Chapter 2
Beckett
Here's a thing nobody tells you about raising a kid alone: you can be drowning in plain sight and nobody notices, because you keep showing up, and showing up looks a lot like being fine.
I showed up. Every day. Dropped Eli at playgroup, did my work, picked him up, made dinner — actual dinner now, I'd learned, the kid needed more than eggs — did the bath, did the books, did the bed, did the second bed when he wandered out, did the third when he had a bad dream. Showed up. Functional. Upright.
And underneath it I was a man treading water in the middle of a lake with no shore in sight, and the only reason nobody could tell was that I'd gotten real good at treading water with a calm face.
Eli was three now. Three is — three is a lot. Three asks questions.
"Beckett, where do the borned babies come from?"
"Beckett, why is the dog at the diner allowed but not me, I'm nicer than the dog."
"Beckett, where did my mom go?"
That last one I got at 6 a.m. on a Wednesday, over oatmeal, out of nowhere, the way the big ones always come.
And I'm a man who can stay calm through anything, who's stayed calm through bar fights and broken bones and the actual literal worst night of my life, and I sat there over a bowl of oatmeal and felt my hands start to shake.
Because what do you say. He doesn't remember her.
He's got two photos and a word — "mom" — that he knows is important and doesn't understand.
And I want to do right by her, by Cora, I want to give him the truth in a size he can hold, and there's no manual for that, there's no Gemma to call, there's just me and a three-year-old and a bowl of oatmeal and the whole weight of the world's hardest conversation.
"Your mom loved you so much," I said, which was true, and which was all I had. "She had to go a long way away and she couldn't come back. But she left you with me, because she wanted you to be safe and loved. And you are. Real safe. Real loved."
He thought about it. Stirred his oatmeal.
"Is she coming to my birthday?"
"No, bud. She can't."
"Oh." A pause. "Can I have a dinosaur cake?"
"Yeah," I said, and my voice did something, and I covered it by getting up for more coffee. "Yeah, you can have a dinosaur cake."
That's three. The hardest question in the world and a dinosaur cake, all before 6:15.
I love that kid more than I have words for, and I've never had many words, so that's saying something.
But I was tired in a way that had gotten into my bones.
Not the kind of tired sleep fixes. The kind that comes from being the only one.
The only name on the emergency form. The only one who knows he likes the blue cup not the green cup and will riot over the difference.
The only one who lies awake doing the math — what happens to him if something happens to me?
— and finds no good answer, because there's no good answer, because it's just me.
The club helped. God, they helped. But here's the thing about the club that I'd never say out loud because it'd sound ungrateful: they all had their own now.
Silas and Briar had their two. Diesel and Nadia were expecting.
Maverick and Wren, Hawk and Gemma, every brother who'd been single rubble when I joined was now a whole household, a whole life with its own gravity.
They'd show up when I called. They'd never not show up.
But they had somewhere to be at the end of it, somebody waiting, and I'd watch them go home to that and I'd take Eli back to a cabin that I kept very warm and very clean and that was still, somehow, too quiet.
I needed something more permanent than a favor I had to call in. And I had no idea how to ask for it, because asking for help is a thing I'd rather chew gravel than do.
And then there was the other thing. The thing I didn't let myself look at directly.
Mari.
I'd noticed her for a while. Longer than I'd admit. She was the only person besides me who could get Eli to eat a vegetable, and that alone made her something close to a miracle in my book. But it was more than that and I knew it was more than that and I kept the knowing in a locked box.
She filled rooms. That laugh. She'd walk into the clinic community room and six toddlers and one exhausted uncle would all turn toward her like plants toward a window.
She was warm in a way that wasn't soft — she had steel in her, you could see it, she'd stare down a screaming kid getting a shot without blinking and have him laughing by the end — but the steel had warmth wrapped all the way around it.
And Eli adored her. Reached for her first. Said her name in his sleep once, "Mari," and I'd stood in his doorway at midnight and felt something I had no business feeling.
So I kept my distance. Professional line.
She was the nurse, I was the fumbling guardian, and a man like me doesn't go reaching for a woman like that.
I had nothing to offer but a kid who wasn't mine and a quiet cabin and a job that involved a leather cut and the kind of past you don't bring to a nice woman's door.
I kept the box locked. I picked up my kid every day and I said three sentences and I went home.
Then Gemma cornered me.
It was a Friday. I came in for Eli and Gemma was waiting by the door with her arms crossed and a look on her face I knew, because it's the same look I get when I've decided to say a thing I'd rather not say.
"Beckett. Walk with me a sec. Eli, sweetie, you keep building that tower, we'll be right here."
We stepped into the hall.
"This isn't gossip," Gemma started, which is how you know something's about to be gossip, except with Gemma it wasn't, Gemma didn't do gossip, Gemma did intervention.
"I want that on the record. What I'm about to tell you, I'm telling you because I'm Mari's friend and I'm your friend and I've watched the two of you orbit each other for a year and a half like a couple of dignified planets, and I'm out of patience. "
"Gemma—"
"Mari's visa got denied."
The hallway went quiet. Somewhere a kid was singing the cleanup song off-key.
