Chapter 4
four
Emerson’s shoulders relaxed as he pulled in front of Jayden’s house, a modernized bungalow on a garden-lined Portland street.
He’d been up early, as usual for a Saturday, prepping all the boxes for the CSA pickup and the market. And even if he had only had the one beer the night before, he could tell it did affect him. His movements a little slow, head a little sluggish. The drive here felt particularly long.
Worth it, though. The drive here was always worth it. He used to only come to the city for market days and CSA pickups, but now he could schedule those things around what really mattered: Daisy pickups.
Well, dropoffs, too. But they weren’t as fun as the pickups.
“Da-dee!”
Daisy’s blonde pigtails bounced in the sun as she ran out to meet him.
Her hair was thin, wispy, barely long enough to fit in said ponytails—Emerson had always been sorry she’d inherited his hair genes instead of Jayden’s, whose dark brown hair was thick and full—but Jayden had parted the blonde locks clean down the middle and brushed them to a shine, as he always did.
“Daisy daze.” Emerson scooped her up, propped her on his hip. It was harder and harder to do these days, picking up his girl without it twinging his back, but he’d take it as long as he could. “Poppy inside?”
He and Jay had each chosen the paternal nickname that felt right to them—Papa for Jay, just Dad for Emerson—but Daisy had put her own spin on things. Papa turned into Poppy, Dad to Daddy, but with one of Daisy’s signature pronounced pauses in the middle: Da-dee.
Emerson knew one day that pause would disappear, that her enunciation would smooth itself out. But part of him hoped it never would. That she’d whisper, thanks, Da-dee, when he hugged her at her high school graduation.
Daisy nodded, tugged on his ear.
“Making snack.”
“Ah.” Emerson continued past Jayden’s roses and shrubs, reached for the handle of the front door. “The most important part of the day. Was your nap okay?”
Daisy turned suddenly shy, hiding her face away as Emerson entered the foyer. The bright turquoise frames of her glasses knocked into the side of his chin.
“I don’t know.”
“I think she knows,” Jayden intoned from the kitchen down the hall, “that she didn’t sleep at all.”
Emerson gasped, dramatic. “Not at all?”
Daisy giggled into his neck. “I wasn’t sleepy!”
Jayden greeted him with a look as they entered the kitchen, a good luck with that look Emerson knew well. Indeed, he understood his imminent future: Daisy would fall asleep on the drive back to the farm and then be wide awake at bedtime.
Still, he somehow couldn’t hold a grudge against that future right now, for the giggle that had just blessed his skin.
“All right, Daze.” He tipped forward; Daisy’s legs dangled before she hopped to the floor. “Go get your backpack, okay?”
“Ho-kay Da-dee.”
Emerson watched as she bounced toward her room, his eyes snagging on the open door to Jay’s office, just before the kitchen.
He smiled at the stacks of papers, the colorful Post-Its and lists tacked to the cork board.
The three—oh, four—mostly-finished mugs of coffee.
Emerson had almost always been the one to clear them away whenever he couldn’t stand it anymore, a harried “sorry, sorry” from Jayden’s lips whenever he caught Emerson loading them into the sink.
He wondered, as he had before, whether Jay eventually collected them himself, now. If he set himself a reminder on his phone, as he was so adept at doing for most other tasks. Or if Yulia did it for him, when she visited on Sunday afternoons.
It should maybe feel strange, visiting the house Jayden moved into after leaving him.
The Divorce House, as Emerson first thought of it.
But now, Emerson only thought of it as Jay’s.
And like everything about Jay, he couldn’t help but love it.
Not just the coffee mugs left around his office, but the clean marble countertops of the kitchen, the subway tile backsplash and navy cabinets, the peachy-pink walls of Daisy’s room, her clutter draped around the floor and on top of the white dresser.
The bones clean and modern, Jayden’s ideal, mixed with a bit of mess, his reality.
Emerson mostly felt grateful he still got to see it. Jay, settling into the life he wanted.
“How’s work going?” Emerson asked. He was already up to speed on how Jay’s week with Daisy had gone; they’d texted about it throughout the week, as they always did. “That big gig with Atlas Athletics?”
Jay glanced up from doling out Cheerios and yogurt chips into a purple cup.
He averted his eyes just as quickly, biting his lip the tiniest fraction—you could barely make out the flash of teeth, would hardly notice if you hadn’t been in love for almost two decades—as he pushed the cup across the counter, toward the stool where Daisy normally sat.
