Lauren told Derek the part Mason had not seen. She had gone into Ruth’s room, which Howard had not much changed, and she had sat on the bed and said, out loud, to a dead woman, “I am not going to thank you and I am not going to damn you. You kept him alive and loved and you kept me a story. Both are true.” Then she had gone downstairs and booked nothing secret. She had looked at one-way fares zero times. She had texted Derek a photograph of the stair rail Jonah had already tightened with a screwdriver he found in the drawer where the decree used to be. The text said, He is good at this. I am trying to be. It was not poetry. Derek saved it anyway, because evidence of effort was the currency they were on now.
On the return night the airport was bright and ordinary and Derek was early. He stood where the doors opened on heated air and cold air in alternating breaths. He had the navy jacket. He had a sign in his head and no sign in his hands, because Mason was not a child who needed to be collected like a stranger, and because irony had limits. The board said the flight was on time. He did not refresh it more than twice. A promise kept badly is just anxiety with a clock.
They came through at 8:52. Two of them. Lauren and Mason. The absence of the third was no longer a horror. It was a fact with a phone number. Jonah had stayed, as planned, for the week, with a shift at the marina waiting and Claire’s guest room and a grandfather who still needed the night hours covered. He had texted Derek a picture of a screwdriver and the words Rail is solid. Tell Mason the dog says hi. Derek had texted back a thumbs-up and then, after a minute, Actual words: he’ll like that. Thanks. It was clumsy. It was a door left unlocked.
Mason saw him and did not run. He walked, backpack on, and when he was close enough he stopped and checked Derek’s face the way he had checked it on the curb, looking for whether the promise had been a style or a structure. Derek crouched. “Eight-forty,” he said. “I cheated and got here at eight-ten. Don’t report me.”
Mason’s smile was small and wrecked and real. He put his forehead briefly against Derek’s shoulder, a contact so quick it might have been an accident if Derek had not known his son. “You came,” he said.
“I said I would.”