18. Quin
— ? —
Quin
I’d never been nervous about a children’s event in my life.
I’d been nervous about board meetings, hostile takeovers, negotiations that could make or break my entire company. I’d been nervous asking Clara to marry me, holding Katie for the first time, watching my empire rise and wondering when it would all come crashing down.
But standing outside Happy Horizons Daycare in jeans and a button-down, no suit, no driver, feeling like I might throw up from anxiety? That was new.
The message had come through three days earlier. Four words, relayed through lawyers, that made me drop to my knees in my office and thank God or fate or whatever force in the universe had decided to give me one more chance.
She would like that.
Clara had said yes. Clara was letting me come.
I’d spent three days preparing for this like it was the most important meeting of my life. Because it was. It absolutely was.
The daycare was cheerful and chaotic. Construction paper art on every wall, little cubbies overflowing with tiny backpacks, the smell of apple juice and finger paint. I felt approximately eight feet too tall and fifty years too old as I signed in at the front desk.
“Name?”
“Quintus Fleming. I’m Katie Fleming’s father.”
The receptionist checked her list and nodded. “She’s in the Butterfly Room. Down the hall, second door on the left.”
I walked down the hall like a man walking to his own execution. My palms were sweating. My heart was hammering. I could hear children shrieking and laughing somewhere ahead, and I had to remind myself that this was a good thing. This was what I wanted.
Then I reached the door.
And Katie saw me.
“DADDY!”
She screamed it so loud that every adult in the room flinched. Her little legs were already pumping, carrying her across the room at top speed, and she hit my legs like a tiny cannonball of pure joy.
“Daddy daddy daddy you’re HERE! You came! I told Sophie you would come but she didn’t believe me and now you’re HERE!”
I dropped to my knees and scooped her into my arms and held her so tight she squeaked.
“Of course I came, sweetheart. I promised.”
“You smell like the ranch.” She buried her face in my neck, breathing deep. “I miss the ranch.”
“I miss you too, baby girl. Every single day.”
She pulled back to look at my face with those big brown eyes, my eyes, everyone said, the one thing everyone agreed she got from me, and she was grinning so hard her whole face scrunched up.
“Come meet my friends! Come see my cubby! We’re going to do FINGER PAINTING!”
She dragged me into the classroom by my hand, introducing me to every single person we passed like I was visiting royalty. “This is my daddy. He’s very tall. He has horses.”
The other kids were suitably impressed.
I caught a glimpse of Clara across the room.
She’d cut her hair. Not much, an inch, but the ends fell differently against her neck when she turned her head, and I wanted to know who had done it and whether she’d liked it and why I hadn’t been the one she told.
She was standing near the window with another parent, watching us, and her expression was…
complicated. She wasn’t angry or closed off. Just complicated.
I gave her a small nod. She nodded back.
That was enough. For now, that was enough.
The next two hours were the best two hours I’d had in months.
Finger painting turned into an absolute disaster. I ended up with purple on my shirt, my arms, somehow in my hair. Katie kept insisting I was doing it wrong even though there was no wrong way to smear paint on paper.
Then she looked up, scanned the room, and bellowed, “MOMMY. You have to paint too. It’s a FAMILY picture.”
Every parent in the room turned toward the window.
Clara’s smile went fixed. I knew that smile.
It was the one she used on donors who asked when Quin would be joining us.
She could have said no. A four-year-old forgets a request in six seconds if you hand her a graham cracker.
Instead she set down her coffee, crossed the room, and lowered herself onto the plastic stool on Katie’s other side, which put her knee against mine under a table built for people who came up to my hip.
Neither of us moved it.
“Hands,” Katie ordered. “Both of you. One each.”
She wanted handprints. Mine on the left of hers, Clara’s on the right.
I put my palm in the blue and pressed it down, and Clara reached past Katie for the same tray at the same moment, and her fingers slid over mine in the paint.
Slick. Cold. Then not cold. She didn’t pull back right away.
Neither did I. We stayed that way for one breath with our daughter chattering between us about which color the sky should be, and then Clara took the blue she needed and pressed her hand down beside Katie’s, and I watched the print she left.
Smaller than mine. Fingers spread wide. I’d held that hand through eleven hours of labor and I could still feel the exact width of it.
