Chapter 8 #2
Noah blinks. “They don’t.”
“They do.” Poppy isn’t being cruel; she’s being a scientist. “Even when your mouth is normal, your eyebrows are still mad.”
“That’s just my face.”
“You should tell your face it’s too angry.”
Noah’s mouth does something. It fights itself. And then, I swear to God, Noah Hale, the most emotionally bulletproof man I know, smiles. An actual smile. At a four-year-old who just insulted his facial structure.
“I’ll tell my face,” he says.
Dane lasts forty minutes.
I’ll give him credit, that’s longer than I’d have bet.
He stands at the edge of the lanai in his weekend version of a suit, which is still basically a suit, handling some call about a port acquisition, projecting the exact amount of CEO that says I love my family and I will also be checking my phone.
Then Poppy climbs into his lap.
Doesn’t ask. Just scales him like playground equipment mid-sentence, settles herself against his chest, and announces, “I want watermelon.”
Dane stops talking.
He looks down at the small person who has completely annexed his torso. Phone still at his ear. Someone on the other end presumably still talking about the port.
“I’ll call you back,” Dane says, and hangs up on a nine-figure deal.
He gets her the watermelon.
I’m observing my oldest brother cut watermelon into manageable pieces while my daughter explains that the seeds are “baby watermelons, and you can’t eat the babies.”
“You’re staring.” Sienna appeared beside me with the quiet competence of a woman who notices everything.
“I’m not staring.”
“Jake.” She follows my line of sight to where Dane is now wearing a flower crown Poppy constructed from the table arrangement. “You’ve been staring at your daughter or Emilia for two straight hours.”
“You make it sound like I have a problem.”
“It’s the good kind of problem.” She takes a slow sip of her drink. “But someone noticed before you did. Just so you know.”
She walks off before I can ask her what the hell that means.
I grab my beer and go find something useful to do, which lasts about four minutes before I’m right back to looking Emilia.
The afternoon comes apart in the best possible way.
Emilia is everywhere, and I can’t stop tracking her. I even stopped pretending I’m not.
She cleans a scraped knee when Poppy goes down hard on the lawn, calm and quick, talking the whole time so the tears never fully arrive.
She brushes tangled curls back from Poppy’s face, matter-of-fact, the same way she’d straighten a crooked name card at a donor table.
When Lucas turns the sprinklers on and total chaos detonates across the backyard, Emilia’s right in the middle of it, soaked and laughing, steering a sugar-loaded four-year-old away from the pool edge without breaking stride.
She sits cross-legged on the grass for forty minutes coloring sea turtles.
Every minute of it guts me a little more.
She looks natural. That’s what I can’t get past. She looks like she belongs in the middle of my kid’s worst, loudest, stickiest moments. And worse…
Poppy looks safe with her.
I know that look. I’ve been cataloguing every flicker of fear on Poppy’s face for five days, every flinch toward the door. Right now, soaked and giggling and being chased across the lawn, she doesn’t have it. The fear is just gone.
Emilia did that.
And I’m standing at the edge of my own family’s barbecue holding a beer I haven’t touched and thinking something I really shouldn’t be.
What happens when Poppy figures out Emilia’s the one she actually needs?
Because everyone here is better at this than I am.
My brothers fold her into the family effortlessly.
Emilia knows how to hold her, how to talk her down, how to be the calm adult in the room.
And I’m the guy who got a phone call in the dark and has been improvising his kid’s entire life one terrified hour at a time.
I’m the weakest link in my own kid’s story.
That sits in my chest the rest of the afternoon, getting heavier, and nobody sees it because I don’t let them.
The family thins out as the sun drops.
Noah and Leah leave first. Dane and Sienna next, Dane still wearing the flower crown because Poppy made him promise not to take it off. Lucas and Isla hang on the longest, naturally, but eventually they pile into the car with Lucas yelling something about surf conditions out the window.
Maggie heads to bed. Poppy crashed an hour earlier on the daybed in the sitting room off the kitchen, still in her flower sundress and boots, sea turtle tucked under one arm. Nobody has the heart to move her.
Now it’s quiet.
Emilia and I end up on the lanai.
The sun is going down over the water, that long slow golden pour across the Pacific. We’re at the rail, not quite touching. The chaos is gone. What’s left is just us.
“She had a good time,” Emilia says.
