19. Aria
ARIA
"Why don't I have an almost-daddy like Noah has an almost-mommy?" Lily asked over macaroni, like she was asking about the weather.
I nearly dropped my fork, the question landing so casually across the table that it took me a full second to register how much weight it was actually carrying.
"What do you mean, baby?"
"Noah doesn't have a mommy anymore, but he's got you now, kind of. You're his almost-mommy." Lily said it with the easy confidence of a five-year-old who had clearly been turning the math over for a while and had finally arrived at a conclusion worth sharing.
"So why don't I have an almost-daddy?"
Noah, sitting across from her with a mouthful of macaroni, nodded like this tracked completely, entirely unbothered by being used as a reference point for his own grief.
"I don't know, sweetheart," I said, careful, buying myself a second I didn't actually have. "Where's this coming from?"
"Emma at school has a daddy who picks her up every day. And Noah's got you sometimes. And I just have you and Grandma and Carol, but Carol's not really a daddy kind of person."
"No," I agreed. "Carol is not really a daddy kind of person."
"So where's mine? My real one, I mean. Not an almost. A real one."
The kitchen went very quiet, the kind of quiet that has weight to it, and I set my fork down because my hands had started doing something I didn't trust anymore.
"That's a big question for macaroni night," I said, trying for lightness and landing somewhere closer to a plea.
"Is it a secret?"
"No. It's not a secret. It's just complicated, and I want to explain it right instead of explaining it fast."
"Okay," Lily said, entirely too reasonable for a five-year-old who had just asked the single hardest question of my week. "But you'll tell me eventually? The real answer?"
"I'll tell you eventually. I promise."
"Pinky promise?"
I held out my pinky, and she wrapped hers around mine with the solemn seriousness of someone finalizing a legal contract, and something in my chest ached at how easily she trusted that promise, how little she understood yet about how heavy it actually was.
Noah slid out of his chair without a word, tugged once at my sleeve, and mimed drawing against his own palm, the wordless shorthand I'd learned by now meant he wanted to go color before bed, apparently satisfied that the conversation had reached a natural stopping point.
"Go ahead," I said, and both kids scattered from the table in the particular chaotic hurry that only small children managed, leaving me alone with a half-eaten plate of macaroni and a question I'd been avoiding for five years.
Lily considered the whole exchange with the patience of a child who had learned, somewhere along the way, that grown-ups needed a little room to find their words.
She went back to her macaroni like the subject could wait, and mercifully, it did, at least until bedtime came and the house finally went quiet.
Jake found me on the back porch afterward, sitting on the top step with my knees pulled up, staring at nothing in particular.
"You've got that look," he said, easing down beside me, his shoulder settling warm against mine. "The one where you're somewhere else entirely."
"Lily asked me about her dad tonight."
He went still beside me, just for a second, and I didn't think anything of it, too far inside my own chest to notice much of anything at all.
"What did she ask?"
"Why she doesn't have a father. Why Noah's got me, sort of, as an almost-mom, and she doesn't have anything close to that on the other side." I laughed, short and humorless.
"She asked if it was a secret."
"What did you tell her?"
"That it's complicated. Which is true, and also a coward's answer, and I know it."
"It's not cowardly to need time to say something right."
"I've had five years, Jake. That's a lot of time to not say something right."
He didn't answer right away, just sat there with me in the dark, and something about the silence felt like permission instead of pressure, so I kept going before I lost the nerve.
"Do you want to hear it?" I asked.
"The whole thing. Not the version I give Carol."
"I want to hear whatever you're willing to tell me."
"It's not exciting. It's just a very ordinary story about a very ordinary summer that turned into the least ordinary thing that ever happened to me."
"Those are usually the best kind."
"I met him one summer. Up at a lake my family used to go to every year, this tiny place, blink and you'd miss it.
I was twenty. He was a little older, working construction on some dock project, and I spent the whole first month of that summer arguing with him about absolutely everything because it was easier than admitting I liked him. "
I picked at the hem of my sleeve, remembering it in pieces, the smell of cut lumber, the particular stubbornness in his jaw when I told him he was measuring wrong.
"He had this way of looking at me like I was the most interesting problem he'd ever tried to solve. I didn't know what to do with that at twenty. I'm not sure I know what to do with it now."
"Sounds familiar."
"Don't."
"I'm listening. I promise I'm not making fun."
"We had maybe six weeks together, and it was the kind of thing where you tell yourself it's just a summer thing, nothing that has to survive the drive home, and then it turns out your body had other plans entirely." I pulled my knees in tighter, my voice going thin in a way I hated.
"I gave him my number the last night, scrawled on a torn page from my sketchbook, and made him promise to call. He never did. I spent that whole first month at school checking my phone like it owed me something."
"What happened?"
"My family left at the end of the season, same as always, and I spent the drive home convincing myself the silence just meant a bad signal or a lost scrap of paper, nothing more sinister than that.
Then the weeks kept going by, and the silence started meaning something else entirely.
And then I found out I was pregnant, and by then I didn't have a single way left to reach him myself, just a first name and a town too small to have much of an internet footprint. "
"Did you know his last name, at least? Anything to go on?"
"A first name, and a business card I found months later at the bottom of my camera bag, nothing on it but a company name and a town. I held onto real hope over that card longer than I probably should have."
"You never tried to find him?"
"I tried once, really tried. I wrote to the company on that card that winter, the most honest letter I've ever written in my life, and I never heard a single word back.
" I wiped my face with the back of my hand, furious at how easily the tears had come, how close they'd apparently been sitting under the surface this whole time.
"I told myself the letter got lost, or he'd moved on, or the whole thing had just been a summer neither of us was ever going to chase past the season. I gave up eventually. I told myself it was a sign, that maybe some things aren't supposed to be found."
"That's not the same as giving up."
"It felt like giving up."
"It sounds like you tried everything a person could reasonably try, and the world just didn't cooperate. That's different from quitting."
I looked over at him, and something in his face had gone careful in a way I couldn't quite place, like he was holding something very still inside himself so it wouldn't spill.
"Do you ever wonder what he'd think of her?" I asked.
"If he saw her now? Whether he'd even recognize himself in her at all?"
"I think he'd recognize himself immediately. Kids like that don't come from nowhere."
"That's a kind thing to say about a man you've never met."
"Maybe. Or maybe some things are just obvious once you know where to look."
"You okay?" I asked. "You've gone quiet."
"I'm right here. It's a lot to carry alone."
"It is." I let out a breath I felt like I'd been holding for years.
"I used to think about what I'd say to him, if I ever found him. I had whole speeches prepared. Furious ones, mostly, and then softer ones later, once the fury wore off and all that was left was just wishing he knew."
"Knew what?"
"That he has a daughter who draws better than anyone I've ever met, and argues like a tiny lawyer, and has his exact stubborn streak even though she's never met him to learn it from." My voice cracked on the last part, and I let it, too tired to hold the seams together anymore.
"I don't even know if that's true. I never saw him again to compare. I just decided it was, because it made the not knowing easier somehow."
"I'm sure it's true."
"You don't know that."
"I know Lily. That's enough to make an educated guess."
I laughed despite myself, wet and a little broken, and he reached over and pulled me against his side without asking permission, which was exactly what I needed and hadn't known how to ask for.
"I'm sorry," I said into his shoulder. "This is not what macaroni night was supposed to turn into."
"Don't apologize. Not for this."
"I haven't told anyone the whole version in years. Not even Carol gets all of it."
"Why not?"
"Because saying it out loud makes it real in a way that just carrying it around never quite does. As long as it stays in my head, it's just a sad thing that happened to me once. Out loud, it's a whole person missing from her life, and that's a harder thing to sit with."
"I'm glad you told me."
"Why?"
"Because you shouldn't have to carry something like that by yourself. Not anymore, if I've got any say in it."
I tipped my head back against his shoulder and let myself believe, for a minute, that some part of the weight I'd been hauling around for five years had finally found another set of hands willing to help carry it.
Something about the particular quality of his stillness under my cheek should have told me more than it did.
The night air had cooled off around us, crickets going steady somewhere in the grass, and for a while neither of us said anything at all, content just to sit in the quiet with everything I'd finally said hanging softly in the space between us.
"I still don't know what to tell her," I admitted. "Lily, I mean. What do I even say?"
"You tell her the truth, when she's old enough to hear the shape of it. That her mother loved someone once, completely, and it didn't work out the way either of you planned, and that has nothing to do with how loved she is right now."
"That's a good answer."
"I've had some practice with hard truths lately."
"Have you?" I studied his profile in the dim porch light, something in his voice catching my attention even through the fog of my own exhaustion. "You'll have to tell me about that sometime."
"Sometime," he agreed, quiet.
I didn't ask him what he meant by that, too wrung out to chase anything else down that night, and he held on to me a little tighter, like he was answering a question I hadn't quite worked up the nerve to ask.
Jake held me while I cried about a man I never found, and I thought, not for the first time, that I had finally found someone safe. I had no idea how funny that was going to turn out to be.