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She hugs me before she leaves, quick and warm, and then the room goes quiet in the specific way hotel rooms go quiet when you’re the only one left in them — the hum of the air conditioning, the distant sound of the ocean through a cracked window, the whole team’s laughter fading down the hallway and then gone.

I sit on the edge of the bed for a long time before I pick up my phone.

I call my dad instead of texting, because some things need an actual voice attached to them.

He picks up on the second ring, the way he always does, like he keeps his phone close specifically in case one of his daughters needs him at an odd hour. “Hey, sugar. How’d Nationals go?”

“We won.” My voice already sounds strange to my own ears, thinner than I mean it to.

“That’s wonderful. I’m so proud of you.” A pause, the specific pause of a father who’s spent twenty-one years learning to read his daughter’s silences. “You don’t sound like someone who just won Nationals.”

“Daddy, I need to ask you something.” I close my eyes. “Can you come to Haven? Soon — this week, if you can manage it.”

“Of course. What’s going on?”

“I need you to come alone. Not Mom. Just you.” I hear him go quiet on the other end, processing that, and I push through before I lose my nerve. “I need to talk to you about something, and I need it to just be us.”

“Margo.” His voice has gone careful, the specific measured calm he uses in the courtroom, the one that means he’s bracing for something and refusing to let the bracing show. “Are you okay? Is this — do I need to be worried?”

I open my mouth to give him the easy answer, the I’m fine, just miss you version I’ve been handing everyone for six weeks, and instead what comes out is smaller and truer than anything I’ve said to him in longer than I can remember.

“I need you, Daddy.”

My voice cracks clean on the last word, and I hear him go still on the other end of the line, the specific stillness of a father hearing something in his daughter’s voice he’s never heard there before.

“I’m coming,” he says. No hesitation. No further questions, not yet, just the immediate certainty of a man who’s just been asked for the one thing he’d never refuse. “I’ll clear my calendar. I can be there Thursday. Margo — whatever this is, we’ll handle it. Together. You hear me?”

“I hear you.” The tears come now, quiet and finally allowed, sitting alone in a hotel room in Daytona with the ocean somewhere outside the window. “Thank you.”

“You don’t thank me for showing up. That’s just what I do.” A beat, warmer now, trying to lighten what he can clearly tell is heavy. “Get some rest, sugar. I’ll see you Thursday.”

I hang up. I sit there for a long time in the quiet, the specific relief of having finally reached for the one person in my family who’s never once made me manage something alone, and I think about everything I’m going to have to say to him on Thursday, and for the first time since the bathroom floor at the Sailmaker, I don’t feel entirely afraid of saying it.

I pull out my phone one more time before I try to sleep. Theo’s text is still sitting there, unanswered since this morning, the words are the three of you okay still hanging in the specific unresolved space between us.

We’re okay. I didn’t compete. I’ll tell you everything when you’re ready to hear it.

I send it before I can talk myself out of it.

Then I lie back on the hotel bed, the ceiling unfamiliar above me, the ocean still audible through the window, and I let myself feel, for the first time in six weeks, something that isn’t entirely dread.

I’m going to tell my father. I already told my team what I needed to tell them today, chose safety over performance for the first time in my entire life, and survived it. I answered Theo honestly instead of managing him. One conversation at a time, I’m learning how to stop carrying everything alone.

I fall asleep before Priya gets back, and for the first time in six weeks, I let myself feel proud of something without immediately calculating what it cost.

Chapter 32

Margo

My father arrives alone, exactly as I asked.

I meet him at the little coffee shop two blocks from the Sailmaker, the one with the mismatched chairs and the specific quiet that makes it feel like a place built for hard conversations. He’s already there when I arrive, seated at a corner table, his suit jacket slung over the back of his chair, two coffees already ordered — mine exactly the way I take it, which he’s known since I was fourteen and never once forgotten.

He drove up straight from the airport, still in his travel clothes, a small overnight bag by his feet. He didn’t book a hotel yet, I notice — didn’t want to assume how long this would take, or maybe just wanted to be fully present for whatever I needed before he thought about logistics for himself. That’s very him. My father has never once made a big show of prioritizing me. He just quietly rearranges his whole life around it and lets the rearranging speak for itself.

He stands when he sees me. Studies my face the way he studies witnesses, the litigator’s read, fast and thorough, and whatever he finds there makes something in his own expression soften before I’ve said a single word.

“Hey, sugar.” He pulls me into a hug, solid and certain, no fuss, exactly the hug he’s always given me. “You look tired.”