Chapter 13
Theo
Saturday morning felt like a gift from the universe. For once, I’d managed to sleep until nearly eight o’clock without Debbie bouncing on my bed demanding pancakes or cartoons or immediate attention to whatever crisis her five-year-old brain had conjured overnight.
Instead, I woke to the sound of her singing softly to herself in the next room, something about princess dragons and magical pasta makers that made me smile before I was fully conscious.
“Morning, Button Bee,” I called through the wall.
She squealed and shouted back, “Daddy! You’re awake! Can we make the really good pancakes? The ones with the chocolate chips that look like tiny smiles?”
I stretched and checked the clock. Eight-fifteen. Practically a noonday sleep-in by single father standards.
“Sure, kiddo. Give me five minutes to become human.”
Twenty minutes later, we were in the kitchen, flour dusting the counters and Debbie perched on her step stool beside me, carefully measuring chocolate chips into the batter.
She was wearing her favorite pajamas—the ones with the dinosaurs riding bicycles—and her hair stuck up at angles that rivaled my own morning disaster.
“One for the bowl, one for me,” she chanted, dropping chocolate chips with scientific precision. “One for the bowl, one for me.”
“At this rate, we’re going to have chocolate chip pancakes with a side of Debbie-flavored batter,” I said, but I was smiling as I said it.
She giggled and popped another chip in her mouth. “Daddy-flavored. I’m not in the batter.”
“Keep eating those chips, and I might have to dump you in.”
She giggled again, then popped another chip into her already stuffed mouth.
We cooked together in comfortable chaos, her chattering about her dreams (which apparently involved riding a unicorn to the grocery store) while I tried not to burn the pancakes or get too distracted by the comfortable warmth of her presence.
These moments—just the two of us, no schedules or obligations—were what I treasured most about our life together.
But today felt different.
Heavier.
More important.
Because I had something I needed to talk to her about, something that had been building in my chest since the first day I held her as a baby and our new reality settled about my shoulders like a cozy, ridiculously heavy chain-mail blanket.
Since Julia’s comment about most dads staying for dessert—and my recognition of the sorrow and longing in her voice when she spoke the words.
Since the realization that my feelings for a certain delivery man were becoming too big to ignore.
We ate our pancakes at the kitchen table, syrup sticky on our fingers, while Debbie told me about her plans to build a fort that could house at least seventeen stuffed animals.
It was normal Saturday morning conversation.
Safe territory.
But I couldn’t put this off forever.
“Baby Girl,” I said when she’d finished eating and was using her finger to collect the last drops of syrup from her plate. “I need to talk to you about something important.”
She looked up, immediately alert. “Am I in trouble?”
I grunted, something between a chuckle and a groan. “Why would you think that?”
“You only call me Baby Girl when I’m in trouble . . . or when you’re about to tell me something you think I won’t like.”
Well, damn. Kids really did pick up everything, whether we realized it or not.
“No, baby. You’re not in trouble, but I need to have a grown-up talk with you, okay?”
Her expression grew cautious as she crossed her spindly arms and squinted up at me, the syrup on her plate no longer fascinating. “Okay.”
I drew in a deep breath, trying to figure out how to start this conversation I’d been rehearsing in my head for days.
No, weeks. Hell, years. Yeah, it had been bouncing around my chicken-shit brain for years.
I justified it with the “she’s not old enough” argument.
The reality? I wasn’t old enough. Or mature enough.
Or brave enough.
But I couldn’t afford fear. Not anymore.
“You know how much I love you, right?”
She nodded, more nervous tick than intentional affirmation. I could see uncertainty creeping into her eyes.
“I love you more than anything in the whole world,” I continued, reaching across the table to take her small hand in mine. “You’re the most important thing in my life, Button. You make every day better just by being in it.”
“Daddy, you’re scaring me,” she said quietly, her voice folding in on itself almost as much as her body.
Shit. I’m doing this all wrong.
When adults started conversations with declarations of love and importance, kids immediately assumed something terrible was about to happen—because, most of the time, that’s exactly what was coming.
Get it together, Theo. She’s five, not a philosophy student. Just tell her what you need to tell her.
“I’m sorry, Baby Doll. I’m not trying to scare you.” I reached across the table and squeezed her hand gently. “I just . . . Daddy’s scared, too. What I need to tell you . . . no . . . what I need to ask you . . . it’s big. Really big. And . . . I need your permission to do something.”
“My . . . permission?” Her eyebrows scrunched together in confusion.
I sucked in another breath and blew it out slowly, hoping to calm my racing heart. It did absolutely nothing.
