Chapter 2
ADAM
On autopilot, in the numb haze of the freeway, I found myself checking the rearview mirror for the hundredth time in so many minutes.
Both girls, still out like miniature logs, wore the slack-jawed serenity of the truly exhausted.
I could barely believe they were real, let alone mine.
They’d passed out about eight hours into the drive from San Antonio to the Bay Area, not even stirring for the impromptu gas station dinner or my repeated (failed) attempts to get them to pee.
I’d always heard kids slept like the dead, but this seemed like some kind of world record.
Of course, their lives had changed just as much, if not more than mine, the past week.
My future flashed before me as I gripped the steering wheel and stared at the road ahead, the ribbon of headlights bounced off the rolling green hillside on the Grapevine.
Returning to San Francisco to live in my childhood home was not on my bingo card.
I sure as hell never imagined that I’d return as the father of five-year-old twin girls, who I had no idea existed a week ago, to live in the home I inherited from my estranged father after his death.
Once again, my eyes glanced in the rearview mirror and I saw that both my daughters were sleeping soundly in their booster seats. Booster seats. Add that to the list of things I was clueless about. Children who were five needed booster seats.
I had a lot of babysitting experience. Most of the people I served with were married with children, and I hated fucking going out.
I’d much rather spend the night playing board games with kids than at a bar getting drunk and hooking up with random women I didn’t give a shit about and who didn’t give a shit about me, so that’s what I’d done.
I’d done it so much I’d even earned the nickname Mary Poppins.
That being said, I still had no fucking idea about car seat laws.
Being responsible for a child, or children, for four to six hours once or twice a week and then returning them to the authority of their parents was one thing.
Being responsible for said child’s life, their well-being, their entire future was an entirely different ball game altogether.
This was a game that I never wanted to play.
It seemed I had stepped up to the plate without my knowledge.
Once again, I found my gaze drawn to the rearview mirror. The twins were still unconscious. Light from the screen flickered over their cheeks, painting their faces with alternating swaths of blue and gold, glowing like little cyber princesses in cryosleep.
“What the fuck is my life?” I mumbled under my breath.
Since discovering I was a father—a distinction that still felt like it belonged to someone else—I’d been making a herculean effort to clean up my language.
I couldn’t say it was going well. Twenty years in the Navy will do that to you.
The dashboard lit up, bright and insistent, with the name “Maddox Cruz” blinking across the console. I hit the button and kept my voice low, as if a whisper could rouse the girls from their sugar-and-screentime comas.
“Maddox, hey. Thanks for calling me back.”
“No problem. It’s good to hear from you.”
“Yeah, it’s been a minute.” I sighed.
“It’s been twenty years worth of them,” Maddox joked.
“Yeah.”
Maddox Cruz was always a good kid. It had been twenty years since I’d spoken to him, but I couldn’t see anything changing that in any amount of time.
He was just one of those people who were good, to their core.
He was younger than me. I’d worked as a basketball coach at an after-school program he was in from the ages of four to ten for foster kids.
He reached out to me after he graduated college to thank me for looking out for him and having his back when he was younger, he was a small kid without a lot of friends.
We’d kept in touch through social media since then, so it wasn’t as if we’d had zero contact.
“Congrats on your wedding, man,” I said. “I wish I could have made it out.”
Maddox had recently reconnected with his high school sweetheart, and they got married.
“No worries. You back in town yet?”
I mentioned in my message that I was moving back. “Not quite yet, still driving. Hey, I hate to ask, but I have a favor.”
“Sure. Anything.”
“I have twin girls, they’re five, and I was wondering if I could drop them by your house while I move my stuff in. I don’t want them getting in the way and getting hurt. I can’t watch them and move, and I don’t have anyone else to ask. I don’t really keep in touch with—”
“Sure man. I’ve got Hannah this weekend, and she’s six. She’d love the company. Her older sister was supposed to hang out, but something came up.”
“Older sister?” I echoed, my brain slow to switch from logistics to the subtle subplot that had just been dropped.
“Lina, my and Peyton’s daughter.”
