As soon as his dad had left, Dylan realized the old man's cell phone sat on the counter. Though Dylan never snooped, all of those strange moments with his dad's incessant texting came to his mind, prompting him to pick up the phone. When he tried to go to the home screen, he found the phone was locked. He entered his own birth date, and voila! It unlocked. His dad was so predictable.

It took him a moment to figure out how the phone worked, but it seemed intuitive enough. Finding the text messages, he noticed quite a few recent texts from a contact named Patrick Garret.

The full name raised a red flag, if only because Patrick Garret was the name of the guy who killed Billy the Kid. Dylan only knew that because Billy the Kid was a big deal in Arizona, and he and his dad used to watch Young Guns and Young Guns II together. Those movies were so fucking corny, but his dad loved them, and Dylan loved them, too. As a teenager, he'd loved the part where the woman with the curly red hair rode out on a horse, naked, and told everyone to kiss her ass.

The two of them had tried to get Ellie to watch the movies, but she'd always refused, saying the movies were way too "manly" and "western" for her. This made Dylan think Patrick Garrett sounded like the perfect pseudonym for a contact his dad wanted to hide from Ellie.

Patrick Garrett's number had a Colorado area code, but nothing else about it jumped out at Dylan, so he decided to dial it into his own phone. His finger hit "send," and he hoped he'd reach voicemail and find out whose phone it was. Even if someone answered, he could hear their voice and see if they sounded like a Patrick or not; maybe he could ask them about their architectural services.

To his complete surprise, his phone said dialing Trina. He hung up quickly, hoping the call wouldn't register in her missed calls.

"What's wrong, Daddy?" Talia asked, standing below him, looking up at his face, ever intuitive.

"It's grown-up stuff, Angel Hair," he told her, but even as he bent down to kiss her, he gritted his teeth. To think he'd almost been ready to forgive that dick.

Before he knew it, someone knocked at his door, and Dylan brought the phone in his hand to answer it. As expected, the dick himself stood there, so Dylan gave him the phone. His dad took it and thanked him, and Dylan gave no outward signs that he knew anything.

Later that night, Leah and Trigger came over to eat, and Leah asked Dylan, "So, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?"

"My mom's coming over to my dad's. My real mom."

"With Ellie there?"

"Yep."

"Oh. That will probably be awkward."

"Yeah. It probably will," Dylan said. He didn't ask what Leah would be doing, because he already knew the answer: she'd be spending Thanksgiving alone, just her and Trigger. She didn't seem to have many, if any, friends in Mountain Springs. He wished he could ask her over. His dad had just told him you are old enough to make your own choices, and that seemed like a statement with implicit permission to keep dating Leah. But it didn't imply that Leah could be invited over for familial affairs. Dylan couldn't forget what Ellie had told him that one day after Trigger had chased her cat with Avery's lacrosse stick: "That woman is not welcome in my home."

To shift the focus off of Thanksgiving, Dylan took Leah's face in his hands and kissed her. They couldn't spend Thanksgiving together, but he hoped they could be together for all the days after. Maybe someday, the shitty people in his life would quit trying to sabotage his happiness. 

And maybe then he would try to quit sabotaging theirs.