“I am,” Hud told him.
“No, you have to be so sorry that I know you’ll never lie to me again, so that I know I can still trust you forever. Like nothing has changed.”
Hud looked at his brother and allowed his sorrow to surface. Jay could see the pain in his brother’s face and body, and he knew Hud well enough to know that it wasn’t the broken ribs. “I am that sorry,” Hud said.
“OK,” Jay said. “We’re OK.” And with that, Jay took the full weight of his brother’s body onto his shoulder and helped Hud up the cliff.
• • •
All this talk of their father made Hud think of their mother. And he thought of the story she used to tell him, how he had been handed to her, and she had held him as he cried, and loved him right then and there.
She had chosen to love him and it had changed his life.
Hud would love his child the way his mother had loved him: actively, every day, and without ambiguity.
And maybe twenty-five years from now, all of them plus a whole new generation of Rivas would be right here on this very beach. And maybe there would be another reckoning. Perhaps his children would tell him he’d been too permissive or he’d been too strict, he’d put too much emphasis on x when it should have been y.
He smiled to think of it, the ways in which he would mess this whole thing up. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? The small mistakes and heartbreaks of guiding a life? His mother had screwed up almost as much as she’d succeeded.
But the one thing he knew in his bones was that he would not leave.
His child—his children, if he was lucky—would know, from the day they were born, that he was not going anywhere.
• • •
Kit, despite herself, did feel something for her father. She did not like him, per se. But she was happy to have learned that he had a soul, however imperfect. Somehow, knowing her father wasn’t all bad made her like herself more, made her less afraid of who she might be down in the unmined depths of her heart.
As they made their way up the stairs, Kit pushed ahead of everyone as only little sisters can and then stopped when she got to Casey.
She slowed down, and as she passed her she said, “Excuse me.”
Later on, Kit would look back on that moment—that time they were all walking, mostly in silence, back up the stairs with their father—as the moment their family rearranged, made room for Casey to stay, made room for Nina to go.
Kit tapped Nina on the shoulder. “Hey,” she whispered.
“Hi,” Nina said.
“What’s the place in Portugal?” Kit asked.
“Huh?” Nina said.
“The place in Portugal. Where you said you wanted to go and eat the catch of the day.”
“Oh,” Nina said. “I don’t know. I was just talking.”
“No, you weren’t,” Kit said. “I know you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It was the most honest you’ve ever been,” Kit said. “It matters more than anything.”
Nina turned, and looked at her sister. “It’s Madeira. I’ve always wanted to live in Madeira in a tiny house on the water, the kind of place where you only go into town once a week to buy food. I’d love to be somewhere where no one knows who I am or who my dad is and no one has my posters on their wall and I can eat anything I want to. And I can cut all my hair off if I feel like it and maybe be a gardener or a landscaper. Something outside. Where no one knows I was married to Brandon. And when the waves are good, I’m always in the water.”
Kit saw it in perfect Technicolor. The thing they could all do for Nina.
• • •
Mick knew that if he really loved his kids, he would leave them alone. That seemed easy, that seemed doable. He thought of it as his own redemption.
And so, as he made his way up the steps, he decided he’d hug each of them, give them his direct phone number, tell them he would be there if they wanted to go get lunch, and then get in his Jag and drive away.
He turned to Casey, just as his feet hit the grass, and he said, “I’ll take a paternity test. If you want. Just let me know.”
Casey, still finding this night beyond belief and sad and a tiny bit thrilling, smiled at him. Then, just in case he was her father, she grabbed his hand and squeezed it.
• • •
As the family came up to the lawn, the remaining cops shined their lights on the faces of Mick and his five children. And it was then that, for one of the first times in their lives, they saw why it’s good to have Mick Riva as your father.
They all went inside and, after ten minutes of smiles and handshakes and autographs and polite laughing at inane stories, the cops resolved to be on their way.
“We had some arrests,” Sergeant Purdy said. “Nobody you’d miss, I can’t imagine. Vandals, really.”
Nina wasn’t sure what to say to that and she wondered who the cops had arrested. “Thank you, Officers,” she said. She showed them to the front door.
Then she turned and looked at her family. Her brothers had blood crusted on their faces, her sister had a hickey—what?—and there were two more bodies than there’d been at the beginning of this whole thing.
“All right,” Mick said. “I believe this is my cue to leave.”
He entertained the fantasy that someone might try to stop him. He wasn’t too surprised when no one did.
He hugged his sons first, and then his possible daughter, and then the one with the big mouth, and then as he got to the front door, the one who had saved the
