Page 89 of How to Walk Away

“You’re craftier than I realized,” Kit said next, eyeing the long yarn snake I’d been making.

“I’m craftier thanIrealized,” I said with a shrug.

It was here, among all this chaos and peace, that Kit decided to give me two pieces of information.

One: She’d booked her flight back to New York. She was leaving on the morning of the same day I was getting discharged.

“You’re not going to come home with me?”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “No.”

“Not even for a couple of hours? To help me get settled?”

“No. This was the cheapest flight, and I took it.”

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me.”

“It’s not for two weeks.”

‘Two and a half,” I corrected.

“That’s, like, ten years in hospital time.”

“Now I have to dread it.”

“I did everything I came here for,” she said then. “I cleared things up with you. I confronted Mom. I went on an erotic journey with Fat Benjamin.”

“Did you come here for that last one?”

She squinted. “I guess Fat Benjamin was a surprise.”

“Anddidyou clear things up with Mom?” I asked.

“As much as I ever do,” she said.

“’Cause it seems like we haven’t talked about”—I didn’t know how to describe it—“your informationsince the day it all came out.”

Kit shrugged. “Yeah, well. We’ve all been kind of busy.”

True, we’d been busy. But this was also a classic Jacobsen-family technique for responding to big, earth-shattering news: pretending it didn’t exist.

There was probably a more delicate way to ask the question, but I said, “Don’t you want to know who your real dad is?”

Kit got quiet at the sound of the words out loud.

“Our dadismy real dad.”

Had I hurt her feelings? “Of course he is,” I corrected. “I just I meant yourbiologicaldad.”

She thought about it. “I’ve thought about it. I am curious. But as long as Dad doesn’t know, it feels disloyal to take it any further.”

“And Dad will never know.”

We agreed.

Two: Kit’s other piece of news was she had decided to throw a party on her last night here. In the rehab gym.

“They’ll never let you do that,” I said.

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