Chapter 12
LIAM
Ileft St. Louis before the sun came up.
I'd been awake since four anyway, lying in the dark staring at the ceiling, running through every version of how the morning could go.
What I'd say when the door opened. How I'd act.
Whether Finn would be scared of me or shy or — the thought that kept surfacing no matter how many times I pushed it back down — whether he'd look at me and just know.
The way I'd looked at those photos and just known.
I stopped for coffee at a gas station outside the city. Stood in the harsh fluorescent light with a paper cup in my hand and tried to eat something and couldn't. Put it back. Got in the car.
Three and a half hours. I had three and a half hours to figure out how to walk into a room and meet my son.
My dad had called last night.
"You ready?" he'd asked.
"No."
"Good. Nobody ever is." A pause. "Your mother has been up since five this morning. She's already planning a trip to Chicago."
"Tell her to give me a few weeks."
"I told her to give you a month. She's negotiating."
Despite everything, I'd almost smiled. "How do you do this?" I'd asked. "How do you just — walk in and be somebody's father?"
"You love them," he said simply. "Everything else you figure out as you go."
"I've already missed five years of figuring it out."
"Then you've got a lot of catching up to do. Start tomorrow."
I'd hung up and looked at the video one more time. Finn on the ice, completely in his element, absolutely certain about number seventeen.
The address Anne had texted me was a quiet street on the north side of Chicago. Older houses, big trees, the kind of neighborhood that had been there for decades and knew it.
I parked and sat in the car.
The house was a two-story brick with a front porch and a basketball hoop in the driveway that looked like it hadn't been used in years. A pot of yellow flowers on the porch steps. Curtains in the front window.
My son was on the other side of that door.
I got out of the car.
I made it to the porch steps before the front door flew open.
He was smaller than I'd expected. I didn't know why — the photos should have prepared me — but seeing him in person, this small dark-haired person erupting out of the door at full speed, everything I'd been rehearsing just evaporated.
He stopped two feet from me.
We looked at each other.
He had my eyes. Not just the color — the shape, the slight downward tilt at the outer corners that my mom always called my serious eyes.
Looking at him was like looking at a photograph of myself at five years old, except this was real and he was breathing and his whole face was doing something I recognized because I could feel my own face doing the same thing.
He'd known I was coming. He'd been waiting. And still, standing here face to face for the first time, we both just — stopped. Like we needed a second to let it be real.
Then he grabbed my hand.
"I have to show you my castle," he said, and pulled me inside.
I didn't look for Anne right away.
I let Finn lead me through the front hall and into the living room where the LEGO castle took up most of the coffee table — an elaborate structure with multiple towers and what appeared to be a whole wing dedicated to horses — and I sat on the floor with my son and listened to him explain every single piece.
It was the most important conversation I'd ever had in my life.
"This is where the king lives," Finn said, pointing to a crooked tower. "And this is where the dragon sleeps. But the dragon is nice. He doesn't eat people."
"That's a relief," I said. "I'm not a big fan of people-eating dragons."
He looked at me sharply. "Me neither. Do you like dragons?"
"I do. What's your favorite kind?"
"The blue one with the wings. His name is Sparkle."
I nodded like this was serious information, because it was. "Sparkle's a great name for a dragon."
He seemed satisfied with that. He handed me a small blue piece and pointed to where it needed to go, and I placed it carefully, and he approved, and just like that we were building together.
I was peripherally aware of Anne on the couch. Of her mom somewhere nearby. Of the sounds of a house with people in it, a life that had been happening without me.
But mostly I was aware of Finn.
The way he talked — not to fill silence but because his brain was genuinely moving that fast, one thought connecting to the next so quickly that sometimes a sentence started in the middle.
The way he concentrated on a difficult piece with his tongue pressed to the corner of his lip.
The way he laughed — sudden and full and completely unself-conscious.
I had a son.
I kept thinking it and it kept not being small enough to hold.
After the castle, he wanted to show me his hockey stick.
He'd gotten it for his birthday, he informed me, and he'd been practicing but he wasn't very good yet. He said this without embarrassment, just as a fact, and something about his matter-of-factness — the way he was already honest about his own limitations — cracked something open in my chest.
He dragged me outside by the hand.
His slap-shot was not, technically speaking, a slap-shot. It was a hopeful tap in the general direction of the ball. But the intent was there, and the grip wasn't bad for someone who'd clearly been figuring it out alone.
I crouched down next to him.
"Can I show you something?"
He nodded, very serious.
I adjusted his hands on the stick — just slightly, widening his grip — and stood behind him, my hands covering his.
"Now try."
He swung, and the ball cracked off the stick and sailed across the driveway and hit the garage door with a satisfying thud.
He turned to look at me with an expression I was completely unprepared for.
Pure, uncomplicated joy. The whole face involved. The kind of joy that five-year-olds have access to that the rest of us spend our lives trying to find our way back to.
"Did you see? Daddy, did you see?"
"I saw." My voice was rough. "That was a great shot, buddy."
"I'm going to do it again."
He did it again. And again. Each time a little better, each time turning to check that I was watching, each time that same look when the ball connected — like the fact of my being there to witness it was the whole point.
I stood in Anne’s mother's driveway on a Saturday morning watching my son take slap-shots and tried to remember the last time anything had felt this simple and this important at the same time.
I couldn't.
After a while I lifted him onto my shoulders, and his delighted shriek brought Anne to the window. I caught a glimpse of her there, watching, hand pressed to her mouth. I looked away before I could let myself feel anything about that.
Not today. Today was about Finn.
Lunch was grilled cheese.
