I just stand there exhaling.
Dad and Jerry grill Alex on the way home. By the time we get there, it’s well past sunset, the dark street glowing with Christmas lights scattered across the landscaping, wreaths on the doors, icicle strands hanging off the roofs, fake reindeer beaming in the front yards. The weather is muggy but cool, the temperature a near ten-degree increase from New York, but it still feels like a classic December evening for the South.
Dad leads Alex with our luggage to my childhood bedroom （thank God they remodeled it last year） while Jerry and I sneakily put an extra place setting on the dinner table. Cider warming in a crockpot perfumes the room with cinnamon, orange, cloves. I ladle two mugs out before chasing Alex down. Dad has him in the guitar room, trying to run interference but coming across as a show-off.
“And this is the guitar Casey was playing when she got her first period—”
“Dad!”
“Hey, kiddo.”
Alex turns to me, stifling a laugh. Seeing him here—in my childhood home—sends me all the way back to the beginning. What would August Casey have thought about this scene? Me, offering a mug of rum-spiked cider to Alex, letting our fingers graze, letting my focus linger while he blows away steam? She couldn’t have fathomed it. But I’ve colored in the lines of Alex’s edges over the past four months. Sometimes, he seems more real to me, more solid, than anything else I’ve ever touched.
The four of us sit down to Jerry’s home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner （we never did have any turkey in New York）， and Alex asks, “Do I get to hear you play one of those guitars?”
I grimace, dishing out mashed potatoes. “Probably not—”
“But your chances increase in direct relation to how much cider she consumes,” Dad advises.
Alex gets up to pour me another drink, not missing a beat. “How did you two meet?” he asks.
Helpfully, I tell him, “They met at my mom’s funeral.”
“Casey.” Dad’s tone comes out scolding, the same he used when I was a kid. Jerry balks, dropping his silverware loudly onto his plate. From the crockpot Alex looks at me, his eyes dancing, trying to figure out if this is a twisted joke or not.
“What?” I say. “It’s true!”
“Okay, yes, that is technically true,” Jerry allows, directing his words at Alex in guilty apology. “I did the flowers for Sadie’s funeral. But we didn’t run into each other again for two years, and then after another year, we officially got together.”
Dad glares at me, his eyes vengeful. “Alex. What are your intentions with my daughter?”
“Um,” Alex mumbles, sitting back down, setting the refilled mug beside my plate.
“Don’t answer that,” I tell him.
“Actually, I think we all need more alcohol,” Jerry says, rising from the table. “Maybe a cocktail? Alex, Marty has this great story he’s got to tell you about a Serbian child named Croissant. The child is, of course, illegitimate.”
“Same,” Alex says, biting back a smile.
This makes Jerry blush, which in turn makes me burst out laughing. “Tell him, Dad.”
Dad tells the absurd story, and Jerry makes old-fashioneds, and over the next forty-five minutes, I get supplied with enough alcohol to play one song only for Alex.
“What do you want to hear?” I ask him as I poise on the living room settee, looping the strap of the Yamaha acoustic over my head. Alex is across from me on a leather pullout chair, but Jerry and Dad are still cleaning up in the kitchen—because they know me, and they know I will positively freak out if I have a whole captive audience for this.
“Whatever you want.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees.
“It’s been a while,” I warn him, tuning the guitar. But the instrument is familiar beneath my fingertips, like the edge of an old photograph or damp beach sand. Holding one of these will always make me feel like a kid again, with a grief I didn’t know where to put because I wasn’t even old enough to name it. For a while, I put it here, in loving something my dad loved—the thing that bound us outside of Mom.
Alex smiles softly at me. “Then play something you know by heart.”
I go with “American Honey” by Lady A. It’s sweet and melodic, and I’ve played it so many times that the words are tattooed inside my mind. It’s also the first song I ever played all the way through without stuttering.
I don’t look at Alex once, just sing and play very softly, focusing on the chords my hand remembers, the words I’ve never forgotten. It’s an indescribable kind of good—paying homage to my dad, this band, the song’s creators, even myself. Coming back to this is fucking cathartic.
The last time I was in Nashville, I was afraid of getting stuck in the past. Miriam was right to say I had a tunnel vision for my future, and Dad was right to worry he’d chased me away. Because isn’t that exactly how I was acting? Like a runaway? Like Mom? Was I trying to be her in that way?
I want to tell all of them—Dad, Jerry, Miriam, even Lance—that it was never about running away from them. I was running from the version of myself I’d backed into a corner years ago, a girl who was so insecure about everything she wasn’t that she’d never bothered to learn all of what she was.
I’m running from her.
Alex is the one who figured it out for me: I think there are parts of yourself that you don’t fully know yet. And that’s probably true. But it doesn’t mean I don’t know who I am. And it doesn’t mean I can’t also love the girl I used to be.
I can love this—playing guitar for someone I brought home to meet my parents—and I can love my parents without needing to be them. I can love my hometown, and my job, and whatever city I choose to live in. I can drag my past into the future.
When the song ends, Alex doesn’t applaud. He comes over to the settee and kneels in front of me, like I knelt in front of him last night in my apartment. When I finally let myself look at him, his eyes are twinkling back at me. His hand brushes my cheek and comes away wet with tears.
“You have literally brought me to my knees,” he jokes.
I laugh snottily. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”
“I do,” Alex murmurs. “You finally let yourself come home.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I fall the rest of the way in love with him the day after Christmas, in between my third interview and my fourth.
It doesn’t hit me like a wrecking ball, or slap me in the face, or anything like that. The full weight of my love for Alexander Harrison settles over me like misty fog, a slow build. One minute I don’t notice it and the next, it’s more certain. The day after that, even more certain. Until the fog is everywhere, and you can’t see a thing. You have no idea which way is north unless he’s the one giving directions.
Two days ago, for his birthday, Jerry baked a cake and scrounged up twenty-six candles while we went to the park and played soccer in our sweatshirts. Dad played “Happy Birthday” on the guitar after dinner, and we sang, and Alex blushed furiously. He got a couple of phone calls—presumably from Freddy and his aunt and cousins—but only an email from Robert. I saw the name pop up on Alex’s phone while he chewed his lip swollen, reading very seriously.