CHAPTER TEN
ROMAN
He asked, on the seventh Saturday, if he could take Felix to the park.
Not alone — he understood that was not yet available to him, that trust at the level of being alone with a child was a different category from trust at the kitchen table.
“The three of us,” he said. “If you want.”
She looked at him.
“There’s a park two blocks over,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
She’d noticed he knew things about her neighborhood — had noticed it without remarking on it. He’d looked it up. He’d walked it, probably, at some point before or after the Saturdays. He was the kind of person who prepared.
“Coats,” she said.
He put on Felix’s coat — he’d been doing this for two Saturdays, the routine of it established by repetition until Felix accepted it with minimal negotiation. Roman did it efficiently and carefully.
She watched him fasten the toggles.
She thought: he practiced this. He figured out the toggles.
They walked to the park.
Brooklyn in November. The trees doing their last things with the remaining leaves. The specific quiet of a park on a Saturday morning, a few other parents, dogs, the ordinary weekend world.
Felix took Roman’s finger in the way he did when he was walking somewhere unfamiliar — not her hand, Roman’s, which was either developmental coincidence or the specific gravitational pull of something eighteen months old couldn’t name.
Roman held the finger.
He looked down at the child beside him.
Nora walked beside them.
She felt the specific weight of the three of them in formation — the first time they’d been in public together, which made it different from the kitchen, made it visible, made it something that required her to decide consciously how to hold it.
She decided to hold it openly.
They sat at the park bench while Felix investigated the ground around it.
“The legal documentation,” Roman said.
She looked at him.
“Marcus found a solicitor,” he said. “I want to establish paternity formally. And — if you’re willing — I want Felix to have my name. Not instead of Price. Both.” He held her gaze. “No custody arrangement yet. Nothing that constrains what’s happening here. Just — his name on the birth certificate.”
She thought about this.
She thought about Felix’s birth certificate in the drawer. Father: Unknown. She’d written it and felt sick and written it anyway because she hadn’t known how to write his name without the conversation that would follow.
“Yes,” she said.
Roman breathed.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I always intended to tell you,” she said. “The timing was—” She looked at Felix. “I needed to survive first. The first year — I was just surviving.”
“I know,” he said.
“I wasn’t—” She stopped. “I wasn’t trying to punish you by keeping it.”
“I know that too.”
She looked at him.
“Did any part of you think I was?” she said.
He was honest.
“For about a week,” he said. “When I first understood about Felix. Before I understood what I’d put you in.” He held her gaze. “Then I understood, and I stopped thinking it.”
She nodded.
Felix came back to the bench with a stick, which he presented to Roman with the seriousness of an offering.
“Thank you,” Roman said.
He held the stick with the same care he’d held the wooden truck.
Felix watched him hold it, satisfied that the object was being treated correctly, then went back to his investigation.
Nora looked at the trees.
She thought: this is what it looks like.
She thought: this is the beginning of something.
She didn’t know what the something was yet.
She was letting it be what it was.