Chapter 7
Emilia
The thing about agreeing to go to the airport at an ungodly hour is that it sounds completely reasonable at eleven o’clock at night when Jake Hale is standing in his penthouse rereading the same legal document for the fourth time and asking, with genuine urgency, whether four-year-olds can eat sushi.
It sounds significantly less reasonable at five forty-seven in the morning.
He warned me. Insanely early, he said, like that’s a unit of time I should have understood. I assumed he meant seven.
He did not mean seven.
Jake is carrying a stuffed sea turtle under one arm and a second stuffed sea turtle under the other, having apparently decided that one was not enough. I decide not to comment on this.
He looks terrible.
He changes twice before we leave. I watch him do it and say nothing, because there are moments when a person deserves to make their own choices without commentary.
The elevator opens into the parking garage. Jake is already three steps ahead of me, moving like he’s been awake for hours. He probably has been.
The freeway is almost empty. Jake drives the way he always does, smooth and too fast, but he’s checked his phone twice at red lights and hasn’t said a word since we left the garage.
“You’re going to be fine,” I say.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t.”
“You’ve checked your phone twice.”
He puts his phone face down on the console.
I watch the city go by and try to figure out, honestly, how I ended up here. None of this was in the agreement. Sixty days, four rules, a fake engagement to get Hale Futures funded. That was the deal. A four-year-old flying in from California was nowhere in it.
But I watched him panic-order toddler sheets at midnight and ask whether children needed pillowcases or if they just slept directly on the pillow, and somewhere around the fourth Amazon order I understood that Jake Hale was going to walk into this completely unprepared.
So I’m here to manage the landing. Get the kid here, get her settled, get a real structure in place around her: a nanny, a routine, the kind of support a single father with Jake’s schedule actually needs.
Then I step back to my actual job, which is making sure Hale Futures gets funded to the last dollar.
That’s the plan. Triage, then hand it off to the right people.
Because this is Jake’s to figure out, not mine. I run his foundation. I’m not in the business of raising his daughter, and I’ve got no intention of getting into it. I’ll get him pointed at the right help and then I’m out of the personal end of this.
I’m not examining the part where I rearranged my entire morning to be standing in an airport at dawn for a child I’ve never met.
The airport is manageable. Jake is not.
He checks the arrivals board. Rechecks it. Reorganizes the paperwork in the folder I made him bring even though everything is already in order.
“The grandparents,” he says. “Robert and Diane Donovan. I need them to know she’s not disappearing from their lives. That this isn’t me taking her away from them.”
“Then tell them that.”
“What if they don’t believe me?”
“Then you show them.” I pull the itinerary from the folder and put it in his hand. “You already worked up the visit schedule. Show them the paper.”
He looks at the paper, then at me.
“When did you add the visit schedule?”
“Last night, while you were ordering the second sea turtle.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
We find a spot near baggage claim with a clear sightline to the arrivals door and wait.
Jake sits for approximately four minutes before standing again, which I expected, so I stay seated and let him pace.
He does a controlled version, just enough movement to burn the edge off, and I watch him while pretending not to watch him, because I’ve had a lot of practice doing exactly that.
The arrivals door opens and closes. Families reunite. A kid sprints toward a grandparent so fast she nearly takes out a luggage cart.
Jake watches the door with an expression I can’t name.
“Hey,” I say.
He looks at me.
“She already loves you. You haven’t even met her and you’re here at six in the morning with a stuffed sea turtle, and a backup sea turtle just in case something happens to the first one. That counts for something.”
“I have two backup sea turtles.”
“I know.”
“I panicked.”
“I know.”
The arrivals door opens again, and there they are: an older couple moving carefully through the terminal with the exhaustion of people who’ve traveled far and slept badly on the plane, and between them, holding both their hands, is a small person with dark hair and ocean blue eyes that I recognize instantly because I’ve been looking at them for years.
Jake goes completely still beside me.
Literally still. He stops adjusting the folder, stops checking his phone, stops everything.
Poppy Hale has her father’s eyes. She’s scanning the arrivals hall with the focused quiet of a child who observes before she reacts, and I watch Jake’s face do something he can’t control and probably doesn’t know I can see.
