
“So basically the entire island of Manhattan,” Heather groans.
“We wanted to make it romantic!” Chloe protests. And I guess to them, an endless string of locations with highly specific latitudes and longitudes is romantic. The two of them are still so hardcore into geocaching that Teddy recently employed the help of about a dozen of the GeoTeens to set up an elaborate promposal for Chloe a month ago (what Heather dubbed the “dry run” for what we’re attempting to execute now).
“We needed the extra time to set these punks up anyway,” I say, messing up Elliot’s already messy hair.
He sticks his tongue out at me, shaking his hair back out. “We’re all set. We’re professionals, lady.”
His T-shirt that currently reads BABY YODA FOR PRESIDENT begs to differ, but logistically speaking, he’s not wrong. After Oliver finished his internship last summer, the Yang family tribunal decided to give him a few months to see if he could juggle managing the band with school, and since then, they’ve been gigging all over the city and even landed a modest-size record deal with an indie label—one that isn’t trying to mold them into anything, so Elliot’s free to be his weird self, David’s free to be his loud self, and Hunter is free to be mostly silent and occasionally cut in with brutally hilarious, deadpan comments at his leisure.
And just in case that all didn’t seal the deal, Oliver just got into Pace, where he’ll study stage management. Between that and Georgie extending his talent management internship into a part-time gig, he’ll be ready for anything the Four Suns will need and then some.
“Thanks again for doing this, by the way,” I say to all three of Oliver’s brothers, who are currently standing by the arch in Washington Square Park with instruments at the ready.
“Anything in the name of true love,” says Hunter, who, in lieu of his usual drums, is unironically chilling with a bongo strapped around his neck.
Elliot scrunches his nose. “I was told there was free food.”
My back is turned, so I see the smirk on Chloe’s and Elliot’s faces and figure out Oliver is approaching before I even hear the footsteps behind me.
“Hey, Ollie,” says Chloe cheekily.
Elliot snickers. He and Chloe have formed tight ranks among the underclassmen at Cornelia, which unfortunately for Oliver means that Elliot is constantly giving Chloe ammo to tease him. It’s probably for the best, seeing as his mortal enemy is his girlfriend now. Someone’s got to keep him in check.