CHAPTER SIX
ROMAN
He left at noon.
She didn’t ask him to stay. He didn’t offer. They existed in the careful, new geography of people who’d been told where the land mines were and were walking accordingly.
He sat in the car outside her building for eleven minutes.
He thought about Felix holding out the board book.
He thought about the way the child had watched him turn the pages — with the absolute, frank curiosity of someone who hasn’t yet decided whether to trust but is willing to gather data.
Eighteen months old.
He’d been a father for eighteen months without knowing it.
Not her fault. He needed to be clear with himself about that. Not her fault that she’d stood at a glass door with their child in her body and watched him sign papers and made a decision. He’d made the decision available to her. He’d built the room she’d walked out of.
He called Marcus — not his COO, his oldest friend, who answered in two rings.
“I found her,” Roman said.
Marcus was quiet for a moment.
“The book,” he said.
“She has a son,” Roman said. “Felix. Eighteen months.”
The silence on Marcus’s end was its own complete sentence.
“He has my eyes,” Roman said.
“Roman—”
“I know,” he said. “I know.” He pressed his hand flat against the car window. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Name it.”
“I need a solicitor who specializes in paternity and custody arrangements,” Roman said.
“Not to — not adversarially. I need someone who can help me establish something legal without it being a fight.” He paused.
“She’s not going to fight me on this. I know that.
But I want the legal framework to exist. I want Felix to have my name if she’ll allow it. I want—” He stopped.
“I’ll find someone,” Marcus said.
“Someone good,” Roman said. “Someone who understands that this is not about fighting for something. It’s about formalizing something that should never have been in question.”
He drove home.
He sat in the Tribeca apartment — his, from before and after, the place he’d been living since the divorce that still felt like a temporary arrangement, as if he’d always been waiting to understand where he was supposed to be.
He opened the graphic novel.
He read the acknowledgment page again.
For F., who arrived at exactly the right moment, as impossible things tend to do.
He sat with that.
Then he turned to the beginning and he read it again, this time differently — not as a man trying to find himself in it but as a man trying to understand her. The woman in the story. What she’d carried. What the glass door had cost.
He read until two in the morning.
He thought about her voice saying: the midnight moment. That’s the wound.
He thought about his pen moving across the signature line. He remembered the relief he’d felt — the specific terrible relief of a man who’d found a wall he could stand behind.
He thought: she was on the other side of that glass.
He thought: she was there.
He would spend the rest of his life carrying the knowledge that she had been there.
He texted her on Sunday morning.
Can I come again next Saturday?
She replied in the afternoon: Yes. Come at ten.
He wrote: Is there something Felix likes? Something I could bring.
A pause. Then: He likes anything with wheels. But you don’t need to bring anything.
He wrote: I know I don’t need to. I want to.
She didn’t reply.
He put his phone down.
He thought about what it meant to want to bring something for a child who didn’t know him. Who would need to know him slowly, in the specific pace of eighteen-month-old trust, which was built on repetition and presence rather than grand introduction.
He found a small wooden truck with smooth wheels at a toy shop on Monday.
He held it up in the shop and tried to imagine Felix’s hands on it.
He bought three.
He spent the week thinking about what Marcus had said when he’d called back with the solicitor’s name.
“Roman,” Marcus had said. “The solicitor. Yes. But also — what are you going to do about Camille?”
He hadn’t answered.
He’d been asking himself that question for nine months and not answering it.
His sister.
The person who’d held him together at twenty-four. The person who’d been his family when family was the only thing between him and the specific loneliness of building something alone.
She’d looked at his marriage and decided it was a complication.
She’d been wrong. She’d done something irreparable. She’d done it with full knowledge of what it would cost.
He thought: Nora deserves to hear it from Camille directly.
Not just from him. Not just from David’s confession. From the person who’d picked up the phone and told her to think carefully about her place.
He was going to make that happen.
He didn’t know how yet.
He kept the wooden trucks in a bag by the door.
Saturday.