5. Kurt #2
“How would you have been there, Kurt? Would you have taken time off work? Would you have come to doctor’s appointments?
Would you have held my hand during the delivery and stayed up for midnight feedings and learned which cry means hungry and which one means tired?
” She shakes her head slowly. “Or would you have sent money and hired help and your assistant to make scheduled visits between board meetings? Would you have been present, or would you have managed me?”
I open my mouth to defend myself, and nothing comes out.
Because I don’t know the answer.
Maddie makes another sound from the playpen, and I look at her. She’s got my coloring and my bone structure and those eyes that everyone always said were my best feature. But the expression on her face, that’s all Ivy.
“Can I hold her?”
Ivy doesn’t move. “Maddie decides. Not me.”
I crouch down next to the playpen, trying to make myself smaller, less threatening. Maddie watches me with deep suspicion, clutching her stuffed elephant to her chest.
“Hey there,” I say softly. “Hey, Maddie. I’m… I’m your dad.”
She doesn’t react with any recognition, curiosity, or reaching arms, and there’s no reason why she should. I’m nothing to her but a stranger with a familiar face, showing up two years too late with empty hands and a head full of excuses.
I reach toward her, slowly, carefully, the way you’d approach a frightened animal. My hand crosses the threshold of the playpen, fingers extended, hoping for contact, hoping for connection, hoping for something.
Maddie flinches back against the far side of the playpen.
My daughter’s lower lip trembles and her face crumples as she starts to cry, offering no quiet whimper or fussy complaint. Instead, she lets out a full-throated wail of fear and distress, sounding exactly like a child who doesn’t know this man reaching for her and doesn’t want to find out.
I yank my hand back as if I’ve been burned.
“Shh, shh, baby, it’s okay.” Ivy is there instantly, scooping Maddie out of the playpen and settling her against her shoulder, one hand rubbing soothing circles on her back. “It’s okay, sweetheart. Mama’s here. You’re safe.”
Maddie’s cries slowly subside into hiccupping sobs, her face buried in Ivy’s neck, her tiny fingers clutching Ivy’s shirt with desperate intensity.
She’s afraid of me.
My own daughter is afraid of me.
I stand there, hands empty, heart shattering, watching my wife comfort the child I didn’t know I had. Ivy doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t need to. Her entire focus is on Maddie, murmuring soft words I can’t quite hear, swaying gently back and forth.
This is what two years of absence looks like.
My daughter knows nothing about me, completely unfamiliar with my voice, my face, my smell, or my touch. I’m simply a stranger who came into her room and made her cry, while Ivy is the one who makes everything better.
“I missed everything,” I say quietly. The anger is gone. I don’t have the energy for it anymore. “I can’t get that back.”
“No. You can’t.”
“She doesn’t know me.”
“No. She doesn’t.”
Ivy’s voice hasn’t softened at all, but there’s a flicker in her eyes now. She’s watching me understand what she understood two years ago, watching the truth land with all its devastating weight, and she’s not gloating about it.
She’s just tired.
I look around the cottage again, seeing it differently this time. The handmade curtains that probably came from a thrift store. The furniture, carefully refinished with sandpaper and paint and hours of labor. The shelves to display bread are covered in glass.
She built all of this herself. No help from me, no money from me, no safety net at all. She was pregnant, and she still managed to create a home and a business and a life that doesn’t need me in it.
The oven timer goes off in the kitchen and I realize that I’ve only been standing looking around, looking at my wife and daughter, all this time.
“Time,” Ivy says. She crosses to the door, Maddie still pressed against her shoulder, and opens it with her free hand. “She needs her nap.”
I don’t argue. What would be the point? I came here with speeches and demands and legal threats, and none of them matter now. My daughter is afraid of me. My wife doesn’t need me. The life I thought I was fighting for doesn’t exist.
I walk to the door and stop on the threshold, looking back at the playpen where Maddie’s stuffed elephant lies abandoned on its side.
“I’m staying,” I tell Ivy. “There’s an inn in town. I saw it on the drive in. I’m not leaving until we figure this out.”
She makes no argument and doesn’t tell me to go back to the city, remaining patient and immovable as she waits for me to step through the doorway and onto the porch.
“Ivy.”
She pauses, the door halfway closed.
“I’m sorry.” The words feel inadequate, pathetically small against the enormity of what I’ve done. “For everything. For the anniversary dinner and the texts and the bracelet and… all of it. I’m sorry.”
Her expression doesn’t change.
“Sorry doesn’t give me back the nine years before it fell apart,” she says quietly. “And it doesn’t fix the year that broke us.”
The door closes.
I stand there for a long moment, staring at the yellow paint and the brass knocker and the cheerful welcome mat that clearly doesn’t apply to me.
Then I walk back to my car, sit down behind the wheel, and let myself feel everything I’ve been running from for eleven hours.
My daughter looked at me with fear in her eyes and cried. My wife looked at me with nothing at all. And I have no idea how to fix either one of those things.
But I’m going to try.