17. Bree
— ? —
Bree
The shower ran for exactly eight minutes.
I knew because I was watching the clock, trying to calculate how long it would take for Grace to drop Rosie off, how long I had to prepare myself for whatever was about to happen, how many minutes remained before my daughter met the man who was her father without knowing it.
Seven minutes, then six, then five.
The water kept running. I heard the pipes creak the way they always did when someone used hot water for too long.
Four minutes. Three.
The bathroom door opened.
Rafael emerged in a cloud of steam, wearing the clothes I’d left for him. My clothes. A pair of sweatpants I used for lounging and an oversized t-shirt that said MARIGOLD FEED CO on the front.
He looked ridiculous.
He looked adorable.
I pressed my lips together and refused to acknowledge either adjective.
“These were all you had?” He tugged at the shirt. It was slightly too small across his shoulders, straining at the seams. The fabric pulled tight every time he moved.
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“I’m not begging. I’m observing.”
“Observe somewhere else. I need to start dinner.”
I turned to the stove, mostly to avoid looking at him. The sweatpants were too short by several inches, exposing his ankles. The shirt rode up when he moved, revealing a strip of stomach that I absolutely didn’t notice.
“Can I help?”
“You can set the table.”
“Where are the plates?” He was already opening the wrong cabinet.
“Cabinet above the sink.” I pointed without turning from the stove.
He found them. Started setting places with more care than the task required, positioning each plate precisely, lining up the silverware with geometric accuracy. The fork went exactly parallel to the knife. The napkin was folded into a perfect square.
“Three places?” he asked.
“Rosie eats with me.”
“Right. Of course.” He set the third plate with even more precision. “Should I… where should I sit?”
“Anywhere that isn’t Rosie’s chair.”
“Which one is Rosie’s chair?”
“The one with the booster seat.”
He nodded. Positioned himself at the chair farthest from the booster, then reconsidered and moved to the middle, then moved back.
“You’re nervous,” I observed.
“No.”
“You’ve moved chairs three times.”
“I’m strategizing.” He didn’t sit down.
“About seating?”
“About everything.” He ran a hand through his still-damp hair. “What if she doesn’t like me?”
“She’s four. She likes everyone.”
“She liked me yesterday. Before she knew I’d be coming back.”
There was a rawness in it I hadn’t heard from him before. Rafael Grant, undone by the verdict of a four-year-old.
“She’ll still like you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you have the same eyes.” The words came out before I could stop them. “She’s been fascinated by that since she was old enough to notice. She asks me about it sometimes. Why her eyes are different from everyone else’s.”
Rafael went very still.
“What do you tell her?”
“That she got them from her father. That they’re special.”
The silence stretched. I focused on stirring the pot, on not looking at his face, on not seeing whatever expression was there.
The front door banged open.
“Mommy!”
Rosie came barreling through the kitchen, Grace trailing behind with her backpack. Her pigtails were lopsided, one higher than the other, and there was paint, or what looked like paint, on her cheek.
She stopped dead when she saw Rafael.
“It’s you.” Her voice was filled with wonder. “The stranger with my eyes.”
“Hi.” Rafael’s voice came out strangled. He cleared his throat. “Hi, Rosie.”
“You’re in my house.”
“I am. Is that okay?”
Rosie considered this with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice. She looked at him. Looked at me. Looked at the table with its three place settings.
“Are you staying for dinner?”
“If that’s all right with you.”
“Mommy, is it all right with me?”
I bit my cheek. “It’s all right.”
“Then yes.” Rosie nodded decisively. “You can stay. But you have to sit in the middle because that’s where guests sit.”
“I’m already in the middle.”
“Good.” She dropped her backpack on the floor and marched over to inspect him more closely. “Your eyes are really exactly the same. Look, Mommy.”
“I see, baby.”
“It’s so weird.” Rosie reached up and touched his cheek, the casual intimacy of a child who hadn’t yet learned boundaries. “Are you magic?”
Rafael looked at me. I looked back, offering no assistance.
“Not magic,” he said carefully. “Just… similar.”
“Similar is boring. Magic is better.” Rosie lost interest in his face and noticed his outfit. “Why are you wearing Mommy’s clothes?”
“I got dirty at work.”
“At the farm?” Rosie narrowed her eyes at him.
“Yes.”
