Oops… Daddy’s Back

1. Amara

AMARA

The studio carries the comforting aroma of linseed oil and espresso gone cold.

Late afternoon light cuts through the window at an angle that turns dust motes into floating embers, and June sits cross-legged on a paint-splattered tarp with a fistful of brushes she's sorted by color instead of size.

She hums something tuneless while she works, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth in concentration.

I step back from the canvas. My shoulders ache. This piece has fought me for three days—a sprawling thing, raw umber and cadmium red, something about memory and erasure that I can't quite articulate yet. The best work comes out like that.

"Mama, this one's lonely."

June holds up a flat brush with bristles splayed wide. She's right. It doesn't match the others.

"Then it gets its own pile," I tell her.

She nods, solemn as a judge, and sets it aside with the reverence of someone solving a minor injustice.

The apartment is small but ours. High ceilings, cracked plaster, a kitchen the size of a closet.

I've filled it with secondhand furniture and June's drawings taped to every available surface.

Her school portraits line the windowsill—gap-toothed grins progressing year by year.

Barcelona gave us this: enough distance to breathe, enough anonymity to rebuild.

Six years.

Six years since I left New York with a positive pregnancy test and a shattered assumption, since I convinced myself Cassian had chosen Raylin, that I was the fool who misread everything, that leaving was the only way to survive it.

I traded my name for a pseudonym. Sold work through galleries that didn't ask questions. Kept my head down and my heart locked up tight.

June drops a brush. It clatters across the floor.

"Oops."

She scrambles after it and I feel the old ache settle somewhere behind my ribs. She has his eyes. Hazel, flecked with gold in the right light. People say she looks like me—the curls, the skin, the stubborn set of her jaw—but I see him every time she laughs.

My phone rings on the worktable. I wipe my hands on a rag and answer.

My mother's face fills the screen, warm and exasperated in equal measure.

"There she is. My daughter, the ghost."

"Hi, Mom."

"Don't 'hi Mom' me. When's the last time you called?"

"Last week."

"Two weeks. I checked." She adjusts her glasses, peers closer. "You look tired."

"I'm always tired. I have a five-year-old."

As if on cue, June pops into frame, waving with both hands.

"Hi, Grandma!"

My mother's expression softens immediately. "There's my sweet girl. How's school?"

"Good! I learned about octopuses. They have three hearts."

"Three hearts. Imagine that."

They chat for a minute. June's current hyperfixation is marine biology, which means I've heard more about squids in the past month than I ever thought possible. My mother indulges her with the patience of someone who raised me, so I let them talk while I clean a palette knife.

Eventually June wanders back to her brushes, and my mother's attention returns to me.

"The city's changing," she says quietly. "New buildings going up in Brooklyn. That little bakery on our corner closed. Everything's different."

I don't respond. She's said this before.

"You should come home, Amara."

"Mom—"

"I'm not saying forever. Just visit. Let me see my granddaughter in person. Let June see where you grew up."

I scrape dried paint off the edge of the table. "It's complicated."

"It's been six years. How much longer are you going to punish yourself?"

I stare at the canvas across the room, at the bleeding reds and the dark, empty spaces I haven't filled yet.

"I'm not punishing myself."

"Then what do you call this?"

I don't have an answer she'll accept. We say our goodbyes, love yous, and promises to call sooner, and I set the phone down feeling hollowed out.

June looks up from her careful sorting.

"Are you sad?"

"No, baby. Just thinking."

"About Grandma?"

"About a lot of things, really."

She accepts this with a shrug and goes back to her work. Kids are magic that way. They don't need all the answers.

My laptop chimes. An email notification.

I almost ignore it—probably another gallery inquiry or some automated newsletter I forgot to unsubscribe from—but the sender's name stops me cold.

Katheryn Caldwell. Sapphire Studios.

I sit down slowly. Click it open.

The email is brief and direct. Classic Katheryn. No need to beat around the bush when you can just cut to the chase.

"Amara,

I'm launching a new exhibition series in New York. Curated, intimate, high-profile. I want you as the headline artist. Three months to deliver a collection. Full creative control. Compensation we can discuss, but it'll be worth your time.

This is the kind of opportunity that changes careers. You know that.

Let me know.

— K.C."

I read it twice. Then a third time.

Sapphire Studios is the place artists dream about. Katheryn Caldwell is a legend—sharp, uncompromising, a Black woman who built her empire brick by brick and didn't apologize for a single decision. She doesn't make offers lightly.

This is everything I've worked toward. Everything I've wanted.

And it's in New York, my home.

I close the laptop and walk to the window.

Barcelona spreads out below, terracotta roofs and narrow streets, the distant hum of traffic. We've been safe here. Anonymous. I built a life where no one asks questions, where June grows up without the weight of my past pressing down on her.

But safety isn't the same as home.

"Mama?"

June's beside me now, brush still in hand.

"Yeah, sweet girl?"

"Can we get churros later?"

I smile despite myself. "If you finish your homework first."

"Deal."

She runs off, and I'm left standing in the amber light, staring at my own reflection in the glass.

New York means risk. It means walking back into the city where Cassian still lives, where our shared past is buried under six years of silence and unanswered questions. It means the possibility of running into him, of June's existence becoming impossible to hide.

But June deserves roots. She deserves grandparents she can hug and streets she recognizes and a city that's hers by birthright.

And I'm so damn tired of running.

I open the laptop again, pull up Katheryn's email and hit reply.

My fingers hover over the keys.

June laughs in the other room—something about her brushes again, some small victory in her organizational system. The sound is bright and uncomplicated, and I think about her hazel eyes, about the father she doesn't know, about all the ways I've tried to protect her by keeping her from the truth.

Maybe it's time to stop protecting and start trusting.

I type quickly, before I can second-guess myself.

"Katheryn,

I'm in. When do we start?

— Amara."

I hit send.

The email disappears into the void, swallowed by distance and time zones and whatever algorithms govern transatlantic correspondence.

I sit back in the chair, heart hammering against my ribs like it's trying to escape.

My hands are shaking. Just slightly, but enough that I have to press them flat against my thighs to steady them.

June appears in the doorway, homework folder clutched to her chest like a shield. Her curls are even wilder than before—she's been running her hands through them again, a habit she picked up from me.

"I'm ready for churros now."

I raise an eyebrow. "Homework first, remember?"

She groans, head tipping back with the theatrical despair only a five-year-old can muster.

But she settles at the small kitchen table without further argument, pencil in hand.

I watch her work—tongue poking out in concentration again, eyebrows furrowed, one foot swinging under the chair.

The light from the window catches the edge of her face, and for a moment I see him there.

The shape of her jaw. The exact shade of those eyes.

I look away.

The future is shifting beneath my feet. I can feel it, the way you feel a subway train approaching through the platform floor before you hear it coming.

New York.

Three months.

Cassian's city. Still his, even after all this time. Even after I've tried to carve it out of my memory and replace it with London rain and Barcelona sun.

I'll deal with it. I have to. There's no other option now that I've hit send, now that Katheryn is probably already drafting press releases and booking studio space and adding my name to contracts I haven't even seen yet.

June deserves more than a life built on fear and distance and half-truths. She deserves everything. Grandparents who would love her, a history that isn't full of gaps I refuse to explain.

Even if it means facing the one person I've spent six years trying to forget.