Epilogue Two
Gabriel
Peyton has been in the bathroom for ten minutes, and I can hear her singing to herself, which means she hasn’t started brushing yet.
I lean against the doorframe. She’s standing at the sink in her pajamas, her toothbrush in hand, conducting an imaginary orchestra in the mirror.
The song is something from school, I think, one of those ones that gets stuck in your head for days whether you want it to or not.
She hasn’t noticed me yet, too focused on her performance.
“Bug.”
She startles at the sound of her nickname and looks at me in the mirror, scrunching up her face. “Hey, Daddy. I was just…”
“Oh, I know what you were doing.” Chuckling, I push off the door frame and come in, grabbing my own toothbrush from the rack. “And you sounded great. But are those teeth getting any cleaner, do you think?”
She sighs, tilting her head to one side. “I guess not,” she lisps.
“Come on, I’ll brush with you.”
She nods and grabs her toothbrush from the holder, holding it out for toothpaste.
I set the two minute timer on my phone and load up our brushes, and for a while, the only sounds in the bathroom are running water and Peyton murmuring around the toothbrush as she makes occasional eye contact with her reflection in the mirror like she’s having a private conversation with herself.
She watches me sometimes too, glancing over as if to make sure I’m not cheating or phoning in my dental care.
When the timer goes off, she spits and rinses, and I do the same. I give her a towel to dry off her face, and she dabs at her mouth before I crouch down to let her press the towel to my face too. She started doing that when she was four, and it’s become part of our routine over the years.
“Okay, let’s see ‘em,” I tell her.
She turns to face me and bares her teeth in an exaggerated grimace, top and bottom, then sticks her tongue out, eyebrows raised like she’s presenting evidence in court.
“Looks good.”
I grin, then stick my tongue out at her too, and the bathroom fills with that carefree, childish laugh of hers, the one that gets me every time.
“You’re so silly, Daddy!”
Only for you, I think, but I don’t say it out loud. I’m pretty sure she’s the only person in the world who holds that assessment of my personality.
She bounces out of the bathroom ahead of me, already halfway down the hall by the time I’ve turned the light off. Her room is at the end, the door decorated with several stickers she’s gotten from various places.
I follow her in and find her already in bed, burrowing beneath her covers as she gets comfortable.
When she finally goes still and looks at me, I sort out the left side of her blanket, the part she can never quite reach, and tuck it in the way she likes.
Then I sit on the edge of the mattress beside her.
Lying on her back, she stares up at the ceiling, her feet moving restlessly under the covers. “Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you going to get married again?”
My entire body jerks slightly in surprise, and I go still for a second before I get myself back under control. She’s still looking at the ceiling, clearly unaware of the fact that she almost gave me a heart attack. The question seemed casual, so I try to match her tone as I answer.
“What made you think about that?”
She rolls her head toward me on the pillow.
“Ella’s mom is getting married again. She told everyone at lunch today.
” Her eyes go wide as she props herself up on one elbow.
“She gets to be a flower girl and she gets to pick her own dress and everything. But her mom said she can pick anything she wants as long as it’s not pink. ”
“Why not pink?”
She gestures with one small hand. “Because her mom doesn’t want pink. She wants lilac. But Ella wants pink because it’s her favorite color, and she says it’s her job to pick since she’s the one who has to wear it.”
“That’s a good point.”
Peyton nods emphatically. “I thought so too.” She flops back against her pillow, satisfied. Then, without much of a pause, she adds, “How come Ella’s mom is getting married again if she was already married to Ella’s dad before?”
“Well… because things change sometimes. People get divorced, or someone dies, and then later they meet someone new. If they fall in love, they might decide to get married again.”
She squints at me a little, turning this over, her fingers finding a loose thread on the edge of her blanket and starting to pick at it absently. “But how do they know? That they love the new person?”
“It usually takes a while to figure out,” I tell her. “It’s not something you just know straight away. It takes time.”
“Hmm.” She winds the thread around her finger as she considers that, and I watch her face as she chews it over, scrunching up her nose the way she has since she was a baby. Then she seems to move on from the subject, dropping the thread and looking up at me. “Can we read now?”
“Yeah, bug.” I chuckle, ruffling her hair. “We can read now.”
I grab the stack of books from the nightstand. She points at two of them without hesitating, the same two she’s picked every night this week, and I settle back against the headboard while she tucks herself into my side, her head on my chest, one hand resting on my arm.
Opening the first book, I start to read. She insists I do voices, and she laughs in all the right places because she’s heard these books enough times to know exactly where the funny parts are—and she finds them just as funny every single time. I love that about her.
The second book is a newer one, something she picked out herself at the bookstore last month, and by the third page, she’s already leaning more heavily against me, her breathing starting to slow.
By the seventh page she’s gone quiet, and by the last few pages, her eyes are closed and her hand has gone slack on my arm.
I finish the book anyway, then close it quietly.
The room is still except for the faint hum of the city outside and the sound of Peyton’s breathing, even and deep.
She always looks younger when she’s asleep, all the busy, focused energy of her day drained out of her face.
She has Melanie’s eyes, which still catches me off guard sometimes after all these years, especially on a night like this when she’s just asked me about getting married again.
I haven’t told her yet. I’ve been putting it off, which I know is not a strategy that’s going to work for much longer. She asked me tonight, point blank, and I sidestepped the topic of marriage cleanly enough that she moved on without noticing, but that’s only going to work for so long.
The wedding is close. At some point in the very near future, I’m going to have to sit down with my daughter and find some way to describe arranged marriages in a way that makes sense to a six-year-old.
And truly, I have no idea how to make it make sense to her, because it doesn’t make much sense to me either.
My father decided this was a good idea.
That’s the part I keep going back to, every time I turn this over in my head.
He knew what I’ve been through. We may not have been all that close, but he was there for all of it.
How could he have looked at my life, at the wreck I was after Melanie died, the years of grief and single fatherhood, and the slow, grinding process of becoming functional again, and decided that what was missing was an arranged marriage to a woman almost ten years younger than me?
Jesus fucking Christ, Dad.
I scrub a hand through my hair, then drag it down my face.
The engagement photo shoot is next week. I’m going to have to stand in front of a camera with Alexis Beaumont and pose like we’re a couple, and shortly after that I’m going to marry her. At some point between now and then, I need to figure out how to explain all of this to my daughter.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I ease it out carefully, trying not to shift enough to disturb her.
It’s a text from my mother, confirming the date and the exact location of the photo shoot, followed by a request that I please confirm I received this information and that everything is still on schedule.
I read it twice. The details sit there on the screen: the time, the address, my mother’s careful politeness. Beside me, Peyton makes a small sound in her sleep, curling up a little on her side.
Grimacing, I slip my cell phone back in my pocket without responding.
For another minute, I sit there watching my daughter sleep.
The nightlight near the door throws a dim glow across the room, enough to see her by.
There’s a faint smudge of marker ink on her thumb, evidence of some project she was working on with Margaret today, and I make a note to scrub it off in the morning.
Finally, I press a kiss to her forehead and reach past her to switch off the lamp. The room goes darker, the nightlight casting long, soft shadows across the floor. She shifts a little, burrowing deeper into her blankets.
I pull the door mostly shut, leaving it cracked just a few inches the way she likes. Then I head down the hall, the text from my mother still unanswered and my phone practically burning a hole in my pocket.
How the fuck am I going to tell Peyton about all of this?
Soon. Someday soon, I’ll figure out how to tell my little girl that our lives are about to be completely upended.
I’m running out of time.