Everyone's But Hers

Chapter 15: Forty Seconds

He didn't speak for a long time.

Elena didn't fill the silence. She had learned a long time ago that silence was not something that needed to be fixed, and she had earned this one. She had carried the weight of it for four years. She could sit with it for a few more minutes.

Kai looked at the table. Then the window. Then his hands. Then her.

"Four years," he said.

"Yes."

"She's four years old."

"She turned four in March."

Something crossed his face. She watched him do the math, watched him land on the showcase, the signing, the night everything changed. She watched him understand that Wren existed in the exact same window as the betrayal, that the two things were not separate events but one continuous moment that she had been living inside of ever since.

"I missed four years," he said.

"Yes."

"That's." He stopped. His jaw worked. "Elena, that's four years."

"I know how long four years is," she said quietly. "I lived them."

He flinched. Not dramatically. Just a small tightening around the eyes that meant the words had gone where she'd aimed them, and she hadn't aimed them to be cruel, she had aimed them because they were true and he needed to understand what true felt like in this context before they went any further.

"I'm not saying it to hurt you," she said. "I'm saying it because you need to understand the size of it before you decide how you want to respond to it."

He looked at her. "How I want to respond to it."

"Yes."

"Elena, she's my daughter."

"I know that."

"There's no deciding. There's no." He exhaled. Ran one hand through his hair. "What do you mean how I want to respond to it. What other response is there."

She had thought about this. She had thought about it for four years in the abstract and for the last forty-eight hours in the specific, and she had a list of responses she had seen other men have when they found out about children they didn't know existed. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. The particular kind of selfishness that dressed itself up as concern.

She had not let herself hope for the response she was currently watching happen across the table from her.

"Some men," she said carefully, "find out they have a child and the first thing they feel is how it affects them."

"I don't care how it affects me."

"You might. Later. When the shock wears off."

"Elena." He leaned forward. His voice was low and very precise, the voice he used when he was being completely serious, when there was no performance in it at all. She had heard that voice maybe a dozen times in the years she had known him. "I understand you have reasons not to trust me. I understand I gave you those reasons. But I need you to hear me right now. I don't care what this costs me. I don't care what Sloane says or what the label thinks or what it does to the tour or the press cycle or any of it. I have a daughter. That is the only thing that is real to me right now."

She looked at him.

She had not let herself imagine this version. She had protected herself very carefully from this version, because this version was the dangerous one. The anger she could handle. The denial she had prepared for. The performance of concern she would have seen through immediately.

This she had not prepared for.

"She doesn't know about you," Elena said. "She has never asked. But she heard your voice through the door two nights ago and she asked Nessa who the man was."

His breath caught.

"I told her it was nobody important," Elena said. "Nessa covered for me. But she's four and she's sharp and she is not going to stop noticing things."

"What did you tell her. About her father. Before now."

"Nothing. She hasn't asked yet. I've been waiting for the question and preparing an answer and." She stopped. "I don't have one. I've been trying to write it for four years and I can't find the version that's true without being too much for a four-year-old."

Kai was quiet for a moment.

"What's her last name," he said.

"Reyes."

He nodded. Like he was filing it. Like he was building something in his head, carefully, one fact at a time.

"Does she look like you," he said.

"Her eyes. Everything else is." She stopped.

"Me," he said.

"Yes."

He pressed his hand flat to the table again. She watched him breathe, watched him keep himself level with the specific effort of a person who understood that falling apart right now would not help anything and was choosing not to.

She respected that. She respected it more than she wanted to.

"What do you need from me," he said.

She blinked.

"Right now," he said. "Today. What do you need."

She had not expected that question either. She had expected him to tell her what he needed, what he wanted, what he was going to do. She had expected the conversation to become about him the way these conversations always became about the person who had just found out, because the shock was real, and she understood the shock was real.

He had asked her what she needed.

"Time," she said. "I need you to give me time to figure out how to tell her. She can't find out from someone else. She can't find out because there's a leak or a photo or someone recognizes you on the street. If this comes out before I've had a chance to talk to her in a way she can understand, I will not forgive that. Do you hear me."

"I hear you."

"She is four years old and she arranges her strawberries in a circle and she has a rabbit with a mismatched button eye and she is the most important thing in my life. If you do anything, anything, that puts her in the middle of something she's not ready for"

"Elena." His voice was very quiet. "I hear you. I promise you I hear you."

She stopped.

She realized her hands had come off the table and she had been leaning forward without noticing. She sat back. She breathed.

"I'm going to need to meet her," he said. "Not today. Not this week. Whenever you say. But I need you to know that's where I'm going. That's what I'm working toward. I'm not asking for anything else right now. Just. Eventually."

"Eventually," she said.

"Yes."

She looked at him across the table. The ordinary coffee shop. The chalkboard menu. The espresso machine with its opinions.

She thought about Wren's face this morning at Mrs. Carla's door. The focused seriousness. The announcement.

Today I want to learn something big.

"I'll think about it," Elena said.

It was not a yes. He knew it was not a yes.

But it was not a no, and they both knew that too, and she watched him understand the difference and hold it carefully, without pushing, without reaching for more than she was offering.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay."

They sat there for another minute. The coffee between them had gone cold. Neither of them had drunk much of it.

Then Kai reached into his jacket pocket and put something on the table between them.

A key card. Hotel logo face down.

"My number is already in your phone," he said. "But if you need to reach me and for some reason you can't, the hotel is the Meridian on Fifth. Room 2209." He paused. "I'm not going anywhere. I want you to know that. Whatever you decide about timing, whatever you need. I'm not going anywhere."

She looked at the key card.

She did not touch it.

But she did not tell him to take it back.

He stood. He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. He looked at her one more time with the eyes she had spent four years not looking at directly, and in them she saw the thing she had been most afraid of seeing.

Not guilt. Not performance.

Something that looked like the beginning of a man deciding to be different than he had been.

"Thank you for telling me," he said.

He left.

Elena sat alone in the coffee shop on Reed Street and looked at the key card on the table and did not move for a long time.

Then she picked up her cold coffee and drank the rest of it in one go.

She had a daughter to pick up at six.

She had a lot of thinking to do between now and then.

And somewhere across the city, she knew, Sloane Mercer's phone was about to ring with news that would make Amsterdam feel very simple by comparison.