“Yes, permission. I want to do something, but it involves you, and I want to know that you’re okay if I do it. I promise, I won’t do anything without you telling me it’s what you want, too. Does that make sense?”
Her brows knitted tighter and then slowly relaxed. “Um, I guess so.”
This was it.
The moment I’d been building up to since Debbie was barely able to hold her own head upright. I fidgeted with my coffee mug, started to speak, stopped, cleared my throat, and tried again.
“I need your permission to . . .” I hesitated, the words stuck somewhere between my brain and my mouth.
“Daddy?” I heard as I blinked away tears I hadn’t noticed clouding my vision. Debbie rose from her seat and climbed into my lap. “Whatever it is, Daddy, we’ll be okay. I know we will.”
I looked at her sweet, patient face, at the chocolate chip smudge on her cheek and the way she was still holding my hand with complete trust, and felt my heart clench with love and terror in equal measure.
“I need your permission,” I said finally, “to become your daddy for real.”
She blinked at me, her mouth slightly open but utterly still.
A heartbeat passed.
Then another.
Finally . . .
“But you’re already my daddy,” she said, as though I’d just told her the sky was blue or water was wet.
“I know, baby, but legally—” I stopped, realizing that ‘legally’ meant nothing to her.
“What I mean is, I want to adopt you, Debbie. I want us to go before a judge and tell the world that you’re my daughter and I’m your daddy, now and forever.
I want this so bad, baby, so that no one can ever take you away from me, and I can never lose you, and we can be a real family forever. ”
Her face lit up with understanding, then something that looked like pure joy.
“Now and forever? Really?”
I choked on broken, whispered words as tears poured down my cheeks. “Now and forever, Button.”
“Even when I’m old, like Mrs. Rodriguez?”
I huffed a sobbing laugh. “Even when you’re older than Mrs. Rodriguez.”
She seemed to consider this seriously for a moment, then asked the question that nearly undid me: “Will you still love me when I’m not little anymore?”
“Oh, Debbie,” I said, my voice and heart and mind utterly wrecked.
“I’ll love you when you’re six and sixteen and sixty.
I’ll love you when you’re taller than me and when you have kids of your own and when you’re so old you forget my name.
There is nothing you could do and nowhere you could go that would make me stop loving you. ”
She smiled then, the kind of smile that could power small cities, and said, “Then yes, Daddy. You can be my daddy for real. I give you my permission.”
I’ve never felt such relief and love and overwhelming gratitude wash over me like the cleansing tide of those words.
No amount of chocolate smear or flour dusting could’ve stopped me from pulling her into me and holding her with all the force I could muster.
My chest heaved, as emotions long contained—long suppressed and hidden—poured freely.
Debbie, usually a squirmer, held me back, as though she, too, never wanted the morning to end.
“Thank you, baby,” I whispered, kissing her head over and over.
Finally, after what felt like a blissful forever, she sat back and stared intently. “Can Willie Wee be my daddy, too?”
The question may as well have been a baseball bat for how hard it slammed into the side of my head, completely derailing the emotional moment I’d been having.
“Can . . . what?”
“Willie Wee,” she said matter-of-factly. “Can he be my daddy, too? I like him. He has nice eyes, and he brings good presents, and he thinks my tiara is the best tiara in the whole world.”
I stared at her, my brain trying to catch up with the casual way she’d just reorganized our entire family structure, the one I’d so carefully laid bare—along with my soul—only minutes before.
“Sweetie, that’s . . . that’s not really how it works. People don’t just become daddies.”
“But you did,” she pointed out with five-year-old logic that was impossible to argue with.
I opened my mouth to explain the difference, then closed it again, because she wasn’t wrong, exactly. I had become her daddy, slowly and then all at once, through love and circumstance and the daily choice to show up for her every single day.
“Willie Wee would have to want to be your daddy,” I said carefully. “And we’d have to get married first, and that’s . . . that’s complicated.”
“Do you want to marry Willie Wee?”
Jesus, Mary, and the baby goat.
The directness of the question made my face flame. “I . . . we barely know each other, Button.”
“But you want to?”
I looked at her expectant face, at the complete trust and acceptance there, and felt something shift in my chest, something that felt like yet another granting of permission—or maybe just clarity. Yeah, it had to be that.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “Someday. If he wanted to, but sweetie, we just met. I can’t bring someone into our lives until I know for sure—”
She clapped her hands together like I’d just agreed to buy her a pony.
“Can I be the flower girl?”
And just like that, my serious adult conversation about adoption had turned into wedding planning with a five-year-old.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“We’ll see, Button. We’ll see.”