Page 35 of Single Pucking Orc

“If it says she’s not mine, do I get the crib back to the store? Because I have opinions about that crib.”

George did not laugh, but the corner of his mouth moved, which for George was a standing ovation. He capped his pen, gathered his copies, and let Rognar walk him to the door, where he paused, and Rognar braced for another four minutes.

Instead George reached into his inside pocket and took out a second envelope. Smaller. Cream-colored. No lab logo, no case number, nothing typed on it at all.

Just Rognar, in handwriting he knew.

“This isn’t part of the estate,” George said, and for once he used the correct number of words. “She left it with me to give you directly. I’ll see myself out.”

And he did.

Rognar stood in the open doorway a moment with an envelope in each hand, the big one heavy with certification and the small one weighing nothing.

Then he shut the door and carried both back to the kitchen table, and set the small one down, and opened the big one, because that was the one that had a job to do.

There wasn’t much in it. A cover sheet. A page of dense legal boilerplate. And then the page.

He found the line. There was a lot of language around it—combined paternity index, a string of numbers, the name of a laboratory in a city three hours away. But the line was one line. It had a percentage on it. The percentage was 99.99%.

He read it.

Then he read it again. God knows why. The number wasn’t going to change and he’d never once thought it would. He’d looked at her the first day in George’s office. The green of her, the ears, the dark hair, the two stubs of tusk coming up crooked exactly the way his had come up crooked. His mother had a photo. And he’d known. There was no version of the last few weeks in which he’d doubted it. He’d built a crib for a certainty.

He read the percentage a third time.

The house was empty. Charlie was down, properly down, the ten-past-one nap having drifted lately to a longer afternoon one. Deb had gone at four. There was nobody in the house at all, nobody to be easy for, nobody watching to see how Rognar Stonebreaker took a piece of news. He’d spent a career making sure there was always somebody around. God, he hated a house this quiet. With nobody in it he found out what his face did when he wasn’t running it.

His did nothing for a second. Then his legs gave out and he sat down on the kitchen floor with his back against the cupboard, the certified copy still in his hand. He stayed there for a while. It turned out that a number he’d never doubted felt different when he saw it on paper.

99.99%.

She was his. Officially. Fireproof-box his.

He put the big envelope on the floor beside him and looked at the small one on the table above him, out of reach, with his name on it in Val’s writing, and he did not open it.

He carried it around for most of the next day. It went in his jacket pocket to morning skate and sat there through a full practice. He wasn’t thinking about it, exactly. He just knew where it was all day, the way he knew where a bruise was without having to press on it. Brogan looked at him twice on the bench and said nothing, which from Brogan was a full conversation. Fen asked if he was hungover and Rognar let him think so, because it was easier than the truth, because it was always easier than the truth, and he was starting to notice how often he chose easier.

It went back in the jacket after. It sat on the passenger seat on the drive home, and then on the kitchen counter while he did the evening with Charlie. He didn’t open it while she was awake. Whatever was in it, he didn’t want to read it with her looking at him.

He got her down, and returned to the kitchen. The envelope was on the counter where he’d left it. The house was quiet in the way it got at night now. He stood at the counter and turned it over and slid his thumb under the flap and opened it.

Two pages. Her handwriting, which he’d forgotten and now remembered all at once—hard slant, no loops, the writing of a woman who wrote fast and did not decorate anything.

Rognar,

If you’re reading this, then the thing I told the lawyer to plan for happened, which means I’m sorry, and also that George did his job, so pay his bill.

He huffed—not a laugh, but the start of one—and kept reading.

I’m not going to spend a lot of ink on being sorry, because you can’t do anything with a sorry and neither can she, but I want you to know that I was wrong. Not confused or scared, but wrong. There’s a difference and I want to be on the correct side of it even here.

I didn’t tell you about her. That was a choice, and I want to be honest that I didn’t decide it once. I decided it about four hundred times, over about the course of a year, and every single time I decided the same way. I’d like to tell you there was a good reason. There wasn’t. I was independent to the point of stupidity and I convinced myself that needing no one was the same thing as protecting her. I told myself that you had a good life, a happy, carefree life, and you didn’t need a child interrupting it.

He stopped there and read it twice.

So why did I ask you to take care of her if something happened to me?

Everybody’s got a version of you. The team’s version, the papers’ version, the version women tell their friends. The charming one. The one who’s fun at parties and gone by morning. I got told that version by three separate people before I met you, and I met you anyway, because I was thirty and I figured I could handle fun-and-gone.