Everyone's But Hers

Chapter 18: Midnight

"Hi," he said.

She didn't answer right away. He could hear her breathing on the other end, could hear the small sounds of her shifting, maybe sitting up in bed, maybe moving to another room so Wren or Nessa wouldn't hear.

"Hi," she said finally.

They sat with that for a moment.

"I'm sorry I called so late," he said.

"You texted first. You gave me the option."

"I know but"

"Kai." Her voice was steady. "Don't apologize for calling. Just. Talk to me."

He was quiet for a moment. Outside the window the city moved in its nighttime rhythm, all those small lights and all those people he didn't know anything about. Inside the room there was just him and the phone and Elena on the other end of it, the person he had known better than anyone once and then known not at all for four years.

"I read the whole thing," he said. "The file. All four calls. I sat here and read it twice and I understand now. I understand why you stopped trying."

"Kai."

"Let me finish." Not harsh. Just asking. "I understand that I was unreachable. Not because of logistics or coincidence but because someone made a decision to make me unreachable. And you tried four times to break through it and the fourth time she told you she recognized your voice and that was the end. That was the message. No more."

Elena didn't say anything.

"I wasn't there," he said. "But I let myself not be there. And that's the thing I keep circling back to. I feel like I should have sensed it. Like there should have been something, some weight in the air, some indication that the world was changing and I was missing it."

"You were twenty-three."

"That's not an excuse."

"I'm not offering it as one." Her voice was careful. "I'm just. Kai, you were twenty-three and you were handed everything you'd ever said you wanted and you were told by someone you trusted that the cost was manageable. That's not your failure. That's a system designed to make you believe in what it's selling you."

He leaned forward. His forehead was against the cold glass of the window. "You were twenty-two."

"Yes."

"And you were alone."

"Yes," she said quietly. "I was alone."

The weight of it moved through him. Four years. A pregnancy. A hospital. A child. All of it happening in the spaces where he was supposed to be and wasn't.

"What was it like," he said. "The hospital. When you realized"

"I don't want to do that right now," Elena said. "I don't want to go through the whole thing in the middle of the night. It's too big. It will turn into something neither of us is equipped to handle at midnight."

He nodded even though she couldn't see it.

"Okay," he said.

"But I will tell you this." She paused. "I was terrified. And alone. And I made a choice in that hospital bed that if the world had decided to erase me, it was not going to erase her too. So I took her and I left and I have spent four years making sure she was wanted by someone, at least by me, every single day."

He pressed his hand against the glass.

"She is so wanted," he said. "I don't know her and she is so wanted."

"She will be angry," Elena said. "When she finds out. She's smart and she's going to understand that she was kept from you, and she's going to have feelings about that. You should prepare yourself for that."

"I know."

"And I was angry," Elena continued. "I was so angry at you for such a long time. And then one day I was angry at myself for still being angry and it was easier to just stop. To make a life that didn't require you to be in it. And I did that. I was successful at that. I made a life."

"You did," he said. "I saw you on that stage. I saw you with your camera and your armor and I saw how far you'd come without me."

"And then you destroyed your own career on live television."

He laughed. It came out wrong, broken somewhere in the middle. "I did, didn't I."

"You couldn't have made a bigger gesture if you'd tried."

"I wasn't trying to make a gesture. I was trying to tell the truth."

"I know," she said. "That's what made it a gesture."

They sat with that.

Outside the window a cab moved past below, yellow and solitary on the empty street. Kai watched it until it disappeared.

"What comes next," he said. "After you tell her. What does that look like."

Elena took a long time answering. He could hear her thinking, could almost see her doing the thing she did where she held a problem in her hands and turned it over carefully, looking for the shape of it.

"I don't know yet," she said finally. "That's the honest answer. I've been preparing to tell her for so long that I forgot to prepare for what happens after. And then you showed up and I had to tell you first, and now I'm here and you're there and she's three blocks away asleep and I don't have a plan for what comes next."

"When will you tell her."

"Soon. In the next few days. While you're still in the city. She needs to see you. She needs to understand that you're real."

He closed his eyes.

"Kai."

"Yeah."

"I need something from you. Before you meet her."

"Anything."

"Don't say it like that. Don't agree to anything. Listen first."

He opened his eyes. "Okay. I'm listening."

"I need you to understand that she is not responsible for fixing this. She is not responsible for your redemption or your recovery or your proof that you're different now. She's four years old and she deserves to just be a kid who meets her father. Not a symbol. Not a chance to make things right. Just. A person."

"I understand that."

"Do you."

"Yes," he said. "I do. And Elena, I won't. I promise you I won't. I just want to know her."

She was quiet for a long moment.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay, I believe you."

They talked for another hour. Not about the hard things, not yet. Just the small things. How Wren likes her strawberries arranged. How she's been sleeping through the night since she was six months old. How she learned to talk late and then wouldn't stop, how she notices everything, how she has opinions about her clothes and her breakfast and the way the light comes through the apartment window.

He listened to Elena describe their daughter and he committed every word to memory, tried to build a picture of the person he didn't know, the person he had missed the first breath of and the first word of and the first time she understood something and became more herself.

"She laughs," Elena said. "When she finds something funny she laughs and she closes her eyes and she laughs so hard she snorts and then she gets embarrassed about the snort so she laughs harder."

He could see it. He could hear it.

"I want to hear that," he said.

"You will."

"Elena."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for calling me back. For answering."

"You're welcome."

He didn't want to hang up. He could have stayed on that phone all night, just listening to her breathe and talking about the daughter they'd made without meaning to and now had to figure out together.

But she had to sleep. And he had to sit with everything she'd told him and prepare himself for a conversation that was going to change him.

"I should let you go," he said.

"Yeah. We both need sleep."

"Elena."

"Mm."

"When should I meet her."

"Saturday," she said. "It's three days away. That gives me time to tell her on her own first. To let her process it. To answer her questions."

"Saturday," he repeated.

"At the gallery. Theo's place. It's neutral ground. And if it goes badly there are places to go, ways to leave."

"It won't go badly."

"You don't know that."

"You're right," he said. "I don't. But I'm going to spend the next three days preparing myself to be whatever she needs me to be. And then Saturday I'm going to walk into that gallery and I'm going to meet my daughter."

She made a small sound, not quite a word, something that fell between a laugh and a sob.

"Goodnight, Kai," she said.

"Goodnight, Elena."

He hung up.

He sat in the dark of room 2209 with the city spread out below him and his phone in his hand and the knowledge, finally, of what he had been missing.

Three blocks away, Elena lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling and prepared herself for the conversation that was coming. The one where she told a four-year-old girl that the voice she heard through the door had a body attached to it, and a name, and a face, and a place in the world that had been empty until now.

And three blocks in another direction, in a bed with a yellow pillowcase and a one-eyed rabbit, Wren Voss slept without knowing that Saturday was going to change the shape of her world.

But it would.

And none of them were ready.

And that was fine.

Sometimes you didn't get to be ready.

Sometimes you just got to finally be honest, and you held onto that and you walked forward and you hoped it was enough.