Free Set Me Free by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Grand Canyon or Mesa Verde, where
     they had Indian ruins? She’d been in her Manifest Destiny phase. But her usually freewheeling father had issued a sharp “No.
     We do not go west of the Mississippi.” His clarity on that point was unforgettable.
    “You’re kidding me, right?”
    “Nope.”
    “Jesus Christ, Dad. So let me get this straight. With no warning, you’ve packed up half our house, even the cat, you’ve decided
     you’re going to Oregon, of all places, which is, may I remind you,
west of the Mississippi,
and you’re, like, leaving me here for a totally unplanned period of time.”
    “I guess that about sums it up.”
    Willa crossed her arms and caught him in her sights. “Is this some kind of trap?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, you
do
know what teenagers do when they have a house all to themselves, don’t you? Are you going to be hiding in the bushes, watching
     to see if I bring any boys over?”
    “Of course not, Willa,” Nat said gravely. “I trust you.”
    Playfulness left Willa when she heard how serious her father was. “So you’re just going to
leave
me.” She was taut again, preparing herself. For what, she didn’t know. But she’d forgotten that when he made decisions like
     this, she had to keep herself prepared for anything.
    “Look, kiddo, you’re welcome to come with me.”
    She laughed bitterly.
    “What?” As if he didn’t know why.
    “I knew it. We’re moving.”
    “No,” Nat said, and it was the first time in the conversation that he sounded like
her
father and not some stock version of himself he’d summoned up for the occasion. “I promised you. This is where we live now.
     We will always come back.”
    “Dad.” Willa stressed the word, so it sang out of her. “Come on. School will be over in a month. We can go camping then. My
     art show’s next week. I don’t want you to miss it.”
    “This cannot wait.”
    “You always do this. When something matters to me, when something actually matters, when I care about someone, when I finally
     have a friend… You
love
this, don’t you? You love doing this to me.”
    “I do not love anything about this,” Nat said, looking down at his hands on the steering wheel. He was not going to let Willa
     see the tears welling in his eyes. But she saw them anyway. The tears changed the conversation, because they brought Willa
     back to the car. She put both hands on the lip of the window and leaned down to get a better look.
    “Dad,” she said, in a soothing voice. “I know sometimes you feel like, you know, things are too hard to handle. Like it’s
     better to leave a place, to escape it? And I understand that, I really do. But we have to stop this. We
have
stopped it. We don’t need to move anymore. Remember how much I love my school? And how much we love our house? And the garden?
     And how you like your boss now? You’re getting really good work. And you’re making your furniture again.” She put her hand
     over her father’s. “We’re happy here,” she said. “We don’t need to run away.”
    “I’m not running away,” Nat said, and when he looked at her, his chocolate eyes were calm again. “I’m going to Oregon.”
    Willa sighed and withdrew. “Why?” He had seemed so muchmore sensible over the last three years. She had loved him even more because he was normal, reasonable, acting like a father,
     but still himself. Still fun. Maybe he’d been lying all along.
    “Because,” he said, “I made a promise to your mother.”
    Willa could barely breathe. Hearing that word was like being punched in the stomach. “What did you say?”
    “Before she died, I told Caroline I would find a man named Elliot Barrow. She made me promise I would find him.” Nat winced
     from the memory. “I made a pact with her. Just before she died. And this morning I heard something on NPR. Elliot Barrow is
     a very well-known man, and apparently, he has been in a terrible accident. He was in a fire. He will