“Why am I even here?” I ask, needing someone to verify my suspicions.

He scrapes his finger against the pole, irritation pooling through his eyes. “That would be Samantha Calloway’s fault. She apparently emailed her friend mid-flight to call the cops on you. She went a little fucking overboard on her anger.” He looks at me. “Her daughters are all a bit nuts, so you know exactly where they get it from.”

“She called the fucking cops on me,” I retort. “That’s not nuts that’s—”

“It’s nuts,” he rebuts.

“It’s fucked up.”

“That too,” he says. “But what do you expect when you stick your dick around a fifteen-year-old girl when you’re twenty-two.”

I glare. “I didn’t—”

“I know,” he says. “Like Greg, I believe you, son. But Daisy is their youngest daughter, the last to leave. You’re encroaching on Samantha’s fucking territory.” He checks his watch. “Like I said, you’ll be out of here shortly. She has a few fake statements that’ll hold you in here for another ten minutes.”

“They’re going to book me soon.”

He nods. “They’re backed up in there. I’m sure they’ll want to fingerprint you in a half hour.” I do the math easily. He’s saying I’ll be out of here before they can even fucking charge me. He smiles at me, knowing I understand.

“I resisted arrest—”

“I talked to the officer. They’re dropping it.”

I breathe through my nose, my heart beating quickly. I don’t know why all of a sudden I feel so fucking overwhelmed. I realize that I’m thankful that he’s here. And the sad thing—I don’t want to feel that way. I’d rather stay angry. Why do I have to hate all the good parts of a person? My mom—I think she fucking taught me that. Every time I thought about my brother in a good light, she’d crush that vision, she’d focus on the bad, and so I did too.

I can’t do it anymore.

I rub the back of my neck. “What about Lo?” I ask my father, not willing to dodge this topic.

“What about him?”

“You’re fucking terrible to him,” I say in a deep breath. “What you say to him—it makes me sick. You beat him down, and then he returns to you like a wounded dog. I can’t be around you when you treat him like that.” I’d rather Lo not be around him either, but we’ve tried that way, and look where we are now. Lo loves our father, and he’s going to keep going back, even if it kills him.

My dad absentmindedly unclips and clips his Rolex watch on his wrist. “He’s not you, Ryke. He dropped out of college. He can’t even fill a resume. He shit his life away, and if that means I’m a little tougher on him, fine. But I’m not going to fucking watch him continue to throw his potential down the drain.”

“So tell him like a normal human being!” I scream. “Stop saying things like he shit his life away.”

“This isn’t about Loren. This is about you and me,” he refutes, cutting off that topic. As if there’s no room to even discuss it.

Fuck him. “If you love him, like you say you do, you’d support his sobriety and you’d stop tearing him down every chance you get.”

He glares. “If I didn’t motivate him, he wouldn’t be where he is. That’s love. You’ll understand when you have your own children.”

No fucking way will I ever raise my kids like him. Fuck that.

I stare at my father for a long moment. He will never change. He is so fucking rooted in his beliefs. It’s either I accept him like this or do what I’ve been doing—try to forget he even exists.

He opens the door further for me. “Are you ready to put this bullshit behind us, or do you still want to hold onto the fucking past?”

I’m frozen again. Stuck to the middle of the floor. There’s no nasty retort on my tongue. It’s those words that get to me the most.

Do you still want to hold onto the fucking past?

I’m living back there. Where my dad leaves my mom. Where I’m lying for years and years about who I am. Where I feel lost of an identity to call my own.

But I have all of that now. Fuck, I have more than I ever dreamed of.

I have a girl I love.

I have a brother.

I have a mom who loves me, even if she fucks up.

I have a dad who wants to be there for me…I look up at him. Who is here for me.

And I’m Ryke Meadows. I’m a free-solo climber. I’m a celebrity. I’m a fucking sober coach. I have an identity that’s mine. No one took it from me.

I glance over at my dad again, and I want to see the villain, but I think, maybe, all this time the villain was me. For not moving past this, for not realizing that he’s free to make mistakes too. I don’t know if I’m willing to forgive him right now, but he’s not asking for that.

He’s letting me take all the fucking time I need.

I inhale strongly, and I say, “I may never see eye to eye with you.”

He nods. “I’d rather fight with you at every Sunday dinner than never talk to you again.” He shrugs. “That’s the goddamn truth.”

“You love me that much?”

There are fucking tears in his eyes. “More than you can possibly understand, son.”

A pressure bears down on me, and I ask him something that I’ve never fucking asked him in my entire life. I just always thought I knew the answer. Now I’m not so sure. “Would you be willing to stop drinking for Lo and for me?”

After a heavy silence, a single tear rolls down his cheek. I see now that he’s fighting an internal battle probably just as powerful and just as rebellious as the one Lo has, as the one I have.

What he does will change everything.

RYKE MEADOWS

“I still can’t believe it,” my brother says while I drive to our father’s house with Lily and Daisy in the backseat, my Infinity speeding along the roads until I get stopped by another red light. The girls are quiet, both looking out their windows.

“Me either,” I say. “Seems fucking surreal.”

“He threw out thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of booze.” Lo shakes his head. “He had a rare two-hundred-year-old scotch he was planning on giving me as a wedding present, you know that?”

My eyes flicker to him. “He wanted to give you booze when you’re sober?” Lo has visited our dad almost every day since he started this long journey. It’s been one week since his proclamation in the jail cell, and he hasn’t backed out.

In my father’s words, He’s no fucking pussy.

“No, he told me that he was planning to drink it at my wedding himself. He’d have an extra glass for me.” Lo stares off for a second and then he smiles. “We ended up watering the plants with the scotch.” He laughs and says, “You know that son of a bitch has three sober coaches to keep him in line?”

I hear the happiness in my brother’s voice, and it lifts me to a new place. I’m proud of my father, for finally going to this length for us. It’s not an easy decision. It’s not an easy road. It’s one that Lo knows better than me, and he can say, firsthand, how much pain there is in giving up a crutch rather than relying on it.

But we’re both going to be here for him.

“I expected a fucking army,” I tell Lo. “If he’s not going to rehab, he’ll bring rehab to him.” I glance in the rearview at Daisy, who is abnormally still on her seat. Her faraway gaze clenches my stomach. She’s been ignoring her mom after I got arrested. It’s not something I ever wanted for Daisy.

I drive through a gated community right in the suburbs of Philly, and I park in my father’s driveway. I snap off my seatbelt, and both Lily and Daisy climb out of the car and shut the doors before Lo and I get out. I turn to my brother, a gnawing question surfacing while we’re here.

“I meant to ask you something,” I say under my breath.

He removes his gaze off Lily who nervously bites her nails. She’s been more anxious than usual, and I haven’t really talked to my brother about it. But her health is not really my main concern right now. “Yeah?” he asks.