Chapter 6 - The Long Way Down
It went fast after that.
The bank took the penthouse. He moved into a one-bedroom in Queens with a radiator that knocked all night. The people who used to laugh at his jokes stopped answering his messages. To make rent he took a mid-level accounting job at a logistics company, sitting in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, checking other people's numbers.
At night he sat in that cramped apartment staring at the wallpaper peeling off the corner, and he thought about Claire. The quiet way she'd run his entire life without him ever noticing. The way she was with the kids. He'd decided a long time ago that kind meant weak. It was the worst call he ever made.
He wanted to see his children. He told himself he'd get on his knees in the street if that's what it took.
He found a guy online who, for a week of his salary, pulled the Kensington address out of the legal filings. Then he booked the cheapest red-eye to Heathrow he could find and spent almost the last of what he had.
On a wet Tuesday, months after the divorce, he came up the block in a suit that hadn't been pressed in weeks and stood across the street from a townhouse with ivy on the brick and a red door.
He started across. He got his hand halfway up to knock.
Then the mail carrier came up the steps and pushed a thick envelope through the slot. A loose sheet of paper slipped out and fluttered down onto the wet stone.
Preston picked it up.
A kid's drawing. Bright crayon. A tall house with a red door, a woman with long hair, two children holding hands in a garden. A big yellow sun in the corner. And under it, in Lily's careful, wobbly letters:
WE ARE HAPPY
May you like
He wasn't in the picture. Nobody had drawn a dad. He'd just been left out.
He set it back on the step. The rain was already bleeding the colors together. He turned around and walked back toward the Tube and let the gray city close over him.