Finn had opinions about grilled cheese — specifically that it was best when it was a little bit burnt on one side, which he demonstrated was true when Anne's mom produced exactly this version and Finn's face lit up in vindication.
"That's the best kind," he told me solemnly, pointing to the burnt edge.
"You're absolutely right," I said, and ate mine the same way, and he nodded like I'd passed some important test.
He sat pressed against my side on the couch while we ate, his small weight settled against me like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like he'd been doing it his whole life.
He hadn't.
That was my fault. And not my fault. And Anne's fault. And not really anyone's fault in a way that fixed anything.
I ate my grilled cheese and let my son lean against me and tried to stay in the room instead of getting lost in the maze of everything that had gone wrong to bring us here.
When Anne's mom suggested Finn help in the kitchen, I saw Anne give him the gentle nudge that got him off the couch, and then it was just the two of us in the room and the silence landed like a stone.
I looked at my hands.
"He's amazing," I said finally. That much was just true and she deserved to hear it. "He's smart and funny and he's—" I stopped. "You did a good job with him."
"We did a good job," she said quietly. "He's half you."
The words stung in a way she probably didn't intend.
"Except I wasn't there."
"I know. And I'm so?—"
"Don't." I kept my voice even. "I don't want to hear it right now."
She went quiet.
We talked about what came next — logistics, schedules, how to make this work with playoffs two weeks away.
I suggested Finn come to St. Louis during the first round.
She agreed immediately, no hesitation, offered her mom's help, offered to rearrange her own schedule. Made it as easy as she possibly could.
Which was the least she could do.
And also more than she had to.
I didn't know what to do with the fact that both of those things were true.
"You know what the worst part is?" The words came out before I'd decided to say them.
I looked at her, and she went very still.
"It's not just that you kept him from me.
It's that you let me fall in love with you again.
You let me think we had something. You slept with me while you were carrying this, and I had no idea. "
"I wasn't lying about my feelings?—"
"You were lying by omission. Which is the same thing."
"I was scared?—"
"I know you were scared." I stopped myself. Breathed. "But being scared doesn't give you the right to make that decision for me. I would have come back. If you'd called me the day you found out, I would have been on the next flight home."
She closed her eyes.
"I know that now."
"You knew it then too. That's what makes it so hard to forgive."
Finn came running back in with news about the grilled cheese, and I turned toward him and let the warmth back in because none of this was his fault and he wasn't going to carry a single ounce of it.
I stayed later than I'd planned.
One more LEGO section. One more trip to the driveway.
One more story — Finn had a book about a hockey-playing bear that he wanted me to read, and I read it twice, and the second time through he corrected my sound effects, which I pretended to take personally, and he laughed so hard he got the hiccups.
By the time I finally stood up to go, he'd fallen mostly asleep against my side on the couch, one small fist curled in my shirt.
I sat very still.
Then I carefully shifted him, lowered him to the cushions, pulled the blanket up over him. He stirred slightly, blinked up at me with drowsy eyes.
"Are you leaving?" he mumbled.
"I have to go back to work tomorrow, buddy."
"Oh." He considered this with the seriousness of someone half-asleep. "Okay. But you're coming back?"
"I promise." I brushed the hair off his forehead. "Nothing could keep me away."
He was asleep again before I reached the door.
Anne followed me out onto the porch.
I didn't want to have the conversation that was coming. I was wrung out in a way I didn't have words for — not bad, not good, just emptied out and scraped clean and full of something new all at the same time.
I said what I needed to say. About being a father to Finn, about being there, about not knowing if there was still a *us* to speak of. I meant every word.
"I don't know if I can forgive this," I told her.
"I know." Her voice was steady even though her face wasn't. "But I'm asking you to try. Eventually. When you're ready."
We stood there for a moment in the dark of the porch. Inside I could hear Carol moving around in the kitchen.
"He asked me today," I said. "About coming to watch a game."
Anne looked at me. "I know. He's been asking since the minute he found out you played."
"Playoffs start in two weeks. I want him there. I want him in the stands watching." I paused. "If you think he's old enough to handle a playoff game — the noise, the crowd?—"
"He would absolutely love every second of it." The corner of her mouth moved. "He'd talk about it for the rest of his life."
"Could you bring him? You and your mom? Stay for a few days, maybe a week. He could see practice, meet the team. I'd be at games and skates during the day but the evenings?—"
"Yes." No hesitation. "Whatever works. We'll figure out school — his teacher will understand. And my schedule is flexible once playoffs start." She looked at me carefully. "Are you sure? Having us there, in your city, in your space?—"
"He wants to watch me play." Something moved in my chest that was still too new to name cleanly. "I've missed everything else. I'm not missing that."
She nodded. Swallowed.
"I'll talk to my mom tonight," she said. "We'll make it work."
I walked to my car.
I drove through her neighborhood, back to the highway, back toward St. Louis. The city fell away behind me and the flat dark of the interstate opened up ahead and I drove with both hands on the wheel and let everything I'd been holding together all day just — go.
I thought about Finn's hand grabbing mine at the door. The way he'd just — reached out and taken it, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like he'd been waiting to do exactly that.
I thought about his face when that ball hit the garage door. That look. Pure and unguarded and aimed directly at me like I was the only person in the world.
I hadn't earned it yet. I hadn't done anything yet except show up today. But he'd given it to me anyway — freely, completely, the way children love before they learn to be careful about it.
I was going to spend the rest of my life being worthy of that look.
I pulled out my phone at a red light and typed a message.
Me: I already love that kid so much. Tell him I'll call tomorrow night.
Her response came a minute later.
Anne: He's already asking when you're coming back.
I sat at the red light until it turned green and turned green again.
Then I put the car in drive and headed home.