“Oh.” I was confused. I hadn’t realized Maddox and Peyton had a child together.
“Long story,” he addressed my silent question.
“Right.”
“We can grab a beer to catch up once you get settled.”
“Yeah, that sounds great.”
“What time?”
“Pending traffic, I should be getting into town around ten tomorrow.”
“Ten’s great. I’ll drop you the address.”
“Thanks, man.” I sighed, genuinely relieved and grateful. There was no margin for error with my current bandwidth, and the idea of the girls making an instant friend—even for a morning—felt like a break in the thunderclouds.
They’d been through so much and had so much change in their short little lives. First, they lost their mom when they were three. Then their grandma got sick and was gone within a couple of weeks. Which is the only reason she contacted me with the Maury news that I am their father.
“Glad we’re doing this, Knight. Looking forward to seeing you.”
“You too.”
The call ended, and for a minute the only sounds in the car were Idina Menzel’s relentless optimism and the low purr of the engine.
I glanced up at the mirror again. The girls were still conked out, cheeks flushed with exhaustion, their identical chins tucked to their chests like a set of Russian nesting dolls.
Their tiny angelic faces were surrounded by a halo of long, wavy light blonde hair.
I tried to picture tomorrow, the chaos of boxes, and the echo of my father’s voice in the empty house filled with memories I’d buried for decades. I hadn’t been home since the day before I left for boot camp. The thought of walking through those doors made my stomach clench.
My phone was on the charging station, and I picked it up and scrolled to Genesis.
The call rang four times before it flipped to voicemail. The same breezy recording I’d heard a hundred times—“This is G, you know what to do”—played through the speakers.
I didn’t bother leaving a message. What was there to say?
“Surprise, turns out I’m a father, and instead of moving to your charming garden flat off Tottenham Court Road, I’m driving my Escalade through the pitch-black mountains with two mini-human strangers in the backseat who share fifty percent of my DNA and moving back to San Francisco to raise them. ”
It had been two weeks since I’d spoken to Genesis.
In those two weeks, my entire life had been torn up, realigned, and stapled back together in a configuration I could barely recognize.
I was supposed to be getting on a plane to Heathrow tomorrow.
Instead, tomorrow I’d be unpacking my entire adult life into my childhood home and moving my new offspring into whatever room they chose from the five bedrooms available.
Genesis, my long-distance girlfriend of three years, was shooting a reality TV show called SAS: Who Dares to Win, so she didn’t have any access to her phone or the outside world until she was kicked off or won, which could be anywhere from one to six weeks.
As a model who served in the British Army, they’d been asking her to do the show for several years.
She told me she’d only agreed now because our future was cemented since I was retired and moving to London, which had been the plan.
I had no way of getting a hold of her and letting her know all of our plans had been blown up like a house of cards in a hurricane.
I squeezed the steering wheel and exhaled a long, slow breath as every ounce of energy drained from my body. I was tired in a way I hadn’t been since the first days of boot camp, the kind of tired that got into the bones and made me feel like I was decomposing in real time.
The silence in the car felt suffocating.
I turned the radio back up to fill the void, landing on a late-night talk show where the host bantered with a guest about haunted lighthouses.
I let the noise wash over me, trying to focus on the road, but my mind kept double-dutching between what my future was supposed to be and what it was going to be now.
I’d been rehearsing the call in my head, how I would break the news to Genesis, searching for the right combination of words that would make her understand.
G wasn’t a cruel person. She was funny, sharp as a razor, and stunningly gorgeous.
I had wanted a future with her. Six months after we started casually dating, because what else could a trans-Atlantic relationship be, she’d proposed the London move after I retired, and I’d said yes because…
why not? What else was there? I had no family in the states, nothing keeping me here.
But she’d told me once, in a moment of rare sincerity, that she never wanted kids. Not ever. She didn’t have a maternal bone in her body, and the world was already too full of people, she said. I was fine with that. I never wanted to be married, and she was fine with that.
Her admission actually made me feel closer to her. I figured I must only fall for women who didn’t want children because the two serious relationships in my life, Billie and Genesis, both had no desire to have kids.