“I’ve been trying to figure out what to say for the last five minutes,” she admitted, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I still haven’t landed on anything better than thank you.”
“Thank you for what?” I asked.
“For seeing him,” she said. “The way I always saw him. It’s a rare thing, a kid noticing what a grown man quietly gives up for him.”
Jonah and Lily came running off the porch then, Lily asking loudly what a petition was, Jonah just grinning like he already understood more than his nine-year-old sister did.
“It means Eli wants Dad to actually be his dad,” Jonah said. “Like, officially.”
“He already is,” Lily said, matter-of-fact the way only a nine-year-old can manage. “This is just paperwork.”
Out of the mouths of children, apparently.
The rest of the party happened almost normally after that, cake and off-key singing and Mom crying twice more before the night was over, though the second time was clearly happy crying.
Lily insisted on sitting next to me the whole time, sliding her chair closer until our shoulders touched, not saying much, just occasionally patting my arm like she was checking I was still real.
“Are you gonna be sad?” she asked at one point, quiet enough that only I could hear it. “About your other dad?”
“A little,” I admitted. “But not the way I used to be. This is a different kind of sad. The kind that doesn’t need fixing.”
She nodded like that made perfect sense to her, then went back to carefully picking every sprinkle off the top of her cake slice, one at a time, the way she always did.
I didn’t drive the car that night. It sat in the driveway, untouched, while everyone else went inside.
I stood at the window for a minute, watching it catch the porch light, trying to decide how I felt about something that expensive sitting there meaning almost nothing to me anymore.
I found Marcus in the garage around ten, sitting on an overturned bucket, staring at nothing in particular.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I keep thinking about the day I married your mom,” he said. “I promised myself I wouldn’t try to replace anyone. I just wanted to help, quietly, without making it a thing.”
“You didn’t replace anyone,” I said. “There wasn’t anyone there to replace. That’s kind of the problem I was trying to fix.”
He laughed, a wet, surprised sound.
“Your father used to call twice a year,” he said. “Birthday, sometimes Christmas. I always wondered if it bothered you, him being so far away but never quite gone.”
“It used to,” I admitted. “For a long time I thought if I just did well enough, at something, anything, he’d notice and come back for real. Tonight kind of cured me of that.”
Marcus rubbed a hand over his face, the way he did when something hit harder than he wanted to show.
“I’m sorry he did that to you,” Marcus said. “Tonight, and every other night before it.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Not anymore. He handed me a car to make a point about blood. I think I just made a better one.”
We sat in that garage for another twenty minutes, not saying much, the kind of silence that doesn’t need filling.
“Can I ask you something?” I said eventually. “About Jonah and Lily’s mom. You never really talk about it.”
