My phone buzzed while I was finishing the paperwork. Storie was FaceTiming me.
I answered and her face filled the screen. Hair done, nails done, lip gloss popping. Fourteen years old and already lookingat me like I was someone she tolerated rather than someone she loved. Erika’s house in the background, decorated and tidy, and I could see Dream somewhere behind Storie playing with a doll on the couch.
“Hey baby girl.”
“Hey Daddy. So did they find Uncle Quest?”
“Yeah. They found him and Mehar. They’re alive. They’re in a hospital in Grenada. The baby came early and she’s in the NICU but she’s fighting. Mehar had emergency surgery but she’s stable.”
I paused, waiting for the reaction. For relief, for tears, for the emotions a teenager should have when she hears her uncle and his fiancée nearly died on a deserted island and their premature baby is breathing through a machine.
“Oh okay, that’s good,” Storie said. The words were right but the temperature was wrong. They were flat and polished. Like she was acknowledging a weather report and not the near-death of her family. She moved on before I could even process it. “So listen, school starts in a few weeks and I saw this Celine bag online. It’s like three thousand but Daddy hear me out. None of the other girls at school have one. Like literally nobody. And I need to stand out this year because?—”
“No.”
“Daddy, you didn’t even let me finish.”
“I said no, Storie. I just told you your uncle almost died and your response is to ask me for a three-thousand-dollar purse.”
“I said that’s good! What else am I supposed to say? I don’t even know what a NICU is. They’re fine, right? So can we talk about the bag?”
I looked at my daughter’s face on that screen and felt something I couldn’t name. She was beautiful, sharp, confident, completely unbothered by information that should’ve shaken her. I tried to tell myself she was fourteen, that teenagers wereselfish by design, that her brain wasn’t finished developing and empathy was a skill she was still learning. But Monica would’ve had something to say about this moment and Monica wasn’t here to say it and I was too tired and too deep in a war to parent the way this situation required.
“I’ll be home in about a week. We’ll talk then. Where’s your sister?”
“DREAM! Daddy wants you!”
The phone shifted and Dream’s face appeared, wide-eyed and open and everything her sister wasn’t. She was holding a piece of paper up to the camera.
“Daddy, look! I drew a picture for the baby. It’s a butterfly because butterflies are pretty and I want the baby to feel pretty even though she’s in the hospital. Can you give it to her?”
My throat tightened. “Yeah sweetheart. I’ll give it to her. That’s really beautiful.”
“Is Auntie Mehar okay? I’ve been praying for her every night like Grandma taught me.”
“She’s going to be okay, baby. And I know she’d love to hear that you’ve been praying. I’ll tell her.”
“Tell her I love her too. And tell Uncle Quest I love him. And tell the baby I love her. Tell everybody I love them, okay?”
“I will. I love you, Dream.”
“Love you more, Daddy!”
The FaceTime ended and I sat there holding my phone and staring at the blank screen. Two daughters. Same parents, same household, same loss of their mother, same everything. And they were becoming two completely different people. Dream was sunshine in human form, a child whose first instinct was to draw a picture and pray. Storie was something else. Something I didn’t have a word for yet and wasn’t sure I wanted to find one.
I put the phone in my pocket and went back to the spreadsheet. The shipment. The medevac. Georgetown. The war.I had too much in motion to sit in the stairwell worrying about a Celine bag and what my daughter’s lack of reaction meant about the person she was becoming.
But it stayed with me. The way she’d said “oh okay, that’s good” and moved straight to the purse. The way nothing I told her landed on her face. I filed it in the place I kept things I didn’t have time to deal with and told myself I’d come back to it later.
I always said that. Later. When things calmed down. When the crisis passed. When there was time to be a father instead of a fixer.
Later never came. And Storie wasn’t waiting for it.
• • •
Prime texted me at eleven that night. Two words.
Wheels up.
