You don't have to decide what to call a sister—mine was just her name, Iris, the girl as beautiful as the flower she was named after. But it was different with Joe. I'd been thinking of him as my dad for quite a while before I decided I wanted to call him that, and then it was weird.

Should I slip it into casual conversation? Should I tell him I was going to do it and, like, make a big deal out of it? I didn't know what to do.

It seems like maybe it shouldn't have been such a huge thing, but I didn't want to ruin the good vibe we had going. That's also why I didn't ask him if I could move in. He'd been letting me use the house for a while, to get away from the dorms occasionally, but then a bunch of new people came to our school for the new semester, and campus housing doubled in price. I couldn't swing that and classes, so I started sleeping on the floor of my buddy Jill's house. Problem was, she had three other guys living with her, and the whole place looked like it hadn't been cleaned since 1985. I searched the Internet for cheap places. I even went to the city Chamber of Commerce. Everything was out of my price range.

I knew Joe had a room; Iris had lived in it her whole life before college, and now it was a guest bedroom, but there's a big difference between letting a guy use your house once in a while to do homework for a couple of hours during the day and letting him move into your spare room. I trusted Joe, but I wasn't sure he trusted me yet. I tried to hint a couple of times, just in case he somehow wanted me, but it didn't go anywhere. That was too much to hope for, I figured. I was still the extra kid.

It's not like Joe wasn't nice. I mean, he offered me a ton of money so I could stay in the dorms. But that's not what I wanted. He'd done enough offering to pay off Mama's hospital bills, and it's not like he was getting rich off a detective's salary. It's just that—when I thought about moving in, it seemed like such a cool thing. To live in the house with my dad, not to have to drive over every time I wanted to say hi. To feel like I had a family again. Even living down the hall from Barry didn't seem like a bad deal; I was starting to think he was a pretty cool guy. After a while, living in Joe's house felt like that thing you want more than anything, that you're never going to get. And I couldn't just ask, because then he would feel like he had to say yes, whether he wanted to or not.

You know what I said about Barry being a cool guy? Turns out, he got it. He's the one who told Joe what I was really getting at when I dropped those hints about having nowhere to live. He saw straight through me, all the way to how much I wanted a home. I guess—you know, Barry didn't have Dr. Allen for eleven years. If anyone was going to understand what it's like to want to be with your dad as much as possible, it would be him.

So I came over one day, and Joe was renovating his guest room for me. Just like that. No weird, dramatic production. Just him, putting up posters, saying he was sorry he hadn't caught on sooner, that Barry had been the one to open his eyes. I said yes to moving in faster than the Flash brushes his teeth in the morning.

You know how, most of the time, life feels pretty random? Things don't usually happen the way they do in movies; nothing's perfect. Except, this was. My dad invited me into his house, the house he'd shared with my mom, then Iris, then Barry, the house that held his entire life. He made me part of that life, and he put his arms around me, and I called him Dad. Then and there, standing in my new room, knowing that my life was going to change forever, it was the exact, perfect, right time. Joe was a cop, a guy who'd been married to my mom. My dad was the guy who renovated a room just so I could live in it, who asked me how I was doing every day, who hugged me when I came and when I left, who told me off when he thought I was making bad decisions.

Home isn't really a place. I guess we all know that. I didn't want to move in because Joe West had a nice place in the suburbs. I wanted to move in because that place, every nook and cranny of it, was filled with love—the loving care that came from my father and touched everybody who came into contact with him.

I set my first bag down on the floor by the bed, and tears filled my eyes. "Mama, I'm home," I whispered. I knew she'd be smiling.