Page 154 of The Rom-Commers

I wasn’t sure where to go from there.

I lowered my voice. “She’s not wrong, though.” And then I said the thing we’d all been thinking all along. “I wanted to go rock climbing. Iinsistedon going. If it hadn’t been for me, we’d have been nowhere near that rockfall. If it hadn’t been for me, she wouldn’t have died.”

But maybe it wasn’t the thing we’d all been thinking—because my dad sighed like he couldn’t even follow my reasoning. “That makes no sense, Emma,” he said. “Mom could have gone to the beach instead anddrowned in a riptide. Or been run over by a drunk driver on the seawall. Or hit by a stray firecracker. Or bitten by a snake near the dunes.”

I frowned.

“There is absolutely no way to predict the infinite random forces in the world any of our choices will expose us to. How paralyzing would it be to even try?”

And then there was a seismic shift—for both of us—in our thinking about me.

Was that what I’d been doing? Trying desperately to predict the unpredictable and avoid the unavoidable? Was that why I’d been so willing—or, if I’m really honest,relieved—to stay home all this time? Had I decided in some place deep below my consciousness that the best way to avoid disaster was to just never do anything?

“You can’t live like that, Em,” my dad said.

I could have denied it, I guess. But it was late. And quiet. And we were already telling truths.

“I don’t know hownot to,” I said.

He studied me. “I think California was a start. In more ways than one.”

At that, I let down the bed railing so I could scoot closer and lean in to rest my head on my dad’s chest. I could hear his heart beating a soothing rhythm, and I listened for a minute before I said, “How do you do it?”

“Do what?” my dad asked, his voice muffled through his ribs.

“How do you find a way to be okay?”

“Well,” my dad said, frowning. “I had to be, didn’t I?”

He squeezed my hand.

Then he said, “Things were very dark for me after Mom died. But I knew you and Sylvie needed me to find the light somehow.”

“I didn’t know things got dark for you. You always seemed… okay.”

“It was my job to seem okay.”

“You didn’t want to talk to me about it?”

“You were a kid.”

“Sylvie was a kid,” I said. “I was—”

“A girl who’d just lost her mom.”

Okay. That wasn’t wrong.

“I decided that if I just held on, things would get better. I wasn’t sure how much better, but better. And when you’ve seenworse, better is good enough.”

“But how? How did you hold on?”

“I just got up every day, and went to bed every night, and tried to be a good person in between.”

“That can’t be all there is to it,” I said.

My dad took a slow breath, and then he said, “Somewhere during that time, I got very lucky and I accidentally figured something out.”

“What?”

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