Page 49 of Pink

In fact, it was the thing that got him through the day. More than anyone around him actually knew because that was the thing …

Other than his boss, no one knew Lev had a kid. Out there working for Andino, he became someone else because he had been afforded that luxury. All by accident, really. He didn’t have to be, Lev Arsov, a single father doing what he had to do to make sure his child never wanted for a thing in her lifetime. They didn’t know about her at all … which meant there wasn’t a soul out there that could hurt her because of him.

No, when he left his home … he became someone else entirely.

“You tell me,” he said, grinning.

Arely’s gaze tipped up, and her pink lips pursed in her consideration. “Ah, I forgot.”

His laughter rung out in the bedroom. “Really?”

“Twenty-two?”

“Little more, kid.”

She sighed. “Don’t know, Daddy. How many?”

This little game between them had been ongoing for months now. About three, actually. From the point that Arely learned she was going to start kindergarten in the fall, she started counting down the days to her first day of big girl school. Well, that’s what they were calling it to differentiate between her current education at daycare and what she would start in the fall. It was also how she learned to count to twenty, and then thirty … forty. Day after day, they sat down and counted the days.

She couldn’t wait.

He loved watching her learn.

“Time to count again, I guess,” he told his girl.

She didn’t pout.

Didn’t even complain.

Pushing up from the bed, Lev grabbed his charging phone from the side table and dropped it into his daughter’s waiting hands. In her striped yellow—her favorite color—pajamas, she unlocked the phone using his four-digit key and quickly toggled to the waiting calendar.

“Start here,” he told her. “It’s Monday today—the twenty-first.”

“Okay, Daddy.” Her firm nod punctuated her words before her finger started tapping on the days following the current one on the digital calendar. “One, two, three …”

And so, their day had begun.

Like so many others.

With Arely distracted, Lev took the chance to slip into the walk-in closet attached to the master bedroom of the townhouse. Had someone told him years ago that he’d end up living in a neighborhood in Manhattan with bedroom windows that overlooked the Hudson River, he would have laughed in their face.

Yet, here he was.

The joke was on him.

Sort of.

“Ten, eleven, twelve,” Arely’s child-like tone echoed to his spot in the bathroom where he’d moved after grabbing the waiting garment bag he’d readied the night before. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen …”

Inside the bag waited a blazer, slacks, and a pressed, black button-down shirt. And his daughter’s yellow summer dress and white knee-high stockings that she preferred over tights that, on more than one occasion, had caused bathroom accidents. The only thing that could send his five-and-a-half-year-old into a tantrum now.

Not that he blamed her.

Nobody wanted to piss themselves.

Her counting continued past thirty as Lev made quick work of getting dressed and doing his business in the bathroom.

“Fifty-five, Daddy,” Arely said when he strolled back into the bedroom, mostly dressed and ready to start his day. He still had to button up his shirt and throw on a blazer, but that shit could wait. He tossed her dress and stockings to the bed. “Fifty-five more days to kindergarten.”