I take another sip from my mug, and my gaze falls on a family portrait on Amira’s living room wall. Her dad looks the part of a middle school principal—which he is—and for the first time, I wonder what he’s like here in his home. Away from all the teachers, and students, and parents. I wonder what he’s like as a father.

I bet he’s … normal. I bet he asks her about her homework and knows the names of all her teachers. And that he’s always in bed asleep by ten p.m., with a half-read crime novel on his nightstand.

“It’s kind of crazy. My dad just … doesn’t make any sense.”

“Okay. I’ll bite.” Amira holds up her cookie and grins over her stupid pun. But her smile fades with one look at my face.

“He … I just can’t understand how the man who wrote bedtime songs for me and flew Landry around like an airplane when she was a toddler could be the same man who popped pain pills like they should have come out of a gumball machine. How can the soldier who served several tours in Afghanistan and put out fires for a living be the same man who practically melted into the couch there at the end? Who never wanted to leave the house?”

Those pieces of the puzzle that was my father don’t seem to have come from the same box. It’s like the factory mixed up two puzzles and gave us a few pieces of someone else’s dad. And someone else got the missing pieces of my dad.

And that has to be it, because we certainly didn’t get those last few pieces.

“Nobody’s only one thing, Beckett.”

“I know. But how can one person have been so many different things? So many different people?”

“Addiction is an illness.” Amira looks distinctly uncomfortable with the platitude. As if she doesn’t know what else to say. How to help me understand.

“Everyone says that, but what other illnesses do people choose to have?”

She sets her mug down and watches me. She’s sitting very still. “You think he chose to get hooked on pain pills?”

“No. But I think that at some point, he made a decision, right? Isn’t that what really happened? At some point he must have consciously decided that he liked being high better than he liked being with us. Or being alive. Every pill he swallowed was a choice. Every drink he took—same thing.”

“I don’t think it’s ever that simple. I don’t think addicts see it as an either/or kind of situation. I don’t think he chose to die, Beckett. I can’t imagine him wanting to leave you guys.”

“Penn thinks he did.”