Page 36 of Single Pucking Orc

It wasn’t the right version. I want you to know I knew that before there was any reason to care whether I knew it.

There was a night—you won’t remember it because there’s no reason you would. We were leaving that place on Sixth and there was a kid working the door. He couldn’t have been twenty. He’d been chewed out by somebody important for something that wasn’t his fault. You saw it, and you stopped, and you spent five minutes telling him some story about screwing up your first year. By the end of it he was laughing. Nobody who mattered was watching. There was nothing in it for you. You didn’t tell me you’d done it and you didn’t do it because I was there. I only saw it because I’d forgotten my scarf and came back for it.

You were kind when there was nothing in it for you and nobody around to notice. That’s the reason. It wasn’t much to go on and it turned out to be enough.

He read that part, and then he stopped reading and stood holding the two pages for several minutes before he could start reading again.

So here’s what I decided, this time correctly. If anything happened to me, I wanted her to have you. Not the team’s you. The you I saw when I went back for my scarf. I trust you to love her, which I realize is a strange thing to trust a near-stranger with, except I don’t think you were ever the stranger everyone thought you were.

Practical things, because someone has to say them and it isn’t going to be me for much longer:

She hates the blue blanket. I don’t know why. Don’t waste your time on it. There’s a grey one.

She’s a good sleeper if you don’t make it weird. You’ll make it weird. Try not to.

That’s it. Look after her. You were always going to be better at this than you’d have believed, and worse at it than you’ll want to admit, and that’s parenthood in a nutshell.

— Val

Rognar set the letter face down on the counter.

Then he went and got his daughter out of her crib. He carried her back to the dark kitchen and stood there with her tucked against his shoulder and said it out loud. There was nobody else to say it to, and it would not stay quiet in his head. He was three weeks in. She was six and a half months old. “Six months,” he told her. “Give or take. Before George’s office. Before the swab. Before the crib.”

He went through them for her, out loud, in the dark.

Her first smile. That would’ve been at Val in some room he’d never seen, and he wasn’t there. The first time she held her head up, which Brogan had told him took no time at all. It had already happened by the time he got her, so somebody had watched that, and it wasn’t him. The first tusk breaking through—that had definitely happened before he had her, because they were both through when George handed her over. Cutting a tusk is not a quiet business. So someone had walked a screaming baby around a room at two in the morning with a thumb on the gum above the tusk. The trick Brogan knew and he had had to be taught. And it hadn’t been him doing the walking.

He ran out of them eventually. Every first she’d had before he existed for her. He heard himself say it out loud and wished he hadn’t. It had been easier before he put words on it.

He was furious with her. And then, in the same breath, he was ashamed of it, because she was dead and she had been right about him, and where was he supposed to put that?

She’d seen the doorman. She’d kept her scarf story and used it to decide the most important thing she’d ever decide, and she’d got it right. And you couldn’t be angry at a dead woman who’d been right about you. The anger had no ground under it. She’d wronged him and admitted it. And left him the one person he most wanted and would never have known to ask for, all in the same two pages. There was no clean thing to feel and nowhere to put any of it.

He turned the letter back over, face up, and read the last practical line again. You’ll make it weird. Try not to.

He turned it face down. He turned it face up. He turned it face down again and left it that way, and carried Charlie back to bed. He was on the nursery floor when Nora found him.

He hadn’t planned to sit down. He’d gone in to check on Charlie and she’d stirred, and picking her up had seemed easier than not, and then sitting down had seemed easier than standing. So he was on the floor with his back against the crib he’d built on his first night. Charlie was asleep on his chest, her cheek against his heart, one fist curled into his shirt, breathing the way babies breathed, too fast and completely at ease.

The nursery door was open. He’d left the front door unlocked, because he always left it unlocked now. It had happened without his deciding it, the same way the coffee had.

He heard Nora in the hallway. He knew her step now. She appeared in the doorway with something in her hand—something small she’d carried over as a reason—and she stopped when she saw them, one hand still on the frame.

He looked up at her.

And he didn’t do it. The smile, the joke, the light-hearted charm he always reached for were right there, but tonight he couldn’t do it. So he just looked at her.

She saw him put it aside and her eyes softened

“The letter from Val came today,” he said, his voice flat.

She didn’t say anything. Her lips parted, and he could almost hear the sentence forming, some version of I could file that for you, do you want me to put it somewhere safe, I’ve got a box. And he watched her stop. As much as she instinctively wanted to help, she stopped.

She didn’t offer to make tea or reach for something to write in. She just came in and sat down on the floor next to him, her back against the crib rail. She settled down next to him and got comfortable there, like she meant to stay a while.

Charlie sighed against his chest and didn’t wake.

He tipped his head back against the top rail of the crib. His shoulder was against hers, warm through two shirts, and neither of them moved, and neither of them said anything, and that was all it was.