"Denied," I said.
"Clerical thing. Not her fault. The clinic restructured and her sponsorship lapsed for eleven days and now she's got" — Gemma checked her watch like the time was relevant, which it wasn't, it was just a thing to do with her hands — "about eighty days before she gets sent back to Spain.
To a country she doesn't even really remember.
Away from these kids. Away from this whole life she built.
" Gemma's voice tightened. "I can't fix it.
Ivy's trying. The appeal probably fails.
The clinic can't pay for re-sponsorship.
She's running out of road, Beckett, and she's too proud and too kind to ask anyone for anything, so she's just walking around with a smile on doing her job while her whole life ends. Remind you of anyone?"
It did. It reminded me of exactly someone.
"Why are you telling me," I said. Low. Careful. Because I knew. I knew why she was telling me, and I needed to hear her say it so I could be sure I wasn't making it up.
Gemma looked at me dead-on. She's a small woman and she's not scared of anything.
"She needs to stay," she said. "You need help with Eli.
That kid loves her, you love" — she caught herself, rephrased, mercy — "you two are good together, anyone with eyes can see it, you've been good together for a year and a half and neither of you will do a damn thing about it.
I'm not telling you to do anything. I'm not playing matchmaker.
I'm just telling you the facts, because you're both too stubborn to see what's standing right in front of you, and I'm tired of watching it. "
She put a hand on my arm.
"Think about it. That's all. You're a good man, Beckett. The best one I know who doesn't believe it. Think about it."
And then she went back to her tower-building toddler and left me standing in a clinic hallway with the floor pulled out from under my entire carefully-treaded life for the second time in three years.
I didn't say anything to Mari that day. Couldn't. I got Eli, I got him home, I made the dinner and did the bath and read the books — the book, the dinosaur one, eleven hundredth time — and I tucked him in, and he grabbed my finger the way he's grabbed my finger since the night I met him, and he said, "Night, Beckett," and I said, "Night, bud," and I turned off the light.
And then I went out to the porch and I sat down and I did not move for a very long time.
The spring night was cool. Tree frogs going. The tree line a black wall against a sky full of stars, the kind of dark you only get out here past the edge of town. I sat there with a beer I didn't drink and I turned the impossible thing over in my hands like a stone I couldn't put down.
She needs to stay. You need help. He loves her. You—
I made myself look at the box. The locked one. I made myself open it, just to see, because there's no point lying to yourself at two in the morning, the dark won't let you.
And there it was. The whole truth. I'd been half in love with Marisol Vega for a year and a half and I'd kept it locked up because I had nothing to offer her and because she deserved a man who came courting with flowers, not a man who came with a kid and a cut and a quiet cabin and a past.
But here was Gemma, handing me a fact: Mari needed to stay. And here was another fact I'd had all along: I needed help raising this boy, and there was exactly one person in the world I'd trust him to without a second of hesitation, and she was about to get on a plane.
What if it wasn't about flowers? What if it was about two people, both drowning quietly in plain sight, who could maybe keep each other's heads above water?
It was insane. It was a business arrangement dressed up in a wedding suit.
It would be using her crisis to fix my crisis, or fixing her crisis to feed my own selfishness, depending on which way you held it up to the light, and I held it up to the light a dozen ways and couldn't get it to stop being both at once.
But.
If I framed it right. If I made it clear it was practical.
If I took the wanting and locked it back in its box and offered her only the clean part — a marriage on paper, separate rooms, no expectations, she keeps her life and her job and her kids at the clinic, and Eli gets someone who isn't just me trying my best and failing half the time —
Then it wasn't me reaching for something I had no right to.
Then it was just two people helping each other.
She could say no. She'd probably say no. She'd probably look at me like I'd lost my mind, and she'd be right, and we'd both pretend I'd never said it, and the spring would turn to summer and she'd get on a plane and I'd go back to treading water alone.
But she could say yes.
The tree frogs sang. The stars wheeled slow. Inside, my boy slept, sure of exactly one thing in the world, which is that he was wanted, because I'd made him a vow and I'd kept it, and keeping it was killing me a little, doing it alone.
I sat on that porch until the sky started going gray in the east, and somewhere in there I stopped turning the stone over and just held it.
By the time the sun came up I'd decided.
I was going to ask her.
God help me. I was going to ask her.
I had no idea how. I'm a man with a limited number of words and the most important thing I'd ever need to say was made entirely of them.
But I was going to ask.
I went inside and started the oatmeal, and a few minutes later Eli padded out, hair in every direction, blanket dragging, and climbed up on his stool and looked at me with Cora's eyes.
"Beckett," he said. "Is it carrots day?"
"It's not carrots day, bud. It's Saturday."
"Oh." He considered the whole concept of Saturday. "Can Mari come to Saturday?"
I looked at my nephew. My son in every way that mattered. The universe sends you signs sometimes so loud you'd have to be a fool to miss them, and I have been a fool about a lot of things, but I'm not always a fool.
"Maybe," I said. "We'll see."
"I want Mari to come to Saturday," Eli said, with total certainty, and went back to his oatmeal.
Yeah, I thought. Me too, bud.
Me too.