“Daddy, you have paint on your face.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“Mommy, fix it.”
Clara looked at me. I looked at her. Katie looked at both of us with the patience of a woman who had asked for a reasonable thing and would keep asking until it was done.
Clara wiped her hand on a paper towel, reached across the table, and dragged her thumb along my cheekbone.
Once. Slow, because paint does not come off fast. Her thumb was warm and her eyes stayed on the smudge and not on me, and I sat very still and did not turn my face into her palm, and it was the hardest thing I had done since the morning I fired Eva.
“There,” she said, and sat back, and did not look at me for the rest of the painting.
Ms. Lynn, Katie’s teacher, a patient woman who had clearly seen worse, caught my eye from the next table. “You have a little…” She gestured at her own face. The other side.
I wiped at it. My hand came away blue.
Clara had missed a spot. Or she hadn’t.
“Your daughter is very enthusiastic,” Ms. Lynn said diplomatically.
“She gets that from her mother.”
Storytime was worse. The chairs were designed for people one-quarter my size, and wedging myself into one felt like some kind of yoga position my body was never meant to achieve.
But Katie insisted I sit next to her, so I sat, and she leaned against my arm while Ms. Lynn read about a caterpillar who ate too much, and I thought: this is it.
This is what I missed. This is what I was too busy to notice.
After storytime, there were graham crackers. Katie shoved three into my hand.
“Mr. Jorge made them special, Daddy. You have to try them.”
They tasted like every other graham cracker I’d ever had. They were also the best thing I’d ever eaten, because my daughter had given them to me with that earnest expression that meant this mattered to her.
“Delicious,” I said seriously.
“I KNOW.”
At the end of the event, Katie dragged me across the room to where Clara was standing.
“Look, Mommy! Daddy finished his painting!”
I held up the paper. It was supposed to be a horse. It looked like a purple blob with legs.
Clara’s mouth twitched. “Nice horse.”
“It’s abstract.”
“It’s a blob. Can’t tell which end is the tail and which one’s the head.”
“Advanced abstract.”
Katie giggled. Clara almost smiled, and it felt like sunrise after a very long night.
We walked out together, all three of us, Katie bouncing between us like everything was normal. Like we were still a family. Like the last few weeks had never happened.
The parking lot was quiet when we reached Clara’s car. Katie ran ahead to pick dandelions, leaving us alone for the first time. Clara leaned back against the car door and folded her arms, and the movement pulled her shirt tight across her chest, and I looked very hard at the dandelions.
“Thank you,” I said. “For letting me come.”
“She missed you.” Clara watched Katie crouch over a particularly large dandelion. “She asks about you every night.”
“I missed her too.” I hesitated, then added, “Both of you.”
Clara didn’t respond to that. But she didn’t walk away either, and that felt like progress.
“The annual meeting is next Tuesday,” she said, to the dandelions more than to me. “The shareholders’ dinner after. I still get the invitation in my email. Nobody’s taken me off the list.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the same day as Katie’s recital. Three o’clock.”
“It is. Every board member in that room is going to want a word with me. Eva’s father most of all.”
She finally looked at me. “So which one are you going to?”
“I will tell my lawyers I won’t be there. They can handle the meeting.”
Something shifted in her expression. Something I couldn’t quite read.
“You weren’t going to tell me.”
“It’s not the kind of thing you tell people.” I shrugged. “It’s the kind of thing you do.”
“That’s a big meeting to miss.”
“It’s a bigger recital to miss.”
She was quiet for a long moment, studying me the way she’d studied Katie’s purple horse. Looking for the trick.
Then she nodded slowly.
“She’s dancing with the Butterfly class at three.” She opened the car door and called for Katie, who came running with fistfuls of dandelions. “Front row. She’ll want to see you in the front row.”
“Front row. I’ll be there.”
Clara buckled Katie into her car seat. Katie waved at me through the window, dandelions clutched in her fist, still grinning.
“Bye, Daddy! See you at my dance!”
“See you at your dance, sweetheart.”
I stood in the parking lot and watched them drive away, and for the first time in weeks, I felt something other than despair.
Hope that was small and fragile, but real.
I had a dance recital to attend and a room full of shareholders to disappoint and a very long road ahead of me.
But at least now I knew which direction to walk.