Page 54 of Burning Daylight

Four.

He’s not going to answer.

Right before I hang up the phone, it stops ringing with an audible click.

“Ryder?”

My body reels in shock. I’m surprised he knew my phone number and more surprised at him answering.

His voice is warmer than I expected, but maybe I’m just misremembering it from the last time. We haven’t talked since I was nineteen and standing on his doorstep after his wife Eleanor’s funeral.

Looking back, I can almost see how my mom sending me then was a knife to the gut, but…still. I’m hiskid.

“Roman, what are you doing here?”

His face is ghostly white, all of the color drained as he stares at me on his front doorstep.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Ma told me to come, so I did. I figured he’d be glad to see me, and I had hoped that maybe if I waited long enough to showup, he’d finally pull me into the fold. That he’d look at me as the man I became and decide I was worth claiming. Especially now that the woman who forced him to stay away is buried six feet deep.

My dad glances behind him like he’s expecting someone, then steps forward, carefully pulling the front door halfway closed. He opens his mouth like he’s about to speak when a voice cuts in.

“Marcus?”

A man appears in the doorway. He’s older with a starched suit, pasty white skin, and narrowed eyes.

Marcus stiffens. “Go back inside, Freddy.”

The man doesn’t move, his eyes settling on me like a sniper. Then he pales. “Is that who I think it is?”

My chest clenches, realizing everyone really does assume I’m dead around here.

My father looks like he’s about to kill the guy. “Frederick, go inside. Now.”

He listens this time and then my dad is closing the front door entirely and rushing toward me.

He grips my arm tightly, and I stiffen my jaw, nostrils flaring at the aggressive hold.

“Let me go.” My voice is flat.

He drops my arm like I burned him and runs a hand through his hair, glancing around again. “You can’t be here, Roman. You need to leave.”

My brows draw in. This isn’t going at all like Ma said it would.

“Isn’t that…” I swallow around the sudden nerves. “I mean, that’s what Ma said. That we just had to stay away until Eleanor was gone and then you’d?—”

Love me.

I cut myself off, not willing to say it out loud. Not wanting to admit that after all the years he spent not showing up, he still holds power over me.

His shoulders slump.

“Rom—Ryder, I…” He runs a hand over his face, pausing on his mouth as he looks at me with pity. “Go home. Grow up some more, get an education. Be everything I know you can be.”

“I thought you’d want me here.” My teeth clench.

It’s pathetic how I almost choke on the words, and I shove the emotion down. The last thing I need is for him to see me as weak.