Straight to the red emergency box mounted beside the garage door.
He opened it, pulled out the first-aid kit, and came back to me.
Ryan blinked.
So did I.
Dad crouched again and set the white plastic box on the floor between us.
“Claire,” he said quietly, “I’m going to ask you one question, and I want you to answer without looking at anybody else.”
I swallowed.
“All right.”
“Do you feel safe leaving here with Ryan tonight?”
The silence afterward seemed to press against my ears.
I looked at Ryan anyway.
His jaw tightened.
It was almost invisible, that tiny movement. A stranger might not have noticed.
I did.
I knew every version of Ryan’s anger.
The clipped smile.
The narrowed eyes.
The sudden stillness that meant he was forcing himself not to say what he wanted to say because other people were watching.
I looked back at Dad.
“No.”
The word came out so softly that I barely heard it.
Dad did.
His face didn’t change.
“All right.”
That was all.
No accusation.
No speech.
No dramatic promise that Ryan would regret what he had done.
Dad simply opened a packet of sterile gauze and handed it to me.
“Hold that against your lip.”
Then he stood and turned to Ryan.
“You need to leave.”
Ryan stared at him.
“Robert, this is getting completely out of proportion.”
Dad’s expression remained almost painfully calm.
“My daughter said she doesn’t feel safe with you.”
“She’s upset.”
“That is not an answer.”
Ryan gave a short, humorless laugh.
“You’ve heard one side of a very complicated situation.”
Dad glanced toward me.
My torn dress.
My swollen cheek.
The blood on the gauze in my hand.
Then his gaze dropped to Ryan’s bruised knuckles.
“What part is complicated?”
Ryan’s face flushed.
“I did not come here looking for a fight.”
“Then don’t start one.”
Dad’s voice never rose.
That made the words land harder.
Ryan looked at his friends.
Neither offered help.
For the first time since I had known him, I saw something unfamiliar pass through his expression.
Uncertainty.
He was used to controlling the version of events everyone heard.
Ryan was charming when he needed to be. Thoughtful in public. Funny at dinners. Impossibly attentive whenever anyone important was watching.
He remembered birthdays.
He sent my mother flowers on the anniversary of her surgery.
He helped Dad carry tables after family parties and stayed late to wash wineglasses.
He had built such a careful version of himself that sometimes, even after he hurt me, I wondered whether I had imagined the uglier one.
But Dad wasn’t looking at the version Ryan had constructed.
He was looking at what was standing in front of him.
“Claire drove the car into the pillar,” Ryan said.
My heart lurched.
Dad’s eyes shifted toward the roadster.
“I know.”
That surprised all of us.
Ryan frowned.
“What?”
Dad looked back at him.
“I know she was driving.”
Ryan’s confidence returned a little.
“Then you understand—”
“No.”
Dad’s voice sharpened for the first time.
“I understand that the car is damaged. I understand my daughter is injured. Those are two separate things.”
Ryan opened his mouth.
Dad held up one hand.
“I am not discussing the car with you.”
Something inside me cracked at that.
Not in a painful way.
In the way ice breaks when spring finally reaches it.
For six years, Uncle Michael’s roadster had sat in that garage beneath a gray cover.
Nobody drove it.
Nobody ate near it.
Dad checked the oil even though the engine was rarely started. He polished the chrome himself. Every summer, he replaced the little cedar blocks he kept beneath the seats because Michael had hated the smell of mothballs.
When I was twelve, I once leaned my bicycle against the front bumper.
Dad had looked at me as though I had placed a lit candle beside a gasoline can.
That car was not simply a car.
It was memory.
It was grief shaped into metal.
And Dad wasn’t even asking me why I had destroyed it.
He was asking whether I felt safe.
Ryan looked at the wreckage and then back at Dad.
“You’re telling me that doesn’t matter?”
“I’m telling you,” Dad said, “that right now, she matters more.”
My eyes burned.
I pressed the gauze harder against my mouth.
Ryan’s friend closest to the garage door shifted his weight.
His name was Ethan.
I had met him dozens of times. He had gone to college with Ryan, served as best man at his brother’s wedding, and laughed louder than anyone at Ryan’s stories.
He looked sick.
Dad noticed that too.
“You two should go with him,” Dad said.
Ethan hesitated.
The other friend, Mason, nodded quickly.
“Yeah. Okay.”
Ryan turned on them.
