I smooth my hair. Nikko assured me that I didn’t have a speck of plant life in it anymore, but I feel like Dad’ll take one look at me and know where I’ve been. I take a deep breath and push open our apartment door.
Dad jumps up from the couch, his knotting cords falling to the floor. “Thank goodness.”
He doesn’t need to say he’s been worried. I can see it on his face. I feel a twinge of guilt for being out so long after dark. “Sorry, I—”
“I know. You needed to get out. To think. Are you—?” He hesitates. “Are you feeling better?”
I’m not furious anymore, like I was when I flew out of here. Mostly because I refuse to think about my parents splitting up. I’m focusing on the garden now. “Yes, I’m better.”
“I’ll text your mom and let her know you’re home.”
This is how it’s going to be from now on, I realize. I’ll be living either with Dad or Mom, and they’ll text each other about what I’m up to. My eyes feel hot, and Dad comes over to hug me. “I’m sorry, Chloë. I know this is hard for you.”
No kidding. I bite back the words and rest my head against his shoulder. When he lets go, I kick off my shoes. One of them hits a cardboard box on the floor. “What’s that?”
“A few of Uli’s things that I set aside for William. He looked through and took what he wanted but left the rest for us.”
I open the box. Albums. A whole stack of photo albums. I crouch down to open the first, and there’s my grandmother, smiling, under the apple tree, with my child-dad up in the branches. “You didn’t want the photos?”
“Please don’t open those now,” Dad says. “You can look at them later. Right now I need to talk to you about the house. Our house. In Montreal.”
I step away from the box and flop down on the couch, but I’m not giving up. Not this time. “Why did you hate him so much?”
“I didn’t.” Dad picks up a cord again and begins another knot. “We had a troubled relationship. It’s not the same.”
I wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t.
“Will you ever tell me?” I ask. “Because I still don’t get it. Why did we move across the country to be here when you could barely stand to be in the same room? Why are you staying now that he’s gone? None of it makes sense.”
He’s got tears in his eyes when he turns to me. “I came back for a lot of reasons, Chloë, and I brought you with me for a lot of reasons too. But the main one is I love you, and I couldn’t stand the idea of not seeing you every day.”
“But Mom—” My voice is barely a whisper. I don’t know what I’m trying to ask. If Mom wouldn’t miss me as much maybe? How did they decide this?
“She misses you terribly, but she wanted you to get to know your grandfather. That was always important to her. She said you needed to know where you came from, even if you didn’t want to stay.”
I think about that for a moment. “Did you know then that you’d stay?” Please say no. Please say that you weren’t lying about that when we came here.
“I didn’t have a clue,” Dad says. “I knew I wanted you to have time to be a kid without two parents fighting every night. I wanted to give you a chance to throw rocks into the ocean. Go for bike rides. Live a simpler life for a while. I didn’t plan to stay for very long. But then William found me this job, and—”
“William?”
“He mentioned it to my father, who mentioned it to me. Everything was set into motion after that, and here we are.” He waves a hand at our furniture and the wall he transformed to lively orange.
It takes me a while to process this. “I didn’t know Mom cared about Uli so much.”
“She didn’t know him well,” he says. “They only met a few times, but family is family. She cares about us, so she cared about him.”
Kind of like how I care about my great-grandmother because Uli cared about her. Enough to plant that tree and tell me about her years and years after she died.
“I wish Mom lived here.” I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help it. How do I choose between my parents and between two completely different lives?
Dad smiles. “Can you imagine your mom living in Victoria?”
I can’t. Mom’s a big-city person. She loves her university, meeting friends after work for a glass of wine, finding vintage clothing at the fripperies and going to concerts. Some weekends, we’d drag her up Mount Royal for a walk in the woods, but she went because Dad and I wanted to. It’s not something she’d ever have done on her own.
“I loved Montreal when I first got there too,” Dad says. “But I missed the ocean—and the trees, and the lakes, and hiking. I left Victoria to get away from my father, but this place never stopped feeling like home. I wanted to come back.”
“Even if your father was still here.”
“Even if, and because. I wanted to put some things to rest with him,” he says. “You’re right. I owe you an explanation. I’ll give you one soon, I promise, but I need to figure out how to tell the story respectfully, in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m judging him. He was a good man. He just took too many risks. I guess he didn’t know how to be any other way.”
I don’t say anything. One wrong word, and my dad might change his mind. He’s never promised to tell me soon about what happened between him and his father. I don’t want to push it. Luckily, we have no shortage of huge, life-altering events to talk about, so I change the subject. “You told Mom you wanted to move back to Victoria, and she thought it was a good idea?”
He shrugs. “We weren’t getting along. I’d lost my job. My father had just had a stroke. Coming here felt like the best thing to do at the time.” He watches my face for a moment. “Neither one of us wanted to hurt you, Chloë. I hope you know that.”
I nod. That, at least, I’ve known all along.