24. Jake
JAKE
I have a daughter. I have said it to the mirror eleven times and it still does not sound like a sentence that belongs to me.
The email had come in sometime overnight, somewhere between a midnight check out of pure habit and the first bleary glance before I'd even opened my eyes properly, and I'd read it standing in the bathroom in yesterday's shirt, toothbrush still dry in my hand.
The number was the same one Aria would have gotten too, if the lab worked the way I assumed it did.
Ninety-nine point nine eight percent, printed flat and clinical, no room left in it for doubt or for the small, stubborn hope that I'd somehow misread the whole thing.
I hadn't gotten it wrong. I read it six more times just to be sure, and it said the same thing every time, which was somehow both the most obvious outcome in the world and the one that knocked the air clean out of my chest anyway.
The bathroom light buzzed overhead, the same fixture I'd meant to replace for a year, and I stood there under it staring at a man in a mirror who looked exactly like me and also like someone I hadn't fully met yet.
My hands were shaking. I hadn't noticed that part until I tried to set my phone down on the counter and missed the first time.
I have a daughter.
I said it out loud to my own reflection, watching my mouth shape the words like I needed visual proof they'd actually come from me, and something about hearing it in my own voice made it land differently than reading it ever had.
I said it again. Then again, counting without meaning to, the way you count contractions or the seconds after lightning, some old instinct trying to measure a thing too big to measure any other way.
By the eleventh time I had stopped sounding steady.
I sat down on the edge of the tub because standing had stopped feeling reliable, and I let myself do something I hadn't done in longer than I wanted to admit, which was cry without immediately trying to stop it.
It came out strange, half laughing, half something rawer than that, the kind of sound a man makes when joy and grief show up at exactly the same door and neither one is willing to wait its turn.
I thought of Lily's stubborn jaw and Noah's careful drawings and every single evening I'd spent fifty feet away from my own daughter without knowing it, and the grief and the joy kept trading places so fast I couldn't tell anymore which one I was actually feeling.
My phone buzzed on the counter. It was Deacon.
"You up?" he asked, before I'd even said anything.
"You never sleep past six anymore. Figured you'd be awake."
"Something like that."
"You sound wrecked."
"I got the email." My voice cracked on the last word, and I let it, because pretending felt pointless with the only person who already knew the whole story.
"It's confirmed, Deacon. Ninety-nine point nine eight. She's mine."
There was a pause on the line long enough that I checked to see if the call had dropped.
"Jake." His voice had gone thick in a way I'd only heard from him twice before, once the day Emily died and once the year after, when he'd shown up at my door every evening just to make sure I hadn't done anything stupid. "You've got a daughter."
"I've got a daughter."
"Say it again. I want to hear you say it like you believe it."
"I've got a daughter." It came out steadier that time, and something in my chest loosened just slightly, hearing it land in someone else's ears and not shatter on the way there.
"That's the best thing you've said to me in six years." He laughed, short and a little wet himself, which from Deacon was as close to tears as the man allowed in daylight.
"I'm serious, Jake. Say it once more, slower, so I know it's actually sinking into that thick skull of yours and not just bouncing off it."
"I have a daughter, Deacon."
"There it is." Something in his voice cracked open a little further, warm and unguarded in a way he rarely let show.
"How are you doing? Really."
"I don't know yet. Ask me again in an hour."
"Fair enough." A pause, gentler now. "You told Noah?"
"Not yet. I don't even know how you start that sentence with a six-year-old."
"You start it the same way you'd start it with anyone.
Slow, and true, and you let him ask you the questions instead of trying to answer the ones he hasn't thought of yet.
" Deacon had raised two nephews through a rough patch once, back before I knew him, and it showed sometimes in exactly this kind of certainty.
"He'll surprise you. Kids usually do."
"What if he's upset? Sharing me, sharing the house, all of it."
"What if he's thrilled? You're borrowing trouble that hasn't shown up yet." Deacon's voice softened further.
"That kid drew you a house with four bedrooms before any of this was even confirmed. I think he's going to take this better than either of us."
I hadn't thought about the drawing in days, not really, but Deacon saying it out loud brought the whole image back, sharp and sudden, four stick figures under one roof and Lily standing closest to me.
"What about Aria?" he asked, careful now, the way he got when he already suspected the answer wasn't going to be simple.
"I don't know. I sent a letter. She hasn't answered it."
"You going to go over there?"
"Eventually."
"Jake."
"I know." I rubbed a hand over my face, exhausted in a new way now, the kind that came from carrying something enormous and finally being allowed to set part of it down.
"I know I can't wait forever. I just don't know what I'm supposed to say yet that isn't just sorry again."
"You'll figure it out. You usually do, eventually, several detours later than anybody would prefer." He let that land with exactly the right amount of teasing in it.
"Go be with your kids today. Both of them. The rest can wait a few more hours."
I hung up feeling steadier than I had in days, which was Deacon's doing more than my own, and I got dressed and went to find Noah, needing to see him before I let myself think too hard about anything else.
He was at the kitchen table, cereal going soft in front of him, sketchbook open to a page I hadn't seen yet, something involving a dog that appeared to be riding a skateboard.
"Morning, bud."
"Morning." He didn't look up, focused entirely on getting the skateboard wheels to look round enough. "Can dogs skateboard?"
"I've never personally seen it happen."
"I think this one could. He's very talented." He said it with total confidence, the way he said most things about his own drawings, and I sat down across from him and just watched for a minute, my son's whole ordinary morning happening in front of me like nothing in the world had shifted overnight.
Everything had shifted. He just didn't know it yet.
I studied his face while he worked, the shape of his concentration, the small furrow between his eyebrows that was entirely his mother's, and thought about how he was about to become a big brother to a girl he already loved without knowing why the word would soon apply.
I wanted to tell him right then. I made myself wait, because Deacon was right, and because some sentences deserve better timing than a rushed morning with soggy cereal and a half-finished skateboarding dog between us.
"You okay, Dad? You look weird."
"Good weird or bad weird?"
"Weird weird. Like you're thinking about something big."
Kids saw more than anyone gave them credit for. Carol had said almost that exact thing to me once, and she'd been right then too.
"I am thinking about something big," I admitted. "I'll tell you soon. I promise."
"Is it a surprise?"
"Kind of."
"Good surprise or bad surprise?"
"The best kind, I think. I'm still figuring out how big it actually is."
He accepted that with the easy trust of a kid who'd never once had a reason to doubt me, went back to his dog, and I sat there a while longer just being near him, grateful in a way I didn't have words sharp enough for yet.
I thought about all the ordinary mornings I'd almost missed with him in the two years after Emily died, the ones where getting out of bed had felt like the hardest job on the schedule, and I thought about how close I'd come to letting that same fear keep me from ever knowing Lily existed at all.
Fear was patient. It would have let me miss both of them forever and called it caution the whole way through.
Later that afternoon, alone in the kitchen while Noah napped, I found myself talking to Emily the way I still did most days, quiet, internal, a habit two years old that had never quite worn itself out.
I have a daughter, I told her, the way I told her most things now, some stubborn part of me still expecting an answer even though I'd stopped believing one was coming a long time ago.
Her name is Lily. She's got Noah's careful way of watching a room before she decides what to say in it, and she draws almost as well as he does, and I think you'd have loved her before she finished her first sentence to you.
I wished, harder than I'd let myself wish for anything in two years, that she could have known this part of me, the father of two kids instead of one, the man who'd finally stopped running the same careful math on every decision and just let something enormous happen to him instead.
There was a version of this where the grief and the joy stayed separate, tidy, one feeling waiting politely for its turn after the other finished.
That was never how it actually worked. I stood in my own kitchen missing her and thrilled about Lily in the exact same breath, both of them true at once, neither one canceling the other out no matter how hard some old instinct in me wanted a cleaner answer.
You'd have known what to say to Aria, I told her. You always knew what to say to people. I never learned that from you the way I should have, and I've been paying for it in slow motion ever since.
She didn't answer, obviously. She never did. But for the first time in longer than I could remember, the silence after didn't feel like losing her all over again.
It felt like she'd already given me everything I needed, a long time ago, and the rest was just going to be mine to figure out.
I passed the photo on the hall table on my way to the door, the one I usually walked by without looking, Emily laughing at something off camera, Noah a squirming bundle in her arms. I stopped this time.
I let myself look at it as long as it needed, and something in my chest settled instead of ached, which felt like its own kind of permission.
I thought about that drawing again, the fence, the two separate houses, Noah and Lily reaching for a rail neither of them could climb alone.
I couldn't fix five years in one conversation, and I wasn't foolish enough anymore to walk over there expecting to.
I knew that much walking down my own porch steps, crossing the yard that had somehow become the only distance in the world that mattered, my heart going faster than the short walk should have earned.
I knocked. I had no idea what I was going to say. I knocked anyway.