27. Maren
— ? —
Maren
I brace for the worst.
That’s how this works, isn’t it? Powerful man discovers he has a son, and the first move is the cold, official one.
All the ways a man with his money can take a child and call it fair.
Rhodes Calloway doesn’t do anything without a strategy, a contract, a binding agreement that ensures he gets exactly what he wants.
So when my phone rings Sunday night and his name appears on the screen, I brace myself for the conversation I’ve been dreading since I watched him drive away with red-rimmed eyes and a shattered expression he thought I couldn’t see.
“Maren.”
“Rhodes.”
A pause. I hear him exhale.
“What time does he go to bed?”
I blink. “What?”
“Bedtime. What time does Rowan go to bed?”
This isn’t the conversation I prepared for. I shift on the couch, pulling my knees up under me, trying to recalibrate.
“Seven thirty.”
“That early?”
“He’s three, Rhodes. He’s not closing a nightclub.”
A beat of silence. Then: “Right.”
I wait for the pivot. For the real reason he called. The demand, the carefully worded request that’s actually a non-negotiable.
“What about dinner?” he asks instead.
“What about it?”
“What time does he eat? And preschool, you mentioned preschool at the party. What’s his schedule?”
I stare at the wall above my television. There’s a crooked frame I’ve been meaning to straighten for three months, Rowan at the beach, digging in the sand with an intensity that bordered on obsessive. I still haven’t fixed it.
“Preschool until three,” I hear myself say. “Little Sprouts, off Centre Street. Dinner’s usually around five thirty. Bath every other night unless he gets into something.”
“Define something.”
“Yesterday it was potting soil.”
A pause. Then, seriously: “Good to know.”
“Rhodes-”
“I’m not going to fight you for him,” he says, like he can hear the question I haven’t asked. “I just want to know how it works. His life. The parts I’m allowed to know.”
The parts I’m allowed to know.
Guilt twists in my chest. Or defensiveness. Or the strange discomfort of hearing Rhodes Calloway ask for permission.
“You can ask me things,” I say carefully. “I’m not going to keep him from you.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t sound angry, or like the Rhodes who cornered me in that hallway, cold and furious. He sounds like the man who sat on my living room floor because he didn’t know what else to do.
“He liked you,” I offer. “Rowan. He told me he wants to show you his preschool.”
“Yeah?”
“He’s not usually like that with strangers. He takes a while to warm up.”
“He’s smart.”
“He is.”
Another silence. I can hear him breathing.
“Can I take you both to the park tomorrow?” he asks. “After preschool?”
Not can I take Rowan. Can I take you both.
“Yes,” I say. “That would be fine.”
“Okay.” He exhales again. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He hangs up.
I sit on my couch, phone in hand, and I wait for the other shoe to drop.
The other shoe doesn’t drop.
Monday, Rhodes meets us at the park. He brings the rocket crackers, the right ones, in the purple box, and nothing else. No toys. No gifts. Just himself and a box of animal-shaped snacks that cost three dollars at any grocery store.
Rowan runs straight for the swings and demands to be pushed super high, which in his vocabulary means a height that would concern a safety inspector.
Rhodes catches on fast. He starts tentative, one careful push, watching Rowan’s face for permission. Rowan isn’t interested in careful.
“Higher! You’re going too slow!”
“Any higher and you hit orbit,” Rhodes says, but he pushes harder, and Rowan shrieks with the specific joy of a kid who’s found an adult willing to break the rules.
I settle on the bench with the purple box in my lap, and I wait.
This is the part I know. Any second now the phone comes out.
He checks it, then drifts ten feet away with a finger in his other ear.
Rowan keeps yelling higher at a father who’s stopped listening, and I’m the one who catches the disappointment when it lands, the way I always was.
The phone stays in his pocket.
“Watch me jump!” Rowan launches himself off the swing at the top of the arc, all thirty-two pounds of him, and my stomach drops, and Rhodes is already there, catching him before I’ve finished standing up.
“Okay.” He sets Rowan back on his feet, a little pale. “We’re going to workshop the dismount.”
“Again!”
“After my heart restarts.”
Rowan negotiates this down to thirty seconds and hauls him off toward the slide.
Rhodes glances back at me on the way, and there’s a question in the look, a checking-in, and I realize he’s been doing it the whole time.
Looking to me before every new inch of ground he takes, reading whether I’m okay with it.
He drops onto the bench beside me eventually, both of us watching Rowan deliver a lecture to an unimpressed pigeon.
“You keep waiting for something,” he says. Not a question.
“I keep waiting for your phone.”
He’s quiet a moment. Then he takes it out, powers it all the way off, and sets it face-down on the bench between us.
“There,” he says. “Now you can watch it not ring.”
It’s a small thing. A stupid, three-dollar-box-of-crackers kind of thing. It has no business undoing me. It does anyway.
Tuesday, Rhodes shows up at five and stays for dinner. He offers to help cook and reduces two grilled cheese sandwiches to a greasy, half-melted disaster.
“The pan’s fine,” I tell him, prying a sandwich off the spatula. “You have to let it sit, not stab it.”
“You could have mentioned that before I destroyed the bread.”
Rowan thinks the mangled sandwiches are hilarious. “Daddy broke the food!”
It’s the first time he’s called Rhodes that. We all pretend not to notice. Rhodes’s jaw tightens, and he turns back to the stove, and when he speaks again his voice is carefully even.
“Should I try again?”
“I’ll do it,” I say. “You can handle the apple slices.”
He looks at the apple in his hand like it might attack him. “How do you want them cut?”
“Thin. No peel. He won’t eat the peel.”
“Any particular shape?”
“Long pieces. Not cubes. He calls cubes ‘wrong squares.’”
Rhodes stares at me. “Wrong squares.”
“I don’t make the rules.”
He picks up the knife and gets to work, and I watch him concentrate on slicing an apple with the same intensity he probably brings to a deal. It shouldn’t be endearing. I refuse to let it be endearing.
He’s rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and I catch myself watching his forearms instead of the apple. The flex of tendon when he angles the knife. The loose old watch on his wrist. Four years, and my body files the details away, greedy about it.
I press my lips together and look at the cutting board.
I shouldn’t be doing this. He’s in my kitchen for Rowan, not for me, and I’ve spent three years learning to want nothing from him. My pulse didn’t get the memo. It’s up in my throat, quick and stupid, and there’s a low, warm pull behind my ribs I refuse to name.
But when Rowan examines the apple slices and declares them “good ones,” Rhodes’s face does something complicated. Something soft.
I look away.
By Thursday, he’s at the shop.
I didn’t invite him. He texted that morning asking if it would be okay to pick Rowan up from preschool, and I said yes before I could overthink it, and then at four-fifteen they both walked through the door of Bellamy Blooms, Rowan holding Rhodes’s hand and chattering about the garbage truck that came to school.
“Oliver tried to get on it,” Rowan announces to no one in particular. “Ms. Linda said no.”
“Wise decision,” Rhodes says.
Camila looks up from the arrangement she’s working on. Her eyebrows rise approximately to her hairline, but she doesn’t say anything. Just shares a loaded glance with her sister, who’s emerged from the back with an armful of eucalyptus.
“Mommy!” Rowan releases Rhodes’s hand and barrels toward me. “I showed Rhodes my cubby!”
“Your cubby?”
“At school. Where my backpack goes. He said it was a good cubby.”
Rhodes, standing just inside the doorway in a suit that costs more than my monthly rent, meets my eyes. “It was a very impressive cubby.”
“He’s easily impressed.”
“I’m learning.”
Rowan tugs on my apron. “Can I do my job?”
“In a minute, baby. Let me finish this order.”
“I want to show Rhodes my job.”
I glance at Rhodes, who’s watching the exchange with careful attention. “You can show him the stems in the back. The ones in the blue bucket. But don’t throw them until I check them, okay?”
Rowan nods solemnly and grabs Rhodes’s hand again. “Come on. It’s my very important job.”
They disappear into the back room. I hear Rowan’s voice, high and excited, explaining the complicated process of sorting ruined stems from good ones. I hear Rhodes asking questions, actual questions, patient and curious.
“So,” Camila says, not glancing up from the stems she’s trimming. “That’s him.”
“Camila.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Don’t just say.”
“He’s tall.”
“I noticed.”
“And he looks at you like-”
“Camila.”
She raises her hands in surrender. “Fine. I’ll mind my own business.”
“Since when?”
“Starting now.”
From the back room, I hear Rowan’s triumphant shout: “This one’s dead! In the trash!”
“Excellent work,” Rhodes says, and he sounds like he means it.
My hands grip the shears tighter, focus on the hydrangeas in front of me.
I don’t think about how strange it is to hear his voice in my shop.
I don’t think about how easily Rowan reached for his hand.
Nothing exists except the arrangement, the flowers, the work that has always been my anchor when everything else spins out of control.
Saturday morning, Rhodes shows up for breakfast.
“I brought bagels,” he says, holding up a bag from the place down the street. “And cream cheese. Two kinds, because I didn’t know which one he likes.”
“Plain.”
“That was my guess. The other one’s strawberry.”
“That one’s mine.”
He looks at me. Surprise flickers across his face, that I’m claiming something for myself. That I exist in this equation as more than just Rowan’s mother.
“Good to know,” he says.