Chapter 20
David
“Hey,” Nora says, and my whole body floods with heat at the sound.
“Hey.”
For a second I just listen to her breathe.
It’s absurd how much that steadies me.
“Were you waiting for me to call?” I ask.
There’s a soft rustle on her end, like fabric shifting. “No,” she says, and then, after half a beat, “Maybe a little. At least, I was debating whether I should call you.”
Despite everything, my mouth tilts.
“I thought you said principals weren’t supposed to encourage poor impulse control.”
“I didn’t encourage it. I simply answered the phone.”
“On the first ring.”
“David.” Her voice warms around my name in that way of hers that always feels more intimate than it should. “It’s the night before your hearing. I wasn’t going to let it go to voicemail and hope for the best.”
I close my eyes and lean back against the counter. The kitchen is dim except for the light over the stove. The rest of the house has gone quiet.
“How are you?” she asks.
I think about lying. Briefly. Out of habit more than intent.
“Not great,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says softly. “Me neither.”
The tension in my chest loosens at that. Not because I want her anxious. God, no. But because there’s relief in not having to perform competence for one more person tonight.
“I had an invasion,” I tell her.
“A hostile one?”
“Extremely. There’s obviously a group chat I’m not in, because they organized a full-scale occupation. Food, wine, moral support. Dominic brought cheesecake and false scientific claims.”
That gets a laugh out of her, low and immediate, and I have the strange, sharp thought that I’d like to spend the rest of my life hearing that sound from my kitchen table while she pretends she isn’t smiling at me for saying something ridiculous.
Instead, I say, “You would have liked the chaos.”
“Would I?”
“Yes. Michaela spent twenty minutes negotiating her status in the girl squad. Serena declared herself supreme commander. Layla offered bribery by shopping spree. Audrey enticed her with a cephalopod documentary.”
Nora laughs again, quieter this time. “I like your friends. They seem very supportive and kind.”
“They are. I’m lucky to have them.”
Silence settles for a beat. Not awkward. Just full. The kind that feels like sitting beside someone instead of speaking across a distance.
I drag a hand over my mouth. “Michaela’s scared.”
“I know.”
“She asked if I was.”
Another rustle on the line. I picture her shifting on the couch, tucking a leg under herself, Archie lifting his head and resettling when he realizes she isn’t going anywhere. The image arrives fully formed—detailed enough to hurt.
I want—with a ferocity that has no business existing this late on a Thursday—to be on that couch with her.
My hand on her thigh. Her weight against my side.
The two of us quiet together in the dark before tomorrow tears everything open.
I want to press my mouth to the spot below her ear where she shivers, feel her fingers tighten in my shirt, and know that this time, neither of us is going to apologize or leave.
“What did you say?” she asks.
“The truth.”
“Good.”
“I’m not sure that’s good.”
“It is with her.” Her voice is gentle but certain. “Children know when you’re lying to protect them. They usually think the lie means the truth is worse than it is.”
I look down at the counter, at the faint ring left by someone’s wine glass. “You always know exactly how to say things.”
“That is an extremely generous interpretation of my word vomit,” she says, and it’s meant to land as a joke. But neither of us laughs.
We stay there a while, caught between the lines.
I want to ask her if she’s scared too. If she’s thinking about the hearing tomorrow.
If she’s thinking about me. But I don’t, because I can hear it in the way she slows her breathing, in the way the ends of her sentences trail off, like she wants to say something but isn’t sure she should.
“Nora,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“We’re going to lose tomorrow.”
The words come out flat. Clinical. The voice I use when I’m delivering a legal assessment to a client.
Here are the facts. Here is the probable outcome.
Here is what we’re facing. Except this isn’t a client assessment.
This is the thing I’ve been unable to say to Caleb, to my father, to anyone, because saying it makes it real.
“Don’t say that, David. You aren’t losing your little girl.”
“Not the case,” I clarify. “Not the whole thing. But the preliminary hearing. The judge is going to grant visitation. Kelsie’s narrative is too clean.
She’s done the therapy, the classes, the stable marriage.
Thomas Canning’s name on the affidavit gives her credibility she doesn’t deserve.
And the system—the system is built to favor contact.
Reunification. The idea that every child benefits from knowing both parents. ”
“Even when the mother signed her rights away and is now performing? I saw her at the school, David. I don’t believe for a second she’s doing this for Michaela.”
“Neither do I.”
“I think she married a very wealthy man who found out she had a child she didn’t want. And to save face, she concocted a story to make herself the wounded party.” A pause. “It’s just so wrong.”
“I know. And I agree with your assessment. I’m not one to badmouth another, but I have very valid reasons for wanting to keep Kelsie away.
To the courts, though, a performing mother with a rehabilitation story looks like a trying mother—and judges love a trying mother.
” I swallow. “And I’m going to have to sit there and watch it happen.
And then I’m going to have to come home and tell Michaela that the woman who left her is getting access to her life, and there’s nothing I can do about it. ”
Nora doesn’t respond right away.
“You don’t know the outcome,” she says.
“I know the math.”
“You know the probabilities. That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s close enough.”
“It isn’t.” Her voice is firm now. Not arguing—anchoring.
“David, you’ve been preparing for this hearing with the two best lawyers in Chicago for six weeks.
You have a documented record of sole parenting that spans Michaela’s entire life.
You have incident reports, behavioral assessments, testimony from people who have watched you show up every single day. That’s not nothing.”
“It might not be enough.”
“It might not,” she agrees, and the honesty of it steadies me more than any reassurance could. “But even if the judge grants visitation, it isn’t the end. It’s a ruling. Rulings can be challenged. Evidence accumulates. And Kelsie—” She pauses. “Kelsie can only perform for so long.”
She’s right. I know she’s right. The logical part of my brain—the part that builds cases and calculates odds—has been telling me the same thing for weeks.
But logic doesn’t account for the image of Michaela’s face when I tell her she has to spend time with a stranger who calls herself Mom.
And it doesn’t protect her from the pain of what happens when the performance stops.
“I’m scared for her,” I say. It comes out raw.
Unedited. The kind of admission I don’t make, because making it would mean acknowledging that the control I’ve been performing my entire life has limits.
That there are things I can’t protect my daughter from, no matter how good my lawyers are, no matter how right I am, no matter how many spreadsheets and strategies and sleepless nights I throw at the problem.
“I know,” Nora says. “I’m scared for her too.”
The tension in my chest gives way. A slow release that makes me realize how long I’ve been holding it.
“Do you need me there tomorrow?” she asks.
The question is simple. Direct. Offered with the same steady certainty she brings to everything.
“It’s not a good idea,” I say.
“That’s not what I asked.” Her voice is gentle but immovable. “I asked what you need.”
I stand in my dark kitchen, phone pressed to my ear, and think about what I need.
I need to win tomorrow. I need Michaela to be safe.
I need Kelsie to be exposed for what she is.
I need the judge to see what everyone who actually knows my daughter already knows—that she is bright and brave and loved and thriving, and the woman petitioning the court has contributed nothing to any of it.
I need to stop being afraid of wanting things.
I need the woman on the other end of this phone to be in the same room as me, not because it’s strategic or advisable or professionally appropriate, but because when she’s there I can breathe, and when she’s not I’m running on discipline, caffeine, and the rapidly depleting reserves of a man who has been doing this alone for too long.
“I need you there.”
It comes out quiet. Stripped of every legal framework, every professional justification, every carefully constructed argument I usually wrap my feelings in before releasing them into the world.
Just the bare, undefended truth.
Nora is quiet for a moment. When she speaks, her voice is thick with something I don’t have the courage to name.
“Then I’ll be there.”