16. Harper
HARPER
Renata catches me smiling at nothing again, which has apparently become a pattern worth commenting on.
“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” she says, sliding a stack of registration cards across the desk toward me. “The smiling at nothing thing.”
“I’m not smiling at nothing.”
“Then what were you smiling at? Because it sure looked like nothing to me.”
I don’t have a good answer that doesn’t involve explaining an entire relationship shift I’m still getting used to myself, so I just shrug and go back to filing, and Renata lets it go for about thirty seconds before circling back anyway.
“You seem different,” she says. “Lighter. Since when?”
“Since things settled down, I guess.”
“Things settled down four months ago. This is more recent than that.” She studies me with the particular focus she usually reserves for spotting a guest trying to sneak an extra person into a single room. “Did something happen?”
“A few somethings, maybe.”
“Harper.”
“I’m not telling you anything at a hotel front desk, Renata. Some things stay private.”
She grins, delighted rather than offended, and doesn’t push further, though I catch her watching me for the rest of the shift with the satisfied expression of someone who’s already guessed correctly and is simply waiting for confirmation.
“For what it’s worth,” she says later, restocking the pen cup like it’s the most casual thing in the world, “I’m glad. Whatever it is. You deserve one thing in your life that isn’t a fight.”
“It’s not a fight. It’s just a different fight than it used to be.”
“That’s practically a confession.”
“It’s practically nothing, and I’m going back to my registration cards now.”
She laughs and lets me go, and I spend the rest of the shift with a small, stubborn smile I don’t bother trying to hide anymore, even when a guest asks if everything’s all right, concerned by a front desk employee who seems entirely too pleased about a broken ice machine on the third floor that still, four months later, nobody’s fixed.
My phone buzzes around four, a text from Denise, a reminder about the visitation schedule starting next week, the Ivanovs’ four supervised hours every other Saturday, arranged through a court-appointed monitor at a family center downtown.
I stare at the text longer than it requires. It’s routine, expected, part of the ruling from months ago that I mostly managed to put out of my mind once the case itself was settled.
Still, seeing it in writing, a real date attached to it now, sits differently than the abstract idea of visitation did back in that courtroom.
I hadn’t thought much about the actual mechanics of it, Ginger sitting across a table from her grandparents in some fluorescent-lit family center, a stranger with a clipboard watching to make sure nothing goes wrong.
I text back a simple “got it, thank you,” and add a second message before I can talk myself out of it. “Does Ginger need to know ahead of time, or is it better to just tell her the day of?”
Denise responds a few minutes later. Usually better to give kids a heads up, so it doesn’t feel sudden. Up to you on timing, but I’d say sometime this week.
I put the phone away and try not to spiral about something that isn’t actually a crisis, just an appointment on a calendar, the same appointment that’s been sitting there since the ruling, waiting patiently for its date to finally arrive.
By six, my feet ache and my voice is going hoarse from a full shift of small talk, but even that feels lighter than it used to, the ordinary exhaustion of a normal day instead of the particular exhaustion of a life that used to feel like it was one bad week away from falling apart entirely.
By the time I get home, Ginger’s already had dinner with Viktor, some experiment involving a new pasta recipe that apparently went reasonably well based on the state of the kitchen.
I decide to tell her about Saturday before bed, gently, the way Denise suggested, while she’s still in the kitchen finishing a glass of milk. It goes easier than I braced for.
“Grandma and Grandpa are going to visit with you on Saturday,” I tell her, keeping my voice light. “At a special place, just for a couple hours. I’ll drop you off and pick you up.”
“Will you be there, too?”
“Not in the room, but close by the whole time. Someone will be watching to make sure everything’s okay.”
She considers this with the same seriousness she brings to most things lately. “Do I have to go?”
“You do, this time. But it’s just a visit. Nothing’s changing about where you live, or who takes care of you.”
“Okay.” She says it simply, no protest, no tears, just a fact she’s filing away alongside everything else that’s happened to her this year. “Can Viktor come with me to the drop off part?”
“If he’s free, sure.”
“Okay,” she says again, and hops down from her chair, and I marvel, not for the first time, at how much more resilient she’s become than I ever expected a six-year-old to be forced into being.
She’s in her pajamas within minutes, doing the specific stalling routine she’s perfected over the last few months before bed, and by the time I’ve cleared the dinner plates, she’s already found the dragon book.
“Book time,” she announces, marching past me toward Viktor’s study and handing it to him without a word, without asking, without even glancing my way first.
He looks up from whatever he was reading, mild surprise in his expression before he sets it aside entirely.
“Two chapters,” she informs him, the same negotiating tactic she’s used for weeks now, though there’s no actual negotiation left in it anymore, just a formality she keeps out of habit.
“We’ll see how tired you get.”
“That’s not a no.”
“No,” he agrees. “It’s not.”
I watch them head up the stairs together, Ginger already narrating some complaint about her math homework, Viktor listening with the same patient attention he’s given her every night for weeks now.
It hits me clearly, standing alone in the kitchen, how completely this has stopped being a performance for anyone’s benefit.
She doesn’t test him anymore. She doesn’t watch his face for signs he might disappear the way she used to watch mine after Mia died, bracing for the moment adults inevitably let her down.
She just assumes he’ll be there, the same way she assumes the sun will come up, and somewhere in the last few weeks, without either of us marking the exact date it happened, Viktor stopped being a stranger in this house.
He stopped being a stranger to me too, if I’m being honest with myself standing here alone with dinner dishes still in the sink.
I think about the man who agreed to marry me eight minutes after meeting me, intrigued more than obligated, and the man currently upstairs doing dragon voices for a child who isn’t his by blood.
I’m not sure those two men are entirely the same person anymore, or maybe they always were, and I just hadn’t given him enough time yet to show me.
There’s a version of tonight where I sit alone at this counter and worry about Saturday, about the family center and the clipboard and the two old people who spent months trying to take Ginger away from me.
Instead, I find myself thinking about pasta recipes and dragon voices and a six-year-old who stopped bracing for goodbye months ago without either of us fully noticing when it happened.
I finish the dishes and head upstairs myself, catching the tail end of the fourth chapter through Ginger’s cracked door, Viktor’s voice pitched low and dramatic for whatever villain the dragon’s currently facing down.
I stand in the hallway a moment longer than I need to, just listening, before I let myself go find him properly once she’s finally, actually asleep.
Four months ago, I would have spent tonight bracing for Saturday instead of standing in a hallway listening to a man I married for paperwork read bedtime stories like he’s been doing it his whole life.
I’m not sure when exactly the bracing stopped, only that somewhere along the way, it did, and I’m not in a hurry to get it back.