Chapter 8
Beckett
The home interview went well. Almost too well, because by the time the officer came we weren't acting anymore, and it turns out the easiest way to convince a federal agent you're in love is to actually be in love and have stopped pretending you're not.
His name was Officer Reyes. Mid-fifties, tired eyes, a man who'd clearly seen every kind of fake marriage there was and could smell one across a parking lot.
He sat at our kitchen table and he separated us — me in the kitchen, Mari out on the porch with his partner — and he asked his trapdoor questions, and I answered every one without thinking, because I didn't have to think anymore.
What does she take in her coffee. Black with one sugar and she steals my last cup.
What's the last thing you argued about. Whether a hot dog is a sandwich; she's wrong, it's not.
When did you know. The morning she fell asleep in my bed with my boy between us.
He wrote it all down. And then Eli, who'd been told a "nice man" was visiting, climbed into Officer Reyes's lap uninvited, showed him a foam letter B, informed him that Mari was "my real mom now even though she comed from far away," and asked if he wanted to see the dog.
"You have a dog?" Reyes asked.
"NO," Eli said, with enormous tragedy. "But we're getting one. Beckett promised."
I had not promised. But I looked at the officer's face as a three-year-old climbed all over him narrating our family, and I understood the interview was over and we'd passed it before it started, because you can fake a lot of things but you can't fake a kid who calls you his real mom in front of a stranger.
"Beautiful family," Reyes said at the door, shaking my hand. "Approval's not my call, but I'll be honest — I see a hundred of these a year and most of them I can tell. Yours, I couldn't tell. Because there's nothing to tell. Take care of them."
"I will," I said, and meant it down to the ground.
We'd done it. The visa would clear. Mari was staying. That part of our life — the part that had started all this, the deportation hanging over everything — that part was solved, by the marriage and by her own merits and by a kid climbing into the right lap at the right time.
I should have known the universe doesn't let you keep the calm.
The conflict came from a direction I never watched, because I'd never thought to watch it, because as far as I was concerned the man had ceased to exist three years and nine months ago.
Dax.
Eli's biological father. Cora's old boyfriend.
The man who'd left her before Eli was born — never signed the birth certificate, never sent a dollar, never once asked after the kid he'd helped make.
Cora never even said his name with anything but a tired shrug.
He was gone. He'd been gone so long he wasn't even a wound anymore, just a closed door.
And then he showed up at the clubhouse on a Saturday, asking for me by name.
Word travels. Somebody must have mentioned — a new wife, a stable home, a man who'd married a nurse and built something — and somewhere in Dax's calculating little mind that translated to opportunity.
A settled household. Maybe a payday. Maybe leverage.
Maybe just the kind of man who sees somebody else's happiness and wants to put his hand in it.
"I'm Eli's father," he said, in the clubhouse lot, with the particular swagger of a man who's rehearsed being brave. "I've got rights. I want to see my son. And if you make it difficult, I've got a lawyer says I can make it real difficult for you."
I have been calm my whole life. It's my defining feature. I'm the man who stays steady when everyone else loses it; it's why I'm Sergeant-at-Arms, it's why people hand me their fear to hold.
And I felt that calm leave my body entirely.
Because here's the one thing — the one thing — that can break a steady man, and it's a threat to the thing he'd burn the world for. I'd made a vow over a crib. You will never wonder if somebody wanted you. And here was a man who'd never wanted him, never once, showing up to use him as a crowbar.
I took a step toward Dax and I do not know what I would have done, except a hand landed on my chest. Flat. Firm.
Knox.
"Not like this," Knox said. Low. Just for me. The president's voice, the one that stops a room. "Look at me, Beckett. Not with your fists."
"He wants to take—"
"He wants you to swing on him." Knox didn't move his hand.
His eyes held mine, steady, the still-water eyes.
"That's the whole play. He's got nothing — no paternity, no history, nothing but a threat in a parking lot.
The second you put a hand on him, you hand him the only weapon he's got.
A judge doesn't see a scared father protecting his kid.
