6. Ivy #2
“I drove eleven hours ready to do exactly that.” He meets my eyes. “I had speeches about my rights. About custody and lawyers and what I was entitled to. I was going to make you pay for keeping her from me.”
“What changed?”
“I saw her.” His voice breaks completely.
“I saw Maddie, and she has my eyes, and she looked at me like I was nobody. Like I was nothing. And I realized that’s exactly what I am to her.
I’m the man who wasn’t there. I’m the empty space in her life.
All my rights, all my legal arguments, none of it means anything when my own daughter doesn’t know my face. ”
I don’t say anything. I don’t trust myself to.
“I’m not here to destroy you, Ivy. I’m not here to take her away or drag you to court or punish you for leaving. I’m here because I want to know my daughter. I want to be in her life. I want to earn back something I threw away before I even knew I had it.”
“Pretty words.”
“I know they’re just words. I know you have no reason to believe me.
I’ve given you a decade of reasons not to.
” He pushes off from the counter, standing straight despite the way he’s still shivering.
“But I stayed in the rain for three hours because I don’t know how else to show you I’m serious.
I don’t have grand gestures. I don’t have gifts picked out by assistants.
I just have time, and I’m willing to spend all of it standing on your sidewalk if that’s what it takes. ”
“Millie was a symptom.” I say it quietly. “You were the disease.”
He flinches like I’ve hit him.
“I know.”
“Do you? Because you came here thinking that telling me you fired her would matter. Like cutting out a tumor means you never had cancer.”
“I know it doesn’t fix anything.”
“It doesn’t fix anything because the problem was never Millie.
” I step closer. “The problem was a husband who outsourced his marriage. Who treated his wife like a task to be managed. Who let someone else learn his mother’s surgery date and his father’s diagnosis and his wife’s taste in jewelry because paying attention was too much work. ”
“I was building something.”
“You were building an empire. I was just supposed to be grateful I got to live in it.”
He doesn’t defend himself.
“I can’t undo any of that,” he finally says.
“I can’t give you back the years I wasted.
I can’t make Maddie recognize me as her father.
I can’t fix us, because you don’t want to be fixed, and honestly?
” He laughs, wet and broken. “I don’t blame you.
If I were you, I’d have left too. I’d have run as far and as fast as I could, and I’d never look back. ”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I’m not strong enough to walk away from my own child.
I’m not good enough to let her grow up thinking her father didn’t want her.
” He wipes his face with a still-damp hand.
“I’m just a man who made every wrong choice for ten years and finally figured it out too late.
That’s all I am. That’s all I have to offer. ”
I should tell him that Maddie is better off without him, that we don’t need his too-little-too-late epiphanies, that he can take his wet jacket and his broken voice and his three hours in the rain and go back to the city where he belongs.
But I think about Maddie upstairs, asleep in her crib, growing up without ever knowing her father’s face. I think about the questions she’ll ask someday, the empty space in her story, the hole that I created by running and he created by not being worth staying for.
I walk to the counter and pick up a printed sheet of paper. I knew this would happen and planned my terms last night and I was trying to delay it, thinking that I might not need to do this at all.
“Visitation schedule.” I hold it out to him. “Wednesdays and Saturdays. One hour each. I choose the location. You show up on time, every time, or we’re done.”
He takes it with shaking hands. Reads it slowly, line by line, like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing.
“You’re giving me a chance.”
“I’m giving Maddie a father. Whether you can actually be one remains to be seen.”
“I’ll be here. Every Wednesday. Every Saturday. I swear to you, Ivy.”
“Don’t swear to me.” I hand him a pen. “Swear to her.”
He signs without reading the fine print. Without negotiating. Without any of the things I braced myself for.
“There’s an inn on Maple,” I say. “The Starling. They have vacancies.”
“I saw it on the way in.” He folds the papers carefully, tucks them inside his soaked jacket. “I already booked a room. Open-ended.”
“For how long?”
“However long you’ll let me stay.”
I walk him to the door. The rain has softened to a steady drizzle, and the street gleams under the lights.
“Wednesday,” I say. “Two o’clock. If you’re late, don’t bother coming back.”
“I won’t be late.”
He steps out into the rain again, and this time he doesn’t look back. Just walks to his car, gets in, and drives away.
I lock the door behind him and stand in my dark bakery for a long time, watching the taillights disappear around the corner.
I press my hand against the glass where he stood for three hours, and the cold seeps into my palm.
We’ll see what he does with it.