MY DAUGHTER'S FATHER NEVER KNEW I LOVED HIM

JASMINE'S POV "She packed her own bag this time," I said, holding Maya's backpack out toward Kai. "Don't let her convince you she needs the pink sneakers for the park. Those are for church." "Noted." He reached for the bag, and his hand landed over mine on the strap for half a second longer than it needed to. Neither of us moved. It wasn't much. A handoff, a bag, two hands crossing paths the way they had a hundred Sundays before this one. But something about the morning light coming through my doorway made it feel like more than that, the way it sometimes did, and I hated how my whole body noticed it before my brain caught up and told it to stop. "You okay?" he asked, and I realized I'd been staring at our hands instead of letting go. "Fine." I pulled back first, tucking my hair behind my ear like that would explain the pause. "Just tired. Late night with a client." "You work too much." "Says the man who answers emails at midnight." That got a small laugh out of him, easy, familiar, the kind of laugh that lived in my chest for way longer than it should have after he left. Seven years of mornings like this one, and I still hadn't figured out how to make my body stop reacting to him like he was something new every single time. Maya came barreling down the hallway before either of us could say anything else, sneakers already on, backpack forgotten because she'd apparently repacked half her room into a tote bag instead. "Daddy, I made you something at school." She held up a folded piece of construction paper like it was a diploma. "It's a card. For no reason. Mrs. Alvarez said you don't need a reason to give someone a card." "Mrs. Alvarez sounds like a smart woman." Kai crouched down to her level, taking the card like it was made of glass, and something in my chest