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I don’t know. Remember what happened last time we did that…
He sent me an emoji of the middle finger.
Wow, I didn’t know he even knew what those were. Sure. I’ll meet you in fifteen. I slid my phone into my pocket as I walked out with Sicily. “Dad wants to get a beer. You want to come along?”
“No, it’s okay,” Sicily said. “You go ahead. I’ve got work to do anyway.” She stood in the elevator and stared at the floor, her eyes a little bit lifeless.
I studied her for a bit. “Everything alright?”
“Yeah, just tired.” She turned to me, gave me a forced smile, and then turned away again.
We said goodbye before I headed in the opposite direction, and then a few minutes later, Dad and I were seated at the bar, a different bar than last time…just in case. Dad told me about his day at the office. “I have this research physician who just started last month. He’s…insanely bright.”
“Like, brighter than you?”
He chuckled. “Might be. He’s making up a lot of ground in a very short period of time.”
“Is he your age?”
“No. He’s closer to your age. He just got his PhD from Cambridge.”
“The guy English?”
“Yes.”
“That’s cool.”
“Yes. It’s very rare for me to have any special affinity for a colleague, but I guess he reminds me of you and Derek, so I’ve become a bit invested. I think he’ll accomplish a lot of great things in his lifetime.”
“Then it’s a good thing you hired him.”
“I don’t expect him to stick around. People like that always end up doing their own thing because they’re too brilliant to work for someone else. I take no offense. In fact, I’d think less of him if he didn’t.” He drank from his beer, relaxed, in a very peaceful place. Catherine’s betrayal didn’t seem fresh in his mind. He wasn’t thinking about the bar fight with Mason. He was just…chill. “How are things with you?”
“Pretty great, for the most part.”
“And the less part?”
“Well, I have to leave next week, so that sucks.”
“You live for that.”
“But now I have a son. I feel weird leaving him.”
“It’s just a couple weeks, Dex. It’ll fly by so quickly.”
“I hope so…”
“And things between you and Catherine are good? I know it can get complicated.”
I shrugged. “It’s as good as it can be, for the time being. I’m so excited to get him, and then, like, a second later, I have to give him back, and it’s like…” I shook my head, unable to find the words.
“Like your heart lives outside your body and she just took it away.”
My eyes narrowed on his face. “Yeah, that’s exactly what it feels like.”
“I know. I had to go through that with Derek when he was younger.”
“Before I was born?”
He nodded. “Yeah, it was torture. It was a different situation, but Valerie wouldn’t let me see Derek and used him as a bargaining chip to leverage my compliance. She wanted us to get back together, and when I was uncooperative, she took him away. It was a really bad situation for everyone involved. Despite my reservations about Catherine, that’s something she would never do.”
No, she wouldn’t. She’d never been a vengeful or spiteful person. When her father passed away, she went into this weird vortex and became a different person, but once it was over, she was exactly who she used to be.
“Have you figured out a schedule yet?”
“Not really. Everything is still so new, and I have to move a bunch of stuff around. I’ll have to leave my position at Kline because I think it’s unfair to expect Catherine to hand him over every weekend, and I don’t just want him every other weekend, so…”
He nodded in agreement. “When you have a kid, you have to make sacrifices. If you don’t make those sacrifices now, you’ll pay for them later. I see it happen all the time with my colleagues who didn’t take the time to be with their kids when they were young. And since that foundation was never formed, there’s no chance to form it later. Once that opportunity is gone, it’s over.”
I wouldn’t let that happen to me. “You and Mom always made time for us, no matter how busy you were.” Mom would take me to school, Dad would pick me up, and after we were put to bed, they stayed up late with their laptops and got caught up before work the next day. They chose to sacrifice their sleep for decades.
He nodded. “And I hope you do the same with Ryan and your other children.”
“I will.” Now I kinda wanted to get started on the next set of kids so they would be close in age to Ryan. Derek and I were nearly seven years apart, and while we were close as adults, we weren’t close as kids. Maybe Sicily would be down for that. We were perfectly compatible in every way, and I was going to marry her at some point—why not do it now? It was probably way too soon. I hadn’t even known her a full year. But when you knew, you knew. She was totally the right person for me, just the way Dad knew Mom was the right person from the get-go.