“Are you the new farmhand?”
Rafael blinked. “The new…?”
“Mommy said she was getting a new farmhand. Is that you?”
He looked at me again. I shrugged.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s me. I’m Rafe.”
“Rafe.” Rosie tested the name. “That’s a funny name.”
“It’s short for Rafael.”
“Rafael is better. It sounds like a prince.”
“You can call me Rafael if you want.”
“No, Rafe is good. Princes are boring.” She grabbed his hand. “Do you want to see my room?”
“Rosie, maybe let Rafe rest for a minute-”
“It’s fine.” Rafael stood, letting Rosie pull him toward the hallway. His eyes found mine, desperate. “Is this okay?”
I nodded, not risking my voice.
I listened to their footsteps recede, to Rosie’s chatter echoing down the hall, to Rafael’s low responses. Grace caught my eye and raised her eyebrows.
“New farmhand?” she murmured.
“Long story.”
“He’s the one, isn’t he? Rosie’s father?”
I let the question sit. Grace had been with us for two years. She knew the situation, knew the vague outlines of a marriage that had ended badly, knew I never talked about Rosie’s father.
“I’ll see myself out,” she said. “Want me back at the usual hour?”
“Please. And Grace? Not a word to anyone yet.”
She left. I went back to stirring the pot and listening to the sounds from Rosie’s room. Her voice carried down the hall, high and excited, explaining the politics of her stuffed animals. Rafael’s responses were too quiet to make out, but I could hear the rhythm of them, patient and attentive.
Fifteen minutes later, they emerged.
Rafael was covered in makeup.
Pink lipstick, applied with four-year-old precision, which meant it was mostly on his cheek. Blue eyeshadow, distributed liberally across his forehead and nose. Glitter. So much glitter. It caught the kitchen light and sparkled.
And rhinestones. Stuck to his face, his neck, the collar of my Feed Co t-shirt.
Rosie was holding his hand, beaming.
“Look, Mommy! I made him pretty!”
“I see that.”
“He sat very still for all of it,” Rosie said proudly.
“That was very patient of him.”
Rafael’s eyes met mine above Rosie’s head. His look was half plea and half pride, and I couldn’t tell where one ended. His face glittered in the overhead light.
“Rosie wanted to practice her makeover skills,” he said carefully. “I told her I didn’t mind being a canvas.”
“You’re very sparkly.”
“Thank you.”
“Mommy, can we have cookies?” Rosie was already moving on, her attention span that of a hummingbird. “I want cookies.”
“Dinner first.”
“But cookies.”
“After dinner.”
“What if we made cookies?” Rafael spoke up. Both of us looked at him. “I could… I mean, we could make them together. If you have the ingredients.”
Rosie’s eyes went wide. “You can make cookies?”
“I can try.”
“Mommy, can we? Can we can we can we?”
I looked at Rafael, still covered in glitter and rhinestones, offering to bake cookies though he’d probably never baked anything in his life.
“Can you?” I asked, skeptical.
“I’ve never actually done it before,” he admitted. “But I’ve read about it. The chemistry is straightforward. Flour, sugar, butter, eggs, leavening agent. It’s just a matter of ratios.”
“Baking isn’t chemistry.”
“Everything is chemistry.”
“That is both true and completely beside the point.”
“Please, Mommy?” Rosie was bouncing now. “Please please please?”
I sighed. “Fine. After dinner. We can try.”
Dinner was simple. Pasta with tomato sauce, bread on the side.
Rosie chattered through the entire meal, telling Rafael about her day, her friends, her favorite teacher, her opinions on various cartoon characters.
He listened with complete focus, asking questions, nodding along, treating her four-year-old concerns with the same seriousness he’d probably give a board meeting.
“And then Emma said that unicorns aren’t real, but I told her she’s wrong because how does she know? Has she been everywhere?”
“That’s a good point,” Rafael said. “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means just because you haven’t seen a thing doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
Rosie considered this. “So unicorns could be real.”
“They could be.”
“I’m going to tell Emma.”
Every time he was about to respond to her, he looked at me first.
A quick glance, a silent question. Is this okay? Can I engage? Am I doing this right?
I nodded. Every time, I nodded, and he visibly relaxed before turning back to Rosie.
After dinner, the cookies.
