Page 47 of Me and Mr. Just Right

“Mickey Wren told me,” Bennett said. “He was in town last week, and when I ran into him at the marina, he mentioned how glad he was that you’d turned their offer down.”

Haydn closed his eyes. Mickey was the person he’d recommended they reach out to. He wrote for the Alaskan tourism center, and their paths had crossed plenty of times over the years.

“Why did you turn their offer down, Haydn?” Jules asked in his prosecutor voice.

“Does there have to be a specific reason?” He knew he sounded too defensive, and he tried to moderate his tone a little more. Why were they getting into this? He thought they’d come out here to help him get over Lia, not poke at his career choices. “I wanted to stay here.”

“Why?”

“To be by you guys.” It took everything in him not to roll his eyes, but he did gather his long hair into a messy ponytail, his irritation evident in every jerky move of his arms. “TheNature Adventurejob would have me relocate to the lower forty-eight for most of the year.”

“So? I live down there,” Jules countered.

“And I live right by Rosie, and I keep an eye on her anyway when you’re out exploring.”

“You guys wouldn’t get it.” He stood and paced away from them, his frustration rising.

“Get what?” Jules said.

“I need to be here. I need to not leave.”

“But why?” Jules pushed again.

“Because I can’t be like Dad!” he finally said, loud enough to earn a few angry squawks from birds in the trees over their heads. They flew away with a rustle of branches and trees, leaving behind a weighted, uncomfortable silence. “I’m worried that if I give in to my urge to explore the world, I’ll never come back.”

“You’d never do that,” Bennett said, his eyes wide.

“Dad did.”

“And you’re nothing like him,” Jules said firmly. He stood up as well and moved in front of Haydn. “He used to put so much pressure on you. I hated that he called you the glue of our family, because he did it to take the burden off of himself. If you were the glue, then he was unnecessary.”

“If you were the glue, then he was free to leave,” Bennett added quietly.

Jules placed his hand on Haydn’s shoulder as if to hold him in place, which made him pause. Bennett was the huggy-touchy one of them, but for Jules to reach out, it was serious.

“You are a lot like Dad,” Jules admitted. The exhaustion lines around his eyes deepened. “He had such a sense of adventure. He’s the reason we love hiking and fishing and exploring and boating. Most of our favorite things come from him taking us to do it when we were little. He traveled a lot for work, and I often got the sense that while he was home, he was always waiting for the next trip. That the work trips were his real life, and we were the people and things keeping him from living it. And then Mom got sick, and he got even more restless …”

Haydn’s shoulders deflated, and Jules’s hand dropped to his side. He remembered how distant their already-disconnected dad had become once their mom’s illness became serious. “I saw Dad the night he left.”

Jules’s gaze sharpened on Haydn. “I didn’t know that.”

“I don’t know how I realized he was leaving for good. Maybe it was because he had two bags instead of one. Or because he brought both of his favorite guns with him, instead of leaving one home like he always had before. But I raced after him, grabbed him by the back of the shirt, and I told him to mature up and stay.”

The wind rustled through the trees, not as wild as the night before, but still sending a chill across his skin. He imagined his young self, trying to speak like an adult to his dad as they’d stood in the entryway of the house. Haydn on one side of the doorway, his father on the other. His voice had cracked when he’d said “stay”—and he hadn’t been able to tell if it was the normal teenage voice cracking, or if it was from emotion.

“Dad told me he was leaving the family in good hands, and that I was already a much better man than him.”Take care of them all, he’d said as he’d tugged his shirt from Haydn’s iron grip and taken his first step down the stairs. He’d pointed at Haydn, like he used to do when he’d lecture them and he didn’t want any back talk.I’m counting on you.

“And then he left.” And they’d only seen him once since then—at their mother’s funeral. “I’ve always wondered if there wasn’t something I could have done to stop him from leaving. Something I could have said differently or—”

“It’s not the kid’s job to convince their parent to stay,” Bennett said quietly. Haydn knew that was true, knew he would say the same thing if the situation were reversed, yet it didn’tfeeltrue when it came to him.

“Why didn’t you ever tell us this before?” Jules asked.

Haydn shrugged. It was his burden to carry, not theirs. Even now, he could see how weighed down they were by the reality that he’d been left with so much responsibility at such a young age.

“I’m sorry,” Jules said simply. “We love you, Haydn, and we know you’d never leave—even if you moved thousands of miles away—because you are absolutely nothing like Dad in the ways that matter. You always come back to us. Even more, you’re the one who makes sure we always come back together. Dad was a loose thread, but the rest of us are continuous, interconnected stitches.”

Haydn liked that imagery. One stitch alone wasn’t strong enough to hold something securely together, but a bunch of stitches in a tight row could do it. Could he stop thinking of himself as the glue and trust himself? That’s what it came down to in the end. Could he really believe he wasn’t going to be like his dad?

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