Also, I would bet my meager life savings that Mikey Danger doesn’t even know how to make a bed.

“Okay. Um. Thank you, then,” I say, grabbing a coffee and a blueberry muffin. “This was really nice of you.”

Nick meets my gaze. “I went downstairs. Not a big deal.”

I take a sip of the coffee and grimace. “Wow. This certainly isn’t Nick Velez coffee.”

Nick smiles, the half smirk that means we’re both in on a joke, one of my favorites. “They can’t all be winners.”

“I’ll take what I can get right now,” I say. I reach for my phone and realize that, in all the drama of last night, I left it in my bag. I cross the room, shoving the muffin in my mouth, and dig it out. When I touch the screen, I have multiple missed calls from Tracey.

“Oh, no,” I say, spraying muffin crumbs onto the screen.

Chapter Fifteen

I know Nick is taking it easy on me because he lets me listen to yacht rock the whole way home. It might have something to do with how I started crying right after I called Tracey back. She reassured me that nothing was seriously wrong, but Dad got into a shouting match with Ralph across the hall because he swore, again, that Ralph was sneaking into his room and attempting to reprogram his TV. This happens a lot and, like Tracey said, it’s not urgent, but I want her to call me every time Dad has an episode. If I don’t go check on him and calm him down, then who will?

“I don’t know why, but he keeps pressing the input button on his TV remote, and then the TV doesn’t work because he can’t figure out how to switch it back, and then he blames poor Ralph across the hall for the problem,” I explain to Nick.

“What does Ralph do about it?” Nick asks, keeping his eyes on the road.

I shrug. “I don’t know. Ralph seems to spend most of his days watching his own TV. I don’t think he’s ever been in my dad’s room.”

Ralph also, I note only to myself, has multiple children who visit him often, not one beleaguered daughter who has to shoulder all the responsibility. All that and a TV that reliably works! What doesn’t Ralph have?

I lean my head against the truck window. “I’m sorry I panicked back there.”

“Chloe. You don’t have to apologize. Anyone would freak out if they were worried about their parents.”

I turn to look at Nick. “And your parents?”

“What about them?”

“Are they, like, around? Did one of them abandon your family to run off to Ann Arbor with a man she met on the Internet in the ’90s?”

“Is that what your mom did?”

“Yes, but we’re talking about your parents now.”

“My mom’s great. My dad’s out of the picture.”

He says it with a finality that shuts me up. For once, I don’t want to badger Nick with questions, because I think about what Shivan and Doug said about him at the bowling alley—that he doesn’t open up to everyone, that something happened with his dad. Maybe, for once, I’ll have to trust Nick to tell me when he’s ready.