She pulled her sweater over her head in my kitchen, and I looked at her in the daylight. She'd been taking care of herself the last couple of weeks. The color was back in her face, her hair washed and down around her shoulders, the mascara she'd started wearing again—the small signals of a woman climbing out of the fog and back into herself. She looked like herself again—Sports Illustrated beautiful, sharp-jawed, gray-eyed—except now, I knew what she looked like at three in the morning with spit-up on her shoulder, and I wanted both versions with the same force, and that was new for me too.
We made it to the bedroom. She pushed me onto the bed, climbed over me, and I pulled her down to me. She kissed me with her hands braced on my chest, her hair falling around both of us.
She lowered herself onto me, and the room went narrow and warm. Slow. The afternoon through the window. Her above me, her hands on my chest, her eyes closed. I watched her face and felt something I'd never felt with anyone before her—the privilege of being the person she came back to. Not a Tuesday night. Not an easy goodbye. The same woman, in my bed, choosing me again, and the choosing making it better than any first time.
She opened her eyes and caught me watching. She didn't look away. Neither did I. She moved, and I moved with her, and for a while, the only sound in the house was the two of us breathing.
Afterwards, we were on my bed with the afternoon light on the ceiling, her head on my chest, Nova still asleep in the next room. Only the second time, and already it had a morning at an ice rink underneath it, and a baby in the next room, and daylight showing me everything the dark had only suggested.
My hand was in her hair. My eyes on the ceiling. Audrey not yet asleep, but not far from it.
"Audrey."
A small sound. "Mm?"
I took a beat. I'd been carrying this for weeks, since the pediatrician's office. The intake nurse had handed me the clipboard and asked for the father's information, and I'd filled it in without thinking—name, birthday, address, phone number—because of course I had, because I was her father. But sitting there with the pen in my hand, it had occurred to me for the first time that nobody had asked me for any of this before. Not at the hospital. Not on any form. I was the father in every room that mattered, and I'd never once been asked to put my name anywhere official.
I understood why. I understood the morning at the hospital, the deal we made, the fear she'd been carrying since before Nova was born.
“I don't think I'm on Nova's birth certificate,” I said. “I figured that out a few weeks ago. I didn't want to push.”
She went still against my chest. Her hand stopped moving.
"I'm not angry," I said. "I get why it's blank. But I want to ask you if we can change it."
The room went quiet. The monitor hummed. The afternoon held still.
Audrey didn't answer right away. I didn't push. I kept my hand in her hair and let the silence sit, because the silence was hers, and the answer was hers, and I wasn’t going to fill the space where she was deciding.
The ask had been small in the room and enormous in my head. I'd been her daughter's father for ten weeks. I changed the diapers, walked the floors at three in the morning, learned the cries, brought the coffee, and held the baby while her motherslept. I was the father in every room that mattered. I was asking to be the father in the one room I wasn't.
Her shoulder rose under my hand. She let out a breath, long and controlled, and I registered it as relief. The breath of a woman who'd been holding something and was setting it down.
"Yeah," she said.
I took a beat. Careful, the same careful I used when I asked to be Nova’s father at the hospital. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
I didn't say anything else. I turned my face into her hair and closed my eyes. The afternoon light sat on the ceiling above us, the crib monitor hummed in the next room, and the thing we'd just decided was in the room with us, quiet and enormous.
Nova stirred. Audrey got up. She pulled on my gray Hartsdale Fire T-shirt, which hit her mid-thigh, and went to the next room.
I stayed on the bed for a beat, listening to her voice through the wall, the soft sounds she made when she picked Nova up. She'd pulled the shirt on without asking, like it was already hers, and I'd watched her walk out of my bedroom barefoot on my floor with my daughter in the next room.
I felt like the luckiest man who had ever lived. I didn't know how else to say it. A year ago, my life was Tuesday nights and easy goodbyes. Now, Audrey Callahan was wearing my shirt in my house on a Saturday afternoon, the baby she'd carried for nine months was sleeping in a crib I bought, and I was lying in sheets that smelled like both of us, thinking I didn't deserve this and I was never letting it go at the same time.
Mid-week. Halsey called over, from the stove, without turning around: "So, Rhodes. Whatever happened with that Nepal thing? Weren't you supposed to hear back?"
I took a sip of coffee. "Still waiting. Haven't heard anything definitive."
That wasn't an answer. The slot was as good as mine if I wanted it. I'd known that since the email came in, saying I was the last one waiting. What I hadn't told anyone was what I'd thought when I read it—not the summit, not the altitude, not the team. I'd thought about Nova being four months old by the departure date, and the part where babies started laughing at things on purpose, and whether I was going to be in the room for it or not.
I'd been running the expedition dates against her milestones for weeks, the same way I used to run them against my training log, and the math kept coming out the same way. The mountain had been getting smaller in my head. The house with the portable crib and the coffee I brought every morning had been getting larger. I hadn't told anyone that either.
Halsey nodded. Micah said something about the baby. The conversation moved on.
Across the bay, Easton stopped what he was doing at the engine. He looked at me through the open door. He didn't say anything. He held the look for a beat, then went back to the rig.