“Okay.” Rafael stood in front of my counter, ingredients assembled, looking at them with the wary focus he’d give a complicated algorithm. “Flour, sugar, butter, eggs, baking soda, salt, and chocolate chips.”
“Vanilla,” I added.
“Right. Vanilla.” He picked up the bottle, examined it. “Extract or synthetic?”
“Does it matter?”
“For the flavor compounds, yes.”
“It’s vanilla, Rafael. Just use it.”
He measured with painful precision. Every cup leveled exactly. Every teaspoon scraped flat. Rosie stood on a stool beside him, “helping” by dumping ingredients approximately in the direction of the bowl.
“The butter needs to be room temperature,” he muttered, consulting his phone. “For proper incorporation with the sugars.”
“The butter is room temperature.”
He turned the stick of butter over in his hand, frowning at it. Twenty minutes in my kitchen and we’d produced exactly zero cookies.
“It feels cold,” he said, frowning at the stick of butter.
“It’s fine.”
“The moisture content affects the final texture-”
“Rafael. Make the cookies.”
He made the cookies. Or rather, he attempted to make the cookies while Rosie added extra chocolate chips and stuck her fingers in the batter and generally created the chaos four-year-olds excel at.
“More chocolate,” Rosie announced, dumping another handful into the bowl.
“That’s a lot of chocolate.”
“There’s no such thing as too much chocolate. Right, Mommy?”
“She’s right,” I confirmed. “There isn’t.”
Rafael looked at the overflowing batter with concern but said nothing.
The first batch came out flat.
“The leavening ratio was off,” Rafael diagnosed, staring at the cookie puddles with obvious distress.
“You used too much butter.”
“I measured exactly.”
“Your exactly and baking’s exactly are different things.”
The second batch came out overbaked, dry and hard.
“The oven temperature must be inaccurate.”
“The oven is fine. You set the timer wrong.”
“I set the timer for precisely twelve minutes.”
Precisely. He’d actually said precisely, about cookies, and he looked genuinely wounded that I’d doubted him.
“Twelve minutes is too long.”
“The recipe said ten to fourteen.”
“Our oven runs hot. Eight minutes.”
The third batch, I made myself.
I took over the mixing while Rafael watched, taking mental notes with the intensity of someone memorizing a formula. Rosie stood on her stool, licking batter from a spoon.
“You’re not measuring,” Rafael observed.
“I don’t need to.”
“But the ratios-”
He hovered at my elbow with the recipe card, checking my hands against the printed measurements, ready to catch me in an error.
“Are in my hands. I’ve made these a thousand times. I know what it’s supposed to feel like.”
“That’s not scientific.”
“It’s not supposed to be scientific. It’s supposed to be cookies.”
The third batch came out perfect.
Golden brown. Slightly crisp at the edges. Soft in the middle. Rosie grabbed one before they’d fully cooled and pronounced it the best cookie in the history of cookies.
Rafael took a bite. His expression shifted.
“These are good.”
“Thank you.”
“Really good,” he said, sounding almost offended by it.
“I know.”
“How did you-” He stopped. Looked at the bowl, the oven, me. “You made that look effortless.”
“Because it is effortless. When you’ve done it enough times.”
We stood in my flour-dusted kitchen, eating warm cookies while Rosie got chocolate on her face and Butterbean snuffled hopefully at the screen door. Rafael still had glitter on his cheek. I probably had flour in my hair.
“Mommy.” Rosie tugged at my shirt. “I like Rafe.”
“I’m glad, baby.”
“Can he come back tomorrow?”
I looked at Rafael. He looked back at me, hope naked on his sparkly face.
“We’ll see,” I said.
Rosie accepted this and went back to her cookie. Rafael caught my eye and mouthed thank you.
I watched them, my daughter and her father, sitting at my kitchen table with chocolate on their fingers and contentment on their faces. They had the same eyes. The same stubborn set to their jaws. The same way of tilting their heads when they were thinking.
Unmistakably father and daughter.
I’d kept them apart for four years. I’d convinced myself it was the only safe choice. I’d told myself I was protecting Rosie from a man who would dismiss her and treat her as an afterthought.
But watching them now, watching Rafael hang on her every word, watching him ask my permission before every interaction, watching him sit perfectly still while she covered him in rhinestones, my chest shifted.
Maybe I’d been wrong.
Maybe I shouldn’t have kept her a secret.