December 1987 Six months. Lanterns had started appearing in windows up and down the street. Someone two houses down played José Mari Chan every morning without fail. Riley had stopped finding it funny by the third week and started finding it comforting somewhere around the fifth.

Riley almost missed it.

He had been sitting on the roof of Miguel's house that evening — he had discovered three days ago that if you climbed up using the water tank as a step, there was a flat portion where you could sit and see three streets in every direction. He went there sometimes when the smallness of everything got too loud. The wooden walls. The borrowed room. The weight of knowing.

He was watching the sky do nothing in particular when he heard Miguel come up behind him.

"You are here," Miguel said, pulling himself up with both arms and sitting beside him without being invited. He had stopped asking permission for things like that. It was a Miguel trait, Riley had noticed. He simply showed up, and somehow it never felt like intrusion.

They sat in silence for a while.

The neighborhood settled into its evening sounds. Mothers calling children inside. The tinkling bell of the ice cream cart making its last round. Somewhere, a radio playing a love song that Riley almost recognized.

"I'm going to ask her," Miguel said.

Riley turned to look at him.

Miguel was staring straight ahead, jaw set, like he was announcing something to the sky and Riley just happened to be nearby.

"Ask her what?" Riley said carefully.

"To be my girlfriend." Miguel picked at a loose piece of roofing. "Officially. I want to do it properly. Not just — You know. I want to say it. Out loud. To her face."

Riley looked back at the horizon.

"Okay," he said.

"I've never—" Miguel stopped. Started again. "I've never wanted to be careful with someone before. You know? Like. I keep thinking about what I say to her before I say it. I keep thinking about whether she ate. Whether she got home safe." He shook his head slightly, like the feeling still surprised him. "It's exhausting."

Riley's mouth curved despite itself. "Yeah."

"Is that what it's supposed to feel like?"

Riley thought about it honestly.

He was twenty-two years old and he had not yet loved someone the way his father was describing. He had been too busy. Too tired. Too focused on the finish line to stop and think about whether anyone had eaten.

But he had watched his parents for his entire life.

And he knew the answer.

"I think," Riley said slowly, "that's exactly what it's supposed to feel like."

Miguel nodded once. Like that settled something.

They were quiet again.

Then Miguel said, softer this time: "I don't have much to offer her."

Riley didn't respond immediately.

"I don't have a stable job yet. I don't have my own house. I can't promise her big things." Miguel turned the piece of roofing over in his fingers. "But I keep thinking — if she says yes, I will spend the rest of my life making sure she never regrets it."

The radio from the neighboring house drifted up between them.

Riley felt the back of his throat tighten.

She won't regret it, he thought. She never did. Not once. Not even at the end.

"Tell her that," Riley said. His voice came out steady. He was proud of that.

"What?"

"What you just told me. Tell her that." He paused. "Not the big promises. Just that one. That you'll spend the rest of your life making sure she never regrets it."

Miguel looked at him.

There was something in his father's eyes just then — curiosity, maybe, or the particular attention people give you when something lands truer than expected.

"You talk like someone who's already lived a long time," Miguel said.

Riley said nothing.

Miguel let it go, the way he always did. He was good at that — letting things rest without pulling at them. Another thing Riley had never appreciated until now.

He watched from across the street the following evening.

He had promised himself he would keep his distance. That he would find something else to do, somewhere else to be.

He lasted approximately four minutes before positioning himself behind a parked kalesa with a clear line of sight.

Miguel found Melissa outside her gate just as she was coming home from her shift, still in her uniform, hair slightly wilted from the heat. She looked tired in the way young people look tired — completely, and yet still bright underneath it.

Miguel said something Riley couldn't hear.

Melissa looked up at him.

Miguel said something else. Longer this time. Riley watched his father's hands — which had been at his sides — move slightly, the way hands do when the mouth is saying something the whole body means.

Melissa was very still.

Then she said something.

And Miguel exhaled — visibly, completely, like he had been holding that breath for weeks.

And Melissa laughed. Her hand came up to cover her mouth.

And just like that, in the ordinary yellow light of an ordinary street, with a kalesa blocking Riley's view of the lower half of everything and a radio still playing somewhere and the smell of neighbor's cooking in the air —

His parents began.

Riley pressed his back against the kalesa.

He looked up at the sky.

He had seen the photographs. The ones from the early years — his parents young and unworried, standing close together, his mother always slightly tilted toward his father like a plant finding light. He had looked at those photographs and understood them as history. As before.

He had never understood them as this.

As a moment that felt, from the inside, like the most ordinary and extraordinary thing in the world.

He closed his eyes.

You're going to be so happy, he thought. Both of them. Neither of them. The evening itself. You're going to be so happy, and you're going to build something real, and you're going to have a family, and it is going to be beautiful and hard and worth every single thing it costs.

And I'm sorry I didn't understand that sooner.

I'm sorry, Mom. I'm sorry, Dad.

Thank you.

He stayed until he heard Melissa's gate close.

Then he walked back slowly, hands in his pockets, face tilted slightly upward.

Exactly the way his father had walked home after their first date.

He only noticed halfway down the street.

And he didn't try to walk any differently.