Joe was cool. I mean, I hadn't expected him to be an axe murderer or anything, but he was a high-level police detective, and I didn't expect the kind of chill he had in the weeks following my mom's passing.

It wasn't so weird that he was cool about me coming and going. There were a couple of times I pushed a little bit—stood him up for coffee or didn't show for dinner, and he didn't even get onto me about it. He was more like a friend than a dad, but I figured that if you didn't meet your dad until you were my age, that was probably how it went.

I was a lot more surprised when he came to the races and didn't go ballistic. To tell the truth, the way I look back and see it now, I was really pushing him by then. I wanted to see where friend mode ended and dad mode started. Except, there didn't seem to be any kind of line. He was just chill.

"This is great," I told myself. Except, it didn't feel that great. There was a way that Joe and my sister were, together, that I didn't have with him. It wasn't just about the extra years they'd had. It was the way they related, the way Joe would still tell her to be careful, the way he would scold her when he found out she'd walked home by herself after working late at night, the way she would stand close to him when we were talking. I don't even think she realized she was doing it, but it was like she used him as a protective shield when she was feeling insecure. It wasn't just the years; the way they related to each other said volumes about a father who had his daughter's full respect and about a woman who was independent but still saw him as her dad.

Iris noticed the difference too. We were getting burgers for lunch three weeks after mom's funeral, when she lasered in on me. "Why are you still racing? Hasn't Dad talked to you?"

"Joe's cool about it," I said, not calling him Dad on purpose.

Iris rolled her eyes. "Our dad is a lot of things—he's loving; he's protective; he's trustworthy. He's somebody you stake your life on. But one thing he isn't is 'cool' about things that are dangerous and illegal. He doesn't have a chill bone in his body about things like that."

I shrugged. "Don't ask me."

She pursed her lips. "Well, he may have lost his mind, but I haven't lost mine, and I don't know what you're thinking."

I finished the last bite of my burger and got up. "We're not having some kind of brother and sister fight right now, Iris. Joe is fine with what I do, so either get fine with it, or get out."

It was a jerk thing to say, and I saw hurt register across her face the moment I'd said it. I got out of there as fast as I could, not wanting to go back and face her right then. I figured I'd at least been strong enough to keep her from messing with me about the racing any more. But I didn't know my sister. Not really.

My sister Iris didn't give up on things she believed in, and she especially didn't give up on people she loved. And she loved me, a lot more than I deserved to be loved right then.

But Iris wasn't totally unlike me, either, so she dressed up and threatened a crime boss and came to the races herself, things as dangerous as anything I'd ever done. We're like that in our family, I guess.

But then everything happened really fast, and The Flash showed up, but Iris got hurt anyway. Iris, my big sister, got stabbed by a shard of glass that moved faster than anything I'd ever seen. It felt like watching my mother die all over again, except in an instant instead of over time. My breath caught, my heart pounded, and I thought I was going to pass out, but I didn't.

I—it wasn't glass that went for my sister; it was me. The glass never would have been there if she'd had a better brother. The Flash wouldn't have had to save me, and I wouldn't have nearly cost Joe his only daughter. It was all my fault for racing like a maniac when I didn't even need to any more.

I didn't know what to do. I thought about running away from Central City, never looking back and pretending that I'd never found out about Iris or Joe. But I could hear my mama's voice in my head, telling me not to be a coward, to own up to my mistake, even when it was a huge one.

So I dressed up nice, and I bought some flowers, and I squared my shoulders. If I was going to see Joe and Iris for the last time, I was going to do it right. I was going to take their rejection like a man and admit that I'd failed—to be the brother Iris deserved or the son Joe should have had. I would go to the hospital and tell them how sorry I was, and that would be that. I would leave and live my life and act like I'd never had any family except the mother I'd lost.

The hospital wasn't that weird to me. I'd spent plenty of time there with my mother. I found Iris's room, and that's when I started to get shaky. I opened the door, and my sister was lying in bed, looking like our mom, with oxygen and an IV. And Joe had worry lines in his forehead and looked like he hadn't slept.

"It's ok, Wally." I hadn't expected that, and it jolted me on the inside. My sister looked over at me, and she didn't look mad. I didn't know what to do—nothing was going how I'd thought it would.

I couldn't remember anything I'd planned to say, so I mumbled something stupid about the flowers I was holding and left them on a table in Iris's room. I turned around to leave, figuring that even if it wasn't the exit from their lives that I'd planned, at least I hadn't left without seeing them one last time.

Only, that's not how it went at all. I left Joe and Iris together, but I didn't get away. A tall cop with a deep voice followed me down the hall. My pulse quickened, but I stopped to listen to Joe. I wanted to hear what he had to say, even if he was gong to start yelling. At least it would be something, a sign that he was paying attention—that maybe he didn't want to see the last of me.

I'd planned to take responsibility for everything that had happened to Iris, but when I was face-to-face with Joe, I suddenly had a desperate desire to convince him it wasn't my fault, to try to make him think I wasn't as much of a loser as I felt like I was. The funny thing is, he didn't even care about that. What he cared about was me taking my life in my hands—and about me leaving my family when they needed me and I needed them. My family.

I'm not sure I would have stayed even after that, but then he said something I realized I'd been waiting for him to say all along. "I'm not your friend, Wally. I'm your father." Friends had always been a part of my life, coming and going. I could find friends anywhere. But I'd never had a dad, and that's the thing I'd always wanted.

Right then and there, walking down a hospital hallway, I'd found Joe West's line. Almost losing me was what made him stop trying to be my fake friend and let himself be my real dad, a dad who told me he wasn't going to let me go. I believed him, and as I walked back to Iris's room, I thought about exactly what he'd said—that he waited up at night, worried because he had a son who put his life on the line all the time. I probably should have felt bad about that, but it just made me feel a little bit safer in the world.

When I got back to the room, Iris was asleep, so I sat in the chair by the window and closed my eyes and let myself think about what it meant to hear Joe's voice calling me his son, to feel his hand on my shoulder, to get full-on dad mode—and not mind, because it just felt right.

I'd expected to walk into that hospital room and end up without any family, but instead I found myself sitting beside my sister, feeling kind of warm and calm because I was part of something and not rejected after all. My dad—now that he was acting like my dad—had this way of chilling me out, calming me down, defusing what I was feeling. He was always like that; that was just the first time I'd experienced it for myself—far from the last, though. I couldn't think of him as Joe West any more. That was too far away, and I was starting to feel closer. He wasn't just the guy who served me dinner once a week any more.

He was the one who wouldn't let me go. He was my dad.