Chương 2
“You threw it in my face.”
“You’ll live.”
“Adrian,” June said.
He heard the warning in her voice.
Lila heard something else.
She whispered, “I want Rudolph.”
The name pulled him back into the room.
Adrian crossed to Travis, picked the reindeer off the floor, and returned it to her.
“Sorry.”
He meant the apology for Lila.
Travis thought it belonged to him.
“That’s a start.”
Adrian almost laughed.
Instead, he looked down at the little girl in his arms.
“We’re leaving.”
Evelyn’s composure cracked.
“Oh, don’t be dramatic.”
Lila tightened her legs around Adrian’s waist.
He walked toward the foyer.
His mother followed.
“Adrian.”
He kept moving.
“You’re seriously going to take her home because I refused to participate in this fantasy?”
That stopped him.
Not because he wanted another argument.
Because Lila had heard the sentence.
He turned only far enough to keep his body between her and Evelyn.
“She is my daughter.”
“Legally, yes.”
A silence passed through the room.
Adrian felt Lila’s hand close around the back of his vest.
Evelyn saw it.
For half a second, something uncertain crossed her face.
Then it vanished.
“You should have told her years ago.”
“She’s six.”
“She’s not stupid.”
“I didn’t say she was.”
“You decided everyone else had to lie because you were uncomfortable.”
“No,” Adrian said. “I decided her story belonged to her. Not you.”
Travis had come up behind Evelyn.
“This is exactly the problem. You decide everything is yours to control.”
Adrian looked at him.
Travis stopped speaking.
Adrian carried Lila into the entryway, shoved his feet into his shoes, then crouched to get her coat. His hands were shaking badly enough that the zipper missed twice.
Lila watched him.
“Daddy.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you mad at me?”
He froze.
Behind them, no one spoke.
Adrian looked into her face.
Her eyes were wet, but she still had not cried.
“No.”
“Because I touched the present?”
“No, baby.”
“Grandma said—”
“I know what Grandma said.”
He got the zipper started.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Was it her present?”
“I don’t know.”
“It didn’t have my name.”
“I know.”
“I was only looking at the paper.”
“I know.”
That answer finally broke something.
Her mouth twisted, and she started crying without making much noise.
Adrian pulled her against him.
His mother stood twelve feet away.
She did not come closer.
Twenty minutes later, Adrian was stopped at a red light three miles from Evelyn’s house while Lila sat in the back seat holding the reindeer beneath its front legs and examining the damaged antler.
Neither of them had said much since getting into the car.
He had turned the radio off before pulling away.
The silence was worse.
At the light, he looked into the rearview mirror.
Lila caught him.
“Green.”
He looked forward.
The car behind him gave a polite tap of its horn.
“Right. Thanks.”
He drove.
Two blocks later, she said, “She said you’re not real.”
Adrian tightened both hands around the steering wheel.
“She said I’m not your real father.”
“Is that different?”
He wanted Nora.
The thought came so fast and so plainly that it hurt.
Nora would have known how to answer without making the answer sound rehearsed. She had been better with children because she did not treat every difficult question like a thing that needed to be solved before bedtime. Sometimes she let questions sit on the table between them.
Adrian had never learned that skill.
He was good at fixing the dishwasher.
He could get Lila to school with matching shoes.
He could negotiate with a subcontractor who had doubled an invoice and remain polite enough that the man thanked him afterward.
But there were questions that turned every adult into a child pretending to be taller.
“Daddy?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not different.”
She waited.
He could see her waiting in the mirror.
He added, “Not to me.”
That was not enough.
He knew it as soon as he said it.
Lila looked back down at the reindeer.
Adrian drove the rest of the way home while every explanation he had ever postponed seemed to sit in the passenger seat beside him.
Their house was quieter than Evelyn’s and much less impressive.
It was a two-story brick place on a narrow street lined with bare maples and cars parked nose to tail along the curb. Adrian had bought it with Nora seven years earlier, when both of them still believed the upstairs bathroom could be renovated in a weekend.
The bathroom remained mostly original.
Nora had once called the pink tile “historically stubborn.”
Adrian still had not changed it.
He carried Lila inside even though she was perfectly capable of walking.
She did not object.
He set her down in the kitchen.
A pan from Christmas Eve breakfast was still drying beside the sink. Two construction-paper snowmen she had made at school were taped crookedly to the refrigerator. One had three eyes because, according to Lila, “maybe snowmen can have different bodies too.”
Adrian took off his vest and draped it over a chair.
Lila climbed onto a stool.
She put the reindeer on the counter.
One antler leaned sideways.
“Can you fix him?”
“Yeah.”
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
He got the sewing kit from the junk drawer.
Nora had assembled it, which meant it contained six useful things and approximately forty objects no person had ever intentionally purchased: tiny safety pins, three foreign coins, a button shaped like a strawberry, a hotel sewing kit from Denver, two dried-out glue sticks.
Adrian found brown thread.
Lila watched him feed it through the needle.
“You’re doing it wrong.”
“I haven’t started yet.”
“You made the hole too long.”
“The thread?”
“The thread hole.”
“The eye of the needle?”
“Why does a needle have an eye?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s creepy.”
He almost smiled.
The thread slipped out.
Lila said, “See?”
“Helpful.”
She did smile, but only for a second.
May you like
Then her face went still again.
“Who is my real dad?”
