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When I came home from work Tuesday, Will was standing in the doorway to Stephanie’s old room, just staring.
For one extremely misguided moment, I thought Stephanie might’ve returned and that he was talking to her. But when I came up behind him, I realized I was sorely mistaken. “She’s gone,” Will said. “All her stuff. And she left this note.” He handed me a sheet of paper with handwriting that I didn’t recognize as hers.
Matt,
I came to get the rest of my daughter’s stuff. She and I are going back to Riverside tomorrow, so if you wouldn’t mind sending Stephanie’s last paycheck to the address on the back of this note, that would be very much appreciated. Stephanie told me to tell you she would call you in a couple weeks and let you know how everything is going.
Take care,
Mrs. Lynn
“I read it,” Will admitted. “It says she’s going back to Riverside. Dad—we have to do something! We can’t let her go back to Riverside, or else we may never see her again.”
“We’re going to see her again,” I said.
“But how can you be so sure?”
I sighed and looked down at my son. I hadn’t told him that he was going to be a big brother yet, mostly because I had no idea how to break the news. But also because I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea about Stephanie and me. If I told him she was going to have my baby, I was afraid he would get so excited by the prospect of us being together, that it would kill him when I told him that she and I weren’t romantically involved at all.
But he deserved to know. Otherwise, this whole thing would only grow more and more confusing for him, and that wasn’t fair.
“Come sit down in the living room with me,” I said. “There’s something I have to talk to you about.”
It was difficult, trying to come up with the right words to tell him that Stephanie and I were going to have a baby, especially since the two of us hadn’t had ‘the talk’ yet, so I had no idea how much he knew about where babies even came from. Thankfully, he didn’t ask too many questions. He was too thrilled about the news to really worry about any of the logistics. I didn’t even get a chance to tell him that we weren’t together before he stood up from the couch and threw his hands in the air with joy. “I’m going to be a brother!” he said.
“Yes,” I laughed. “You are.”
“This is the best day of my life.” He gave me a big hug and then went back to dancing around the living room. “I’m going to be a big brother!”
I chuckled and then caught him when he came running past me on one of his victory laps. “Listen, buddy. There’s more to the story though. Stephanie—”
“You’re going to marry her, aren’t you?” he asked. “That’s what people do when they are having a baby! They get married.”
“Sometimes,” I said. “But not always. And in this case, the answer is no. Stephanie and I are not going to get married. She’s going back to Riverside and we’ll have to figure out how we are going to share custody but—”
“My little brother or sister isn’t going to live here with us?” His face fell. “But why?”
“Well, they are going to live with us part of the time. I just don’t know how much of the time.”
“Why don’t you ask Stephanie to move back in?”
I sighed. “I can, but I don’t think she’ll say yes.”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“It’s—it’s hard to explain.”
He sat down again and then fixed me with the kind of stare only your own kid can give you. It was a stare that said, ‘I know you better than that. You can’t hide from me’.
“You love her, don’t you?” he asked.
I started to laugh, but he didn’t smile. Instead, he kept staring at me with those intense eyes, and I knew he was trying to let me know that he did not want to be lied to. I stopped laughing and nodded my head. “Yes,” I finally said. “Yes—okay!” I didn’t know who I was really talking to, him or myself. “I love her. I am totally in love with her, I’m mad about her. But it doesn’t matter because she doesn’t feel that way about me. Not anymore.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“So… you have to win her back.”
