Iris's POV
The words sat in my ear for a second before they fully registered. I pulled the phone away, stared at the screen like it might explain itself, then put it back.
“What do you mean by that?” My voice came out flatter than I meant. “You’ve been distant for months, Dad. You barely texts, no calls. Now all of a sudden you want me to come home?”
There was a short silence on the other end. I could hear him breathing, the faint sound of a TV somewhere in the background of his house.
“Your stepmother’s traveling,” he said finally. “Business trip. She would be gone for eight weeks. The house feels empty. I thought… we could reconnect, just the two of us. No tension. No arguments, like it used to be before everything got complicated.”
I sat down harder on the edge of the bed. My free