“Oh, you know,” he said, a beat too late. “Fine. Probably.”
“Jay.” Emerson slid onto the stool next to Daisy’s. “I’m sure it’s going better than fine.”
“Yeah, well. What about you? How’s the farm?”
Emerson stole one of Daisy’s Cheerios before weaving his fingers together on the counter.
“There’s actually been a…development I wanted to tell you about.”
Jay had been glancing at his phone. Now, he carefully placed it face down.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, but.” Emerson attempted a smile. “You don’t have to look so worried. It’s a good thing. I think I’ve hired someone.”
Jay raised a brow, tilted his shoulders back. Crossed his arms over his chest. His assessing-but-uncertain stance. “You think you’ve hired someone?”
“Well.” Emerson consciously tried not to squeeze his hands closer together.
“Not all the paperwork has been signed yet.” Emerson should probably make up paperwork.
He’d learned that from Jay: even if it was half bullshit, even if you weren’t a lawyer and didn’t know what the hell you were doing, you should still always have paperwork. “But he’s set to start Monday.”
“And how did you find…him?”
Daisy released a squeal for unknown reasons from her room.
She emerged a second later, racing down the hall to jump onto her stool.
Emerson reached out on reflex, steadying her, smiling down.
The tension in his fingers relaxed as she settled.
She smiled back, her chubby cheeks rising to almost cover her eyes—brown, like Jay’s—before she stuck her fingers into the snack cup.
Her smile gave him the courage to turn back to Jay and say, “At a bar.”
Jayden laughed. Until he understood Emerson wasn’t joking, and he stopped.
“You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“You were at a bar?”
“A brewery, technically. I thought you’d be proud of me.”
“I mean, I am, but—” He raked a hand through his dark hair.
Jayden had started taking testosterone shortly after Daisy’s birth, a plan that had been discussed since the first ultrasound.
And while the changes had always been subtle in real time, they’d become easier for Emerson to notice with the distance between them this last year.
Each pickup and dropoff, even now, there were tiny shifts, ways he’d settled even further into himself.
This motion in particular—raking his hand through his hair in distress, the thick locks shorter now than they were when Emerson met him—felt quintessentially Jay, something he had always done, the flex of muscle in his forearm underneath dark fuzz, the re-flop of hair over his forehead fitting the frame of his face even more beautifully, now.
“Daisy, can you go watch TV in the playroom?”
“Hokay, Poppy,” she said, not protesting a peep at the change in direction even though she’d just sat down.
She was in a spectacularly good mood, high on the rebellion of skipping nap.
She held out her arms for Emerson to help with the altitude change and then hopped away like a rabbit, snacks in hand.
Emerson watched her go before turning back to Jay’s questioning face.
“So you met this guy at a bar, and now he’s going to work at the farm? Did you at least run a background check?”
Emerson knew how it sounded. But running a background check cost money. Money Emerson didn’t have.
He knew Jay would become even more irritated if he said that, though, so he lied instead, just like he’d lied to Luca when he’d said he’d run one. As he had lied to Jay throughout their marriage: always about little things, always to avoid conflict, always done too much.
“Yeah.”
“And can you…” Jay leaned a palm against the counter, stuck his other in his back pocket, clearly uncomfortable. “You can afford him?”
Now Emerson shifted on his seat. He never had been able to lie about anything of true consequence. And he knew, if Luca actually showed up and everything went according to plan, that a strange man living with them would certainly be of consequence.
“We actually made an arrangement. He offered to do the work if I offered him free room and board.”
“He’s staying with you? For free? Wait—” Jayden’s eyes went wide. “There’s going to be a stranger living with Daisy?”
“He’s not a stranger,” Emerson tried to placate. “Well, he’ll be a stranger to Daisy, but his family’s lived in Greyfin Bay a long time. Mostly all fishermen. They’re good people.”
Emerson couldn’t afford an official background check, but he had done his due diligence.
Meaning, he’d texted Mae, who’d asked their partner Dell.
He’d done it this way because he’d figured Dell would ask Liv, whom Emerson had wanted to ask in the first place, since Liv knew everyone in Greyfin Bay.
But as his current most important business partner, he also didn’t want Liv to think he was a dumbass.
And as Jayden’s face currently communicated: it was possible Emerson was being a dumbass.
But Mae was friendly and kind, another relatively recent transplant to the coast from Portland, so he knew they’d get to Liv for him without judgment.