I know the exact second it hits him.
I look away before he realizes I’ve been watching.
The grandparents are kind people carrying an enormous amount of grief and doing it with remarkable dignity.
Diane has Poppy’s dark coloring and the composed expression of a woman who decided before she left the house that she was going to hold herself together for the entire trip.
Robert shakes Jake’s hand and then looks at him for a long moment, like he’s taking a measurement.
Jake passes, apparently, because Robert’s shoulders drop about an inch.
“She talks about the ocean constantly,” Diane says. “We told her Hawaii had the most beautiful water she’d ever see, and she’s asked about it every single day since.”
“Then the first place we’ll go is the beach,” Jake says. “Wherever she wants to go, we’ll take her.”
Poppy is standing slightly behind her grandmother’s leg.
Not hiding, exactly, more like she’s positioned herself for maximum observational advantage.
She has dark hair that needs a brush and a purple dress that’s been through a journey, and she’s looking at me with the focused attention of a small scientist running an experiment.
Jake crouches down. Not quite to her level, because he’s too tall for that, but partway, making himself smaller. I can see him working through it in real time, trying not to overwhelm her.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m Jake.”
Poppy studies him. “Are you actually my dad?”
The airport noise continues around them. An announcement comes over the PA. Jake’s expression does the cracking-open thing again, and this time he doesn’t try to stop it.
“Yeah, baby,” he says. “I am.”
Poppy processes this with the gravity of someone making an important determination. Then she looks at me.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Emilia. I work with your dad.”
She looks at Jake, then back at me. “I gotta go potty,” she announces.
Jake freezes. He raised forty-two million in one day and can’t handle a bathroom request.
I glance at Diane and Robert. “I can take her, if that’s okay.”
Diane hesitates, just a second, her hand still half on Poppy’s shoulder. Then she nods. Robert nods too.
“Okay,” Poppy says, and takes my hand.
That’s how I end up walking Poppy Hale to the airport bathroom while Jake finishes a quiet, earnest conversation with her grandparents about visit schedules and video calls and the fact that she’s not disappearing from their lives.
She’s just starting something new.
When we come back, Diane is crying quietly into a tissue and Robert has his arm around her. Jake is showing them the itinerary. Poppy watches her grandparents with an expression that’s too old for her face, and then buries herself in Diane’s arms, fierce and silent, for a long moment.
The goodbye takes time. It should. These are the people who held her together after a tragedy, and they’re handing her to a stranger, and no amount of good intentions makes that simple. Jake tells them twice, with different words each time, that they’re part of this. That Poppy isn’t losing them.
I believe him. I think they do too, eventually.
Then Poppy picks up her new sea turtle, looks at Jake with those blue eyes, and says, “Can we see the water?”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice coming out rougher than usual. “We can definitely see the water.”
In the car, Poppy asks nine questions before we hit the freeway.
Does Hawaii have jellyfish? Are there sharks? Do sharks come on the beach? Why do people live near the ocean if there are sharks? Does Jake’s house have a pool? Does the pool have sharks? Why not?
Jake handles the shark questions with remarkable composure for a man who was stressing over toddler mattress reviews at midnight.
Poppy falls asleep somewhere around Pearl City, suddenly and totally, the way small children do, and the car goes quiet.
“She’s out,” I say.
“She has…” He stops.
“I know,” I say.
We don’t talk for a while after that. The silence feels different than it usually does between us, less like a standoff and more like something shared.
I watch the city come back around us and think about the way Poppy took my hand at the airport.
No hesitation, like safety was something she could detect and I happened to have it.
I don’t know what to do with that.
The moment Poppy Hale enters Jake’s penthouse, his carefully curated adult life ends. Just stops, like someone pulled a plug.
She presses every button in the elevator. Jake tells her to stop and she presses the last two with sustained eye contact.
She steps into the penthouse, looks around for a second, and then says, “It’s really big.”
“I know,” Jake says.
She walks straight to the nearest floor-to-ceiling window and puts both hands flat against the glass, nose pressed to it, staring at the water below. “Oh,” she breathes. “Oh, there it is.”
“You can see it from pretty much everywhere in the penthouse,” I tell her.
“Even from where I sleep?”