I was a different man a year ago. Clean apartment. Controlled schedule. No lever—nothing and no one in the world that could be used to reach that guy. The man who had engineered his life specifically to be unreachable considered that a reasonable way to live.
Opal wasn’t asking me to change anything. She was asking me to confirm what she’d already decided was true. The way she confirmed the wedding from the doorway in her pajamas. The way she drew four figures in the apartment before there were four of us and included a cat that didn’t exist yet—not wishing, not hoping, just recording what she already knows to be the case.
She’s been right about all of it from the beginning. About me. About us. About the shape of things, long before the shape was visible to anyone else in the room.
Kids cut through the bullshit and the noise and all the stuff that grates on me about adults. The niceties. The formalities. The invisible rules everyone is supposed to know instinctually, and they ostracize you if you don’t already know them.
Kids don’t give a fuck about any of that. I hope she never changes in that regard. But I want her to experience the world in every other regard. I want to see her learn and grow and have fun and be there when she has her first heartbreak and talk about boys over coffee in the morning. Or girls. Or whoever. I want the world for Opal to be whatever she wants it to be.
I watch her go higher on the swing, working the technique she’s been developing, and after a while she calls over without looking at me, “Dario, watch this!” and does the thing with her legs, and goes higher than she usually goes, and laughs at the top of the arc.
I watch.
That’s all she wants. For me to be here and watch. She’s making this parenting thing easy on me. I suspect that won’t last forever, but I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts.
When she’s higher than she’s ever been, she leaps out of the seat, and I race to her. She lands, one knee up, and one knee down, hands braced.
I get there before she stands, checking for wounds. “Are you okay? What happened? Where?—”
“Did you see?” she practically shouts. Blood drips down the knee she landed on. Her whole face shines as she asks, “Did you see how high I jumped?”
In that moment, I make a choice. I don’t know how I do it. My heart hasn’t restarted yet. But I could yell at her for doing something that dangerous, or I could celebrate with her.
“That was so cool!”
She grins so wide I’m worried she’ll hurt herself there too. “You saw?”
“Yeah! That was amazing! Let’s get you cleaned up, and you can try jumping into my arms like a trapeze artist!”
“Okay!”
Thank fuck she doesn’t realize I’m just trying to cushion her fall.
I always will.
THIRTY-ONE
LENA
The household accountpassword is a string of numbers I’ve memorized and still type like I’m disarming something.
Dario sat me down two weeks after Marco and walked me through it—the accounts, the income streams, what I should and shouldn’t track. Theshouldn’t worry aboutcolumn is very long.
“You have access to everything,” he said. Flat, certain. He meant the money, and he meant something bigger than the money, and I sat there and felt the strange, disorienting sensation of security with no expiration date attached to it.
I’m working on accepting it. Not sure if I ever will.
“Are we rich now?” Opal asks, in the car on the way to the third school on my list.
“We’re okay now.”
She turns from the window. “What’s the difference?”
I think about it. “When you’re okay, you stop watching the numbers all the time. When you’re rich, you have a driver.”
“We should get a driver.”
“Maybe.”
