10. Nora
NORA
Three weeks in, and I've stopped pretending to myself that this is like other jobs.
In other jobs, I maintained a professional demeanor. I was warm with the children and pleasant with the parents, and I always knew where I ended and where the family began. I was good at it. I'd refined it over four years.
This is not like other jobs.
Tuesday morning, Riverside Park. It's always busy at this hour: nannies and parents and pushchairs in every direction, the sociable herd of people managing small, unreasonable people and finding solidarity in proximity.
Harper is in her pram, tucked into the bassinet attachment, lying on her back and watching the world drift past above her with Tyler's blue eyes.
Tyler spreads the blanket under the tree while I lift Harper out and settle her on her back between us. She blinks at the sky like it's personally offended her.
He drops onto his stomach with his chin in his hands, making slow, careful faces at Harper while she watches him with the total seriousness of someone conducting academic research.
I should be watching Harper.
I'm mostly looking at the back of his neck where his hair is curling slightly at the nape, and I would very much like to stop doing that.
It happens while I'm watching Harper, which is the correct order of operations and where I should have been to begin with.
She's looking at me. Her face does the serious-concentration thing it does when she's about to do something new. And then it transforms, something unfurling in it, a door opening.
A real smile. Social, deliberate, aimed at me.
"Tyler." I hear the urgency in my own voice. "Tyler, look."
He scrambles upright, looks at Harper, looks at me, and then looks back at Harper, who obliges him by doing it again, but bigger this time.
The sound he makes is somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
"That's my girl." His phone is already out. Filming, narrating, doing both simultaneously, the way he does with Harper, full-body attention, completely unselfconscious. "Harper Rose West's first smile at exactly two and a half months. Gold medal. Ten out of ten. Absolutely devastating performance."
I'm laughing, and he grins at me over his phone. The expression on his face does something to my stomach that it needs to immediately stop doing.
Laura and Maria come over to our blanket. Laura has twin boys, and Maria has a toddler currently dismantling a sandcastle across the park, and both of them are watching Tyler the way people do when they think they're being subtle about it.
Laura leans close to me and drops her voice, though not quite enough. "Is that the hockey player?"
Tyler's back is to us, but his shoulders shift slightly, and I see him make himself busy adjusting Harper's blanket.
"Tyler West," I confirm. "This is Harper."
Maria sits on the edge of our blanket without being invited. "He's here a lot. Most dads don't come to the park."
"Off-season," I say.
"Still." Laura is watching him make faces at Harper, who has decided the game is mutual and is being extremely expressive in return. "Most dads wouldn't bother even in the off-season."
Something rises in my chest without my permission. "He's involved because he cares about her. He's a good father."
Both of them raise their eyebrows. I said that with considerably more heat than the situation required.
"Of course," Laura says, almost carefully. "I only meant—"
"It's fine. Sorry." I force my voice back to neutral.
They make conversation for a few minutes and wander back to their charges. Tyler doesn't say anything about it. He helps pack up Harper's things when she starts getting fussy, and we walk back to the car in the easy silence we've developed, and it's only as we're nearly there that he says:
"Thanks."
"For what?"
"Defending me. You didn't have to."
I look at the path ahead. "It’s true. You're a good father. They should know it."
He's quiet, and I don't look at him. We get Harper in the car and drive home.
Home. I catch the word a second too late.
After lunch, we're both on the living room floor, with Harper on her tummy time mat between us. Tyler is on his stomach, watching her the same way he was at the park, completely absorbed, chin on his hands.
She pushes up on her forearms. Wobbles. Stays.
"Look at that head control," Tyler says.
"She's strong. You've been consistent with the tummy time."
"We have. You, me, and her—we're a team about this."
My heart turns over in my chest, slow and certain, like it's been waiting for him to say something exactly like that.
Then he shifts. His hand finds my knee.
I still.
We watch Harper on her tummy time mat between us, her forearms braced against the floor, reaching for the soft fabric ring she's started grabbing at this week.
Tyler's hand is still on my knee, warm and still through my jeans, sitting there the way you'd rest a hand on a table, completely unthinking.
And somehow that's the thing that undoes me most, not something deliberate I could argue with but the easy, unconscious weight of it, as if it belongs there and he hasn't noticed he's done it.
My chest feels too full.
My skin feels too aware.
This is not professional. This is not what I agreed to. This is the exact thing I told myself wouldn't happen.
Harper squeaks and lurches toward the toy; Tyler lifts his hand to reach for her, and the absence of his weight is something I have absolutely no right to notice as a loss.
I sit up. Reset. Breathe normally.
He goes quiet at dinner. I notice. I notice everything about him now, which is the problem in a nutshell.
"Training camp starts next week," he says, staring at the soapy water while we clean up.
"Nervous?" I ask.
He's quiet for a moment. "What if I miss something? With Harper. Two weeks of intensive camp, staying with the team overnight most nights." He sets a glass down. "She changes every day. What if I'm not there for something?"
"Then I'll film it and send it to you within thirty seconds. You have my word."
He looks at me sideways. Something in his shoulders comes down. "Okay."
"You've built something solid with her. Two weeks won't undo that."
He nods, slowly, like he's deciding whether to believe it. Then he pulls the plug on the sink and dries his hands before heading upstairs.
I finish wiping down the counter. Hang the cloth over the tap. Turn the kitchen light off.
In my room, I press my fingers against my knee where his hand was. The warmth is gone. The awareness of it isn't.
Three weeks. That's all it's been. Three weeks of this man getting formula wrong and then right, narrating hockey positions to a two-month-old, and looking across the dinner table at me like I'm something worth looking at.
I pull out my phone and look at the photo he texted me this afternoon, Harper's first smile, her whole face transformed by it. In the corner of the frame, part of Tyler's hand is blurred from movement.
He’d called us a team today. Easy and certain. You, me, and her.
I put my phone down.
I am not going to let this happen. I have a very specific track record of losing people I let myself rely on, and I am not adding a hockey player and his daughter to that list. I can't.