Chapter 94 Bonus Chapter 22: The Girl Worth Fighting For

Chapter 94 Bonus Chapter 22: The Girl Worth Fighting For
The day Nathan said he wanted to get married, Brandon was in the yard trimming the hedge.
September in Chicago was still hot. Sun beat against his back until his shirt clung damply to his skin. He held an old manual hedge shear and cut through the wild branches one by one. The stems were thick and stubborn, and the work reddened his palms. Cut branches piled around his feet, waiting to be bagged and thrown away. The air smelled sharply of snapped green stems.
When Nathan walked over, Brandon did not look up.
“Dad.”
“Mm.”
“I want to marry Chloe.”
Brandon’s hands stopped.
The hedge shear had caught on a thick branch. He tugged hard and finally pulled it free. The branch still did not break. It bent to the side, sulky as a child refusing to behave.
“You’re only twenty,” he said.
“I know.”
“You haven’t finished school.”
“I know.”
“Your mother won’t agree.”
Nathan fell silent.
The silence was brief, but Brandon could feel his son thinking through a thousand things in that small pause.
“I know,” Nathan said.
Brandon set down the shears and turned to look at him.
Nathan was already tall then, half a head taller than Brandon. He wore a dark blue T-shirt, his hair slightly too long, falling over his forehead and shifting faintly in the wind. His expression was serious, but not in the way young people looked serious during a sudden impulse.
This was not impulse.
He had thought about it for days. Over and over. Stared at the ceiling through sleepless dawns. Run every possible consequence through his mind until he reached the same conclusion every time.
This was what he wanted.
Brandon had seen that expression before.
On his own face, thirty years earlier, when he had stood in front of Samantha’s family home and told her father, “I’m going to marry your daughter.”
He had been in his early twenties then too.
“You’ve really thought this through?” Brandon asked.
“Yes.”
“You won’t regret it?”
“No.”
Brandon nodded.
“All right.”
He bent, picked up the shears, and went back to cutting the hedge.
Nathan stood beside him, stunned for a second. He had probably expected Brandon to discuss it at length. To ask how he planned to manage the future. To remind him that marriage meant becoming an adult, that he could not be reckless anymore.
Brandon said none of that.
He trusted his son.
That child had known what he wanted since he was young.
“Dad, you’re not against it?” Nathan asked. For once, his voice held a trace of uncertainty.
“I’m not.”
“But Mom…”
“I’ll talk to her.”
Nathan did not answer.
Brandon heard his breathing change behind him. A moment later, a very soft “Thank you, Dad” came from him. His voice was a little hoarse, as if something had caught in his throat.
Brandon did not turn around.
He only grunted and kept working.
That night, Samantha argued with him.
She said he was irresponsible. Said Nathan was still too young. Said that girl was not worthy of him. Her voice filled the kitchen, loud and sharp beneath the overhead light, their shadows swaying against the cabinets.
Brandon listened without arguing back.
When she was finished, he said only, “The child likes her. That matters more than anything.”
Samantha was so angry she threw a pillow.
Brandon bent, picked it up, patted the dust off, and put it back on the bed.
He knew Samantha was not unreasonable. She was worried. Worried Nathan was too young. Worried he would regret it later. Brandon had those worries too.
But he believed Nathan more.
That child had known what he wanted since he was young.
And what he wanted had never changed.
Nathan and Chloe got married at City Hall on Nathan’s twenty-second birthday.
Brandon heard it over the phone.
“Dad, we got married.” Nathan’s voice came through the receiver, and even across the distance, Brandon could hear the smile in it. A smile completely unlike his usual one.
Brandon held the phone and stood in the kitchen. A pot of soup simmered on the stove, steam rising and blurring the window. Samantha stood beside him, chopping vegetables, her knife landing against the cutting board in a steady rhythm.
She could not hear what Nathan had said, but she saw Brandon’s expression and asked, “What happened?”
Brandon did not answer her.
Into the phone, he said, “Good.”
After he hung up, he looked at Samantha.
“They got married.”
The knife in Samantha’s hand paused, its edge suspended in midair, catching the kitchen light.
“What?”
“Nathan and Chloe. They got married today.”
Samantha set down the knife and wiped her hands on her apron. She wiped them for a long time, again and again, as if they would never dry.
After a long silence, she said, voice rough, “That child. Why didn’t he discuss it with us?”
Brandon said nothing.
He knew Samantha was not truly angry.
She simply was not ready.
She needed time to accept that her son had grown up, that he now made decisions that belonged only to him.
Brandon learned Chloe had disappeared through Nathan’s phone call.
That day, he had just gotten home from work and was changing shoes in the garage. The laces of his work boots had been tied all day, tight enough to ache across the top of his feet. He bent slowly to loosen them when the phone rang.
Nathan’s voice came through the receiver.
It was a voice Brandon had never heard from him before.
Not grief.
Not fear.
Something deeper. Heavier.
Like a man standing on the edge of a cliff while wind rushed up from below, shaking him so hard he could barely stay upright.
“Dad, Chloe’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“She took a bus back from home to Chicago yesterday. She still hasn’t arrived. Her phone won’t go through. Greyhound says there’s no record of her boarding. The police said she might have gotten into a private car…”
Nathan spoke faster and faster, like a train that had lost its brakes, metal wheels grinding sparks from the track. Brandon could barely make out the words anymore. They blurred together, buzzing near his ear like a swarm of bees.
“Slow down,” Brandon interrupted.
Nathan drew a breath.
Brandon heard how deep it went in, and how slowly it came out. Like someone who had been trapped underwater for too long and had only just surfaced.
“Dad,” he said, “I can’t find her.”
Brandon remembered that sentence for a very long time.
Not because of the words.
Because of Nathan’s voice.
That restrained, almost-breaking sound, as if he were holding back something that would tear him apart from the inside.
Brandon had heard it only once before.
When Nathan was six and got lost at the park. By the time Brandon found him, Nathan was standing beneath the slide, his face covered with tears and snot. The second he saw Brandon, he threw himself forward and wrapped both arms around his father’s leg, his small body shaking like a leaf in autumn.
Only that once.
After that, Nathan never cried again.
At least, not in front of him.
Brandon stood in the garage, gripping the phone. His work boots lay at his feet, one upside down, one tilted sideways. The fluorescent tube overhead buzzed, not bright enough, stretching his shadow long and faint across the concrete.
“I’m coming over right now.”
He hung up, changed his shoes, grabbed his car keys, and walked out of the garage.
From inside the house, Samantha called, “Where are you going?”
“Nathan’s.”
“What happened?”
“Chloe’s missing.”
Samantha froze in the kitchen doorway, still holding the spatula, tomato sauce smeared across the front of her apron. She did not ask another question. She only stood there, watching Brandon’s back disappear through the door.
Brandon drove to Nathan’s apartment.
On the way, he thought of many things.
Chloe crouching in the garage while he fixed the chair. Chloe smiling as she handed him the screwdriver. Her ponytail falling over her shoulder while she crouched there, the ends brushing the concrete floor.