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That was how he ached.
That was how he lived.
That was how he died these little deaths.
When he opened his eyes again, his husband was standing in front of him in the rain outside of the hotel where they’d have their staycations, their little getaways that Alice would tease them for, saying she didn’t want to know what they got up to in the hotel room, that she’d just eaten, Daddy and Papa, that was just guh-ross, did they want to scar her for life?
His husband. Phillip. One of his two great loves.
Who had just yelled that Alice had been his daughter too.
Because she had been.
That might have been David’s biggest mistake out of all of this. That he’d driven away the one person who understood exactly what he was going through, the one person who knew how much it hurt to see her picture. The one person who knew just how devastating having an active imagination could be, able to think of any one of a hundred different scenarios, of the worst possible things that could have been done to their daughter. That she was trapped in a dark room somewhere, held by a monster, and that she would scream for them—
David had been so focused on Alice and his own pain that he’d barely thought of Phillip at all. Oh sure, he’d known Phillip was at his side, and he’d held him when Phillip had cried, but it’d almost been a cursory thing, something that he was required to do. It was terrible. David was terrible.
Phillip had stuck it out much longer than he should have. He’d put up with David’s shit, had rubbed his back as David had vomited alcohol, had stood by David’s side as he’d pleaded for someone to just fucking help Alice come home. He’d done all of that.
And David had repaid him by telling him he hadn’t loved Alice as much as him.
I want to see you.
David wanted to see him too.
More than anything.
He didn’t deserve it.
He didn’t deserve any of it.
And yet here they were.
Standing in the cold, in the rain, on a late winter’s evening, face to face after not having seen each other in almost eight months.
This was what his life had become.
“She was my daughter too,” Phillip growled at him now, as if trying to convince them both that it was true.
“I—”
“No, you listen to me, David. You listen to me right now.”
David closed his mouth.
Water sluiced down Phillip’s face. His skin was pale. His breaths came out in quick little puffs, swirling up around his head.
David had missed him.
He’d missed him so very much.
So he listened.
“She was taken,” Phillip said angrily. “From both of us. I know she was your little girl, and I know that you were close, but you forget that she was my daughter too. She came to you when she scraped her knee, but I was the one who bandaged her up. You’d do the voices when you read her a story, but I would be the one to tuck her in. I was there for the parent-teacher conferences, the time she decided to try cigarettes and threw up all over the carpet, when she told us she’d had sex for the first time and you had to stop me from going to that little fucking asshole’s house and ripping his goddamn dick off. I was there when she took her first step. When she rode her bike without training wheels. When she broke her arm. When she lost her first tooth and then a second one the very next day. When she came to us and told us that she loved us, but she needed to learn what it meant to be black. When she laughed. When she cried. When she was here and when she wasn’t, I was there, David. I was right there with you and you don’t get the monopoly on missing our daughter, because there isn’t a day that goes by that I wouldn’t give anything for her. Anything.”
Maybe it was jus
t the rain, but it looked like Phillip was crying a little. David was surprised to find that after everything, his heart could break just a little bit further. It did, and the pain was bright and glassy, and he took in this great, gasping breath. It felt like the first one in forever, like he just breached the surface after being underwater so long that he thought his lungs would burst.