A judge sees a biker who assaulted a man.
You'll win this. But only if you don't give him a thing to use. Paper, not fists. You hear me?"
I heard him. Through the roaring in my ears, I heard him.
I stepped back. I unclenched my hands. It was the hardest thing I've done since the rocking chair.
"Get off my property," I told Dax, level, dead. "Anything you've got to say, you say it through a lawyer."
He smirked, because he thought he'd rattled me, and he had, but not the way he wanted.
Then he got on his bike and left, and I stood in the lot shaking with everything I hadn't done, and Knox kept his hand on my chest until I stopped shaking.
"Now," Knox said. "Go home. Tell your wife. And tomorrow we go see Ivy. You don't fight this with the club. You fight it with the law, and you let the people who are good at the law do the fighting. That's an order, Sergeant."
I told Mari that night, after Eli was down. I told her every word, sitting at the kitchen table where we'd negotiated our whole marriage, and I watched her face go from shock to fury to something cold and focused and absolutely terrifying.
"He never signed the birth certificate," she said.
"No."
"Never paid support. Never visited. Cora named you guardian, explicitly, in a will."
"Yeah."
"Beckett." She took my hands across the table.
"He has nothing. I need you to hear me, because I can see you spiraling, I can see it.
He has no legal standing. No established paternity.
A documented history of total abandonment.
And a dead mother's explicit written designation of you as guardian.
This isn't a custody fight. This is a man trying to scare you into a payout because he thinks you'll panic.
And we are not going to panic. We are going to bury him in paperwork. "
"You're really not scared."
"Oh, I'm furious," she said. "There's a difference.
Scared is useless. Furious gets things done.
" She squeezed my hands. "I lost six years of my life to a piece of paper, Beckett.
I know exactly how this works. You think I'm going to let some deadbeat take our son with a threat?
I have been fighting bureaucracies on three hours of sleep my entire adult life. This is my home field. Let me play."
And she did. God, she did.
She and Ivy mobilized like a single organism.
Ivy on the legal strategy, Mari pulling every document — the will, the birth certificate, three years of medical records with Beckett listed as guardian, school enrollment, the works.
They built a wall of evidence so high and so clean that Dax's "lawyer," when he finally produced one, took one look at it and started talking settlement within a week.
The whole town testified, on paper. Gemma wrote a statement about three years of watching me father that boy.
Wren about the bottle. Briar about babyproofing a cabin.
The clinic. The playgroup. Judge Fenton remembered the turtle at the wedding.
An entire community stood up and said, in writing: this is the father.
This is the family. There is no question.
Mari resolved it. I need that on the record, because I'd spent three years thinking I had to carry everything alone, and the thing that finally proved I didn't was watching my wife take the worst threat of my life and dismantle it with a binder and a fury and her own two hands.
She didn't need me to rescue her from anything. She rescued us.
But it was agonizing while it lasted. Weeks of it. And it forced me to look at the thing I'd buried deepest.
She found me on the porch at three a.m.
I hadn't been able to sleep. The settlement was all but done, Dax all but gone, and I should have been relieved, and instead I was sitting in the dark gutted hollow, because the fight had cracked something open in me and the thing inside it was the oldest fear I had.
"Hey," Mari said softly, coming out in her t-shirt, sitting down beside me on the step. "Talk to me. We promised honesty. Even when it's bad. Especially when it's bad. You said that. So talk."
"He's right," I said. "That's the thing I can't get past. In the worst, smallest way — he's right.
I'm not Eli's father. Not really. Not by blood.
I've been telling myself for three years I'm enough, I made a vow, and then a man shows up who actually made him, who's got the actual blood, and I look at my whole life raising that kid and I think — what if I've just been a stand-in this whole time.
What if I'm the consolation prize. What if there's some part of Eli that'll always have a hole in it shaped like the parents he should've had, and I've just been filling it with a guy who can't open a juice box. "
Mari was quiet for a moment. Then she shifted, and took my face in both her hands, and turned me to look at her in the dark, the way she does, the way that doesn't let me hide.