2. Colm
two
Colm
For the record, I looked for her the next morning.
That's the thing nobody knows. It didn't take long — she was just gone, the tent empty, the sleeping bag folded with a neatness that felt deliberate, like she wanted to leave no trace.
I asked around. Described her. Three different people vaguely remembered seeing a woman with dark hair near the main gate, and one of the vendors thought she'd parked on the east side.
By the time I got to the east lot, she was already gone.
I looked. That matters to me, even if nobody else knows it.
I've thought about her on and off for three years.
When I'm up on the ridge alone, or when I'm sitting on my porch in the evening and the mountains are going blue, sometimes I think about the one night that felt entirely complete and went entirely nowhere.
The woman who laughed at something I said and then said something back that made me laugh, and who touched me like she meant it, and who was gone by morning.
And now she's standing on the viewing platform with a toddler at her side.
Three years ago. The festival.
The toddler is two. Maybe two and a half. Dark hair. A jaw set at that angle — the stubborn one, the one I see in every mirror and in every photograph my mother ever took.
My eyes.
The kid has my eyes.
My chest does something I don't have a name for. The air goes strange in my lungs. I am thirty feet away from a two-year-old with my eyes, and her mother is standing there watching me figure it out. Her face says I know. I know what you're seeing.
The little girl calls out to me.
I don't answer. I can't.
My whole mouth is occupied with keeping my jaw level and my face neutral, because I am a man who grew up in a logging family, and we don't display our feelings in the middle of crowded festival grounds. What I am feeling right now would fill a room.
I walk toward them.
The platform is three steps up. I climb them.
She doesn't move back, which I register somewhere — the fact that she holds her ground.
Up close, she's the same and not the same.
The same face, rounder at the edges than she was at twenty-two.
The same eyes — dark and very direct. The same stubborn quality in her posture, like she's made a decision and she's staying with it.
But she's harder than she was. Not mean.
Just — not soft the way she was then. The softness is still there, but it's underneath something that earned itself. She’s grown in the past three years.
I look at the toddler.
She looks at me. Curious.
The little girl has a little bruise on her knee. A small crescent of dried something on her chin that might be apple mush. She's holding the railing with both hands and leaning forward like she wants to see everything.
My eyes.
I reach toward her and she looks at my hand and then, with complete toddler certainty, she grabs my finger.
Her hand is small. Her grip is serious.
That's it. I'm gone.
I have been a father for two years without knowing it.
I found out thirty seconds ago, and I am already completely, irreversibly gone for this kid.
I am ruined in the best possible way. I am also furious, and both of those things exist at the same exact moment, and neither one cancels the other out.
I look up at her mother.
"Three years," I say.
She doesn't flinch. "I know."
"She's mine."
Not a question. The question was finished the second I saw her eyes on the kid's face. The statement is for both of us, so we're starting from the same place.
"Yes."
The toddler is still holding my finger. She gives it an experimental tug, checking its structural integrity. I let her pull.
"I didn't know your last name," she says. "I want you to understand that before I explain anything else. I didn't know your name. I couldn’t find you."
"I know mine," I say. "I'm Colm. Colm Gallagher."
She closes her eyes for exactly one second. The particular expression of someone receiving information two years too late.
"Mila Jensen," she says. "And this is Macie."
Macie releases my finger, looks at her mother, then looks back at me. She reaches up and touches my arm with an exploratory pat. Testing the texture.
Something in my throat closes.
I say: "How old is she?"
"Two. She'll be three in May."
The math. May, nine months after August. The math is simple.
"You came back," I say. “Why now?”
"I've been trying to find you for two years." Her voice is even. Not defensive, not apologetic — just factual, the way you state a thing that happened. "No name. No number. The festival in Silver Ridge — that was all I had. I looked. I put what I could think of online. Nothing came back."
"I was here," I say. "I've always been here."
"I didn't know that."
The radio on my belt crackles. Someone is calling about the log-rolling staging order. I ignore it.
"I know," I say, and I do.
I believe her. I can see it in the way she's holding herself, the quality of the waiting.
This is not a woman who came here to make trouble.
This is a woman who drove however far to hand me something that belongs to me.
The anger is real. It's also not aimed where it wants to go, which is at her, and I know that too.
"She has your eyes," Mila says. Quieter. Something in her voice that isn't quite an apology but is adjacent to one.
Macie has gotten bored with standing still. She tugs her mother's hand and points at the log-rolling pool below. "Log," she tells me, like I might have missed it. "Big log."
"Yeah," I say.
She looks at me with those grey-green eyes. I squat down so I'm at her level. She examines my face. Then she puts one hand on my cheek, patting, the same exploratory gesture she gave my arm.
She smiles at me. It is my own smile on a face that is thirty-three years younger than mine, and it destroys me completely. I don't try to hide it.
"Hi, Macie," I say.
"Hi," she says. Satisfied. "More log," she tells me, and points.