16. Callum
— ? —
Callum
The party is a success.
Ponies. A magician. Children in party clothes, running across the lawn like small, well-dressed tornadoes.
My mother is holding court under a tent near the rose garden, telling everyone who will listen how involved she’s been in the planning, how important it is to start these social connections early, how Olivia is such a lovely child despite her circumstances.
Despite her circumstances.
Like being adopted is something to overcome. Like Olivia is damaged goods that my mother has graciously agreed to acknowledge.
I watch it all from the terrace, a glass of something I’m not drinking in my hand.
I watch Olivia shriek with laughter when the magician pulls a rabbit from his hat.
I watch her feed carrots to the ponies with the serious concentration of a surgeon.
I watch her be happy, genuinely happy, surrounded by children her own age and adults who are trying their best to make this day special.
And I watch Nichole move through all of it like a woman walking on a broken leg.
She’s smiling. She’s laughing at the right moments. She’s helping cut cake and organize games and make sure no child gets too close to the ponies without supervision. She’s doing everything a stepmother should do at her stepdaughter’s birthday party.
But I saw her in the pantry yesterday.
I saw her on the floor with her hand over her mouth, crying like the world was ending.
Her daughter would have been six today. The same day. The same age.
I don’t know what to do with that information.
I don’t know what to do with any of the things she told me - the death, the lack of a body, the grave she’s never found.
It’s too big to fit inside my understanding of her.
She walked into my house looking for a job, and I thought I knew what kind of person she was: desperate, determined, poor.
I reduced her to her circumstances because that was easier than seeing her whole.
I didn’t know she was carrying this.
Halfway through the cake, I realize she’s gone.
I scan the lawn, the tents, the clusters of adults with champagne glasses. She’s not at the table. She’s not with the ponies. She’s not anywhere I can see.
I hand my glass to a passing waiter and go looking.
The garden behind the hedge maze is quiet.
It’s not part of the party layout - too far from the tents, too close to the water, not suitable for a yard full of children and a liability-conscious mother.
But there’s a stone bench there, hidden from the house by a wall of old roses, and when I come around the corner, I find them.
Nichole is bent over on the bench, sobbing so hard she can’t get air. Her whole body heaves with it, her hands pressed against her face, her shoulders shaking. She’s not making any sound - she’s worked too hard to stay silent - but the force of the grief is visible in every line of her body.
And Olivia is standing in front of her.
My daughter, in her birthday dress with her birthday crown askew on her dark hair, is standing in front of a grown woman’s grief and holding her face in two small hands.
“You can cry,” Olivia is saying. Her voice is serious, steady. “I cry sometimes. It’s okay.”
Nichole shakes her head, tries to pull away, but Olivia doesn’t let go.
“It’s my birthday,” Olivia says, “so I’m allowed to give you a present. So my present is you can cry. Okay? You can cry and I’ll stay right here.”
I stop behind the hedge.
I cannot go forward.
I cannot go back.
I watch my daughter hold a grown woman’s face like she’s been doing it for years. Like this is natural. Like comforting the people she loves is something she was born knowing how to do.
Nichole pulls Olivia into her chest and holds on like a woman in open water. Her arms wrap around the child - around my daughter - and she buries her face in Olivia’s hair and cries, the silent sobs breaking open into sound.
Olivia pats her back with one small hand.
“It’s okay,” she says again. “You’re okay. I’m here.”
Something cracks in my chest.
She’s not the nanny.
The thought comes from somewhere deep, somewhere I’ve been avoiding. She hasn’t been the nanny for months. Maybe she never was. Maybe from the first moment Olivia crossed that marble hall and climbed into her lap, something else was happening. Something I was too blind to see.
I put a contract on it.
I put a number on it.
I looked at whatever was growing between my daughter and this woman and I reduced it to terms and signatures because that was the only language I knew. Because that was how my family has always done things. Because I didn’t know there was another way.
Standing here in my daughter’s birthday garden, watching Olivia comfort the woman who is falling apart in her arms, I understand for the first time how wrong I was.
I stay behind the hedge until the crying stops. Until Nichole sits back, wipes her face, says something I can’t hear that makes Olivia nod seriously. Until they stand, hand in hand, and walk back toward the party.
They don’t see me.
I let them go.
The rest of the party passes in a blur. More cake. More games. The last cars pull away as the sun starts to set, and the staff begin dismantling the tents, and my mother finally, finally leaves.
I find Nichole in Olivia’s room that evening.
She’s braiding my daughter’s hair, slow and careful, while Olivia tells her about her favorite parts of the day.
The magician was good but the rabbit was better.
The ponies were nice but one of them tried to eat her dress.
Sophie Henderson pushed Tyler Mitchell into the cake but nobody got in trouble because it was her birthday and she declared an amnesty.
I stand in the doorway and watch them.
Nichole’s hands move through Olivia’s hair, gentle and sure. There’s still a trace of redness around her eyes, but she’s smiling now, the kind of smile that reaches all the way in.
She looks up.
Our eyes meet.
“Say it,” she says quietly, her hands still moving. “Whatever it is. You’ve been looking at me like that for six hours.”
I have been looking at her like that for six hours. I’ve been looking at her like that since I found her in the garden with my daughter’s hands on her face, since I understood that I’ve been lying to myself about what this is.
The words come out before I can stop them.
“I don’t want the year to end.”
Her hands go still in Olivia’s hair.
“Callum-”
“I know what we agreed. I know what the contract says. I know you told me not to turn this into something you’d have to grieve.
” I stay in the doorway because if I move closer I’m going to do something we can’t come back from.
“But I can’t lie to you about this anymore. I don’t want it to end. I want-”
“Don’t.” Her voice is raw. “Don’t say it.”
“Nichole-”
“Olivia, sweetheart.” She ties off the braid with shaking fingers. “Go brush your teeth. I’ll come tuck you in.”
Olivia looks between us with the knowing eyes of a child who understands more than adults think.
“Okay,” she says, and slips past me through the door.
Nichole stands.
“You can’t do this to me,” she says. “Not today. Not after-”
“I know.”
“I just spent an entire day smiling at a party for a child who shares a birthday with my dead daughter, and you’re standing there telling me you want-” She stops. Starts again. “What do you even want, Callum? You put a contract in front of me. You made this a transaction.”
“I know.”
“So what changed?”
Everything. Nothing. The way my daughter held her face in the garden. The way she cried in my pantry. The way she looked at me in the ballroom with wine running down her dress and didn’t flinch.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” I say. “I just know I can’t look at you anymore and pretend the year is the point.”
She closes her eyes.
“Go away, Callum.”
“Nichole-”
“Please.” Her voice breaks. “Just for tonight. Give me tonight.”
I want to argue. I want to cross the room and take her face in my hands the way my daughter did, and tell her that she doesn’t have to carry any of this alone. I want to burn the contract and the arrangement and every cold calculation that brought us to this moment.
But she asked me for tonight.
She asked me for space.
So I give her that.
I turn. I walk away. I go to the room we share and I lie down on the fold-out couch and I stare at the ceiling until I hear her come in, hours later, and climb into the bed on the other side of our careful distance.
The silence between us is different tonight.
It’s not the awkward silence of strangers. It’s not the tense silence of people pretending not to want each other.
It’s the silence of two people standing on the edge of something, both afraid to jump.
I don’t know what happens next.
I only know that the year isn’t the point anymore.
It never was.