Page 82 of Becoming Us
I tapped ash and gave him a lopsided grin. “You’re getting real introspective.”
He burst out laughing.
I’d never really noticed the sound of it before. It was deep and a little raspy. Dad had smoked for years when he was younger—he only quit after I turned five. The rasp never left him. And when he laughed, really laughed, it was a rough, contagious sound. It made you want to smile too.
“You’ll understand when you grow up.”
“I’m nineteen.”
“That’s just a baby, hijo. Trust me on this.”
Was he right? I could think of a million things I regretted. All those fights with Mom. Ghosting people who tried to stay in touch after school. Kissing people I didn’t want to kiss.
“I’ve fucked up already, Dad. You just don’t know all of it.”
He turned toward me, green eyes narrowing—not with suspicion, but with focus. “The fuckups you’ve had so far? Those were baby ones, Noah. You’re entering the part of your life where mistakes start to count. And you need to watch out for them. They’ll still happen—you can’t avoid them—but you can control how deep they cut. Because sometimes they’re so big, you don’t come back from them. You understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded.
“You can have fun. Be young. But when something’s going to harm someone, or you, in a way you can’t fix with an ‘I’m sorry,’ you need to listen to that voice in your gut. Stop before you cross that line.”
Hadn’t I already crossed it? It felt like I had.
“So…what are your big five?”
He turned away again, lips pressed tight, humming to himself. Then he said, “I cheated on Teresa. That’s what ended my first marriage.”
I rolled over onto my stomach, eyes wide. “Shut the fuck up! You said it was because she didn’t want to move from Buenos Aires.”
“You weren’t old enough to hear the truth.”
“What, like there are age-appropriate truths now?”
“Yes, that’s a thing.”
I flopped onto my back on the floor, shaking my head. “Does Mom know? Was it Mom?” I asked, slightly horrified.
“As if your mother would ever be the other woman.”
I laughed. He wasn’t wrong about that. She could be a lot of things, but low-maintenance wasn’t one of them.
“Do Mati and Diego know?”
He nodded. “They were around your age when we got divorced. Teresa was never very quiet about it.”
“Wow,” I breathed. It was strange, getting this level of honesty from him. Nice, but still…odd.
Then it sort of struck me—those whispers I’d been hearing my whole life. About him. About the money. The kind of rumors that kept me too afraid to ask, because what if they were true? But if not now, when?
“Do any of the big five come from work?”
A pause. “A couple. But they’re not recent.”
My stomach twisted. “Kids at school say stuff sometimes. Not directly—just hints. Nothing explicit or to my face…” I trailed off, unsure how to keep going.
He sat up, and I followed, glancing up at him, sheepish and already worried I’d gone too far.
“What did they tell you?”