“Yeah.”
“So did you. Even though you spent the whole thing pretending you were fine.”
I glance at her. There’s no point lying to a woman who reads me like a donor report.
“She likes you better,” I say.
It comes out quiet, the truth I’ve been carrying all afternoon.
Emilia turns to face me. “Jake.”
“It’s fine. She should. You figured out the dress thing in nine seconds. I’d have been there an hour. She reaches for you. Every time something goes wrong, she looks for—”
“She looks for you.”
I stop.
“Jake.” Emilia steps closer, her voice dropping into something certain.
“Every single time you walk into a room, she looks for you first. I’ve watched it all day.
She finds the door, and then she finds you.
Before anything else. Before me.” She holds my gaze.
“She did it at the doctor’s office yesterday.
Twice today at the barbecue. You just don’t see it because you’re too busy deciding you’re the problem. ”
I don’t say anything.
I didn’t know that. Shit. I genuinely didn’t know that.
“You’re not the weak link,” she says, softer. “You’re her dad. You’re just the only one who hasn’t figured out she already decided that.”
Shit.
I look at her and stop pretending I’m not in too deep.
She doesn’t pull away.
We clean the kitchen because neither of us is brave enough to keep standing on that lanai.
It’s a cowardly move, and we both know it. Maggie’s gone up to bed. The house has gone dark and quiet around us. And here we are, side by side at the counter, packing leftovers into containers like the work is the point, like if we keep our hands busy the thing in the room will just politely leave.
Our hands keep brushing. The kitchen isn’t even small, but we keep finding ways.
“You make it look easy,” I say.
Emilia doesn’t look up from the container she’s sealing. “Make what look easy?”
“This. All of it. The kid, the family, the…” I gesture at the kitchen, at the house, at the whole impossible day. “You just…you fit. Like you were meant for this. Like none of it scares you.”
She stops moving.
When she looks up, her eyes have changed.
“You think I’m not terrified?” The container hits the counter.
“You think I’m not…” Her voice cracks down the middle and she doesn’t bother repairing it.
“Jake. I have a four-year-old calling me at seven a.m. about dresses. I have your daughter falling asleep against me. I have a fake engagement that stopped feeling fake somewhere around day two and a list of rules I wrote myself that I’ve apparently been breaking since I wrote them.
You think I have any idea what I’m doing? You think this is easy for me?”
We’re not on opposite sides of the counter anymore.
I don’t remember either of us moving. One second the marble stretches between us like a barricade, and the next she’s right there, close enough that the subtle jasmine of her perfume fills my lungs, close enough that I can see the rapid flutter of her pulse beneath the delicate skin of her throat.
“It’s not easy,” she says, quieter. The polished executive director is gone, stripped away, and this is just Emilia: raw, exposed, her sharp green eyes glassy. “It’s the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me. I just don’t fall apart where people can see it.”
The kitchen is dead silent.
The Pacific churns beyond the windows, but here there’s nothing. Just the hum of the fridge and the ragged sound of her breathing and the thundering of my own heartbeat in my ears.
My hands grip the edge of the marble counter so hard the cool stone bites into my skin. I’m trying to anchor myself to something solid, trying to hold the line I’ve drawn for years, but my knuckles are white and my arms are shaking and the concrete inside my chest is fracturing.
And then I’m done.
Whatever’s been holding the line in me for years, for years, it just gives way, all at once. A dam breaking. A fault line slipping. I reach up and take her face in both my hands, my palms rough against the softness of her jaw, and I kiss her.
She makes a sound against my mouth, half a gasp, half a sob, and then her hands fist in my linen shirt and she’s not pushing me away. She’s pulling me in. The kiss goes from careful to desperate in the space of a breath, all teeth and tongue and a frantic urgency that tastes like starvation.
It’s not soft. It’s every loaded look and unfinished argument finally catching fire.
I lift her onto the counter. My hands find her waist and I haul her up like she weighs nothing.
She wraps her legs around me like she’s been waiting to, locking her ankles at the small of my back and pulling me in by the collar.
The tailored fabric of her dress rides up her thighs, exposing her smooth, tanned skin, and the heat of her settles right against me. My entire body locks up.
“This is a terrible idea,” she breathes against my jaw, her lips dragging across the stubble.
“Catastrophic,” I agree, and trail my mouth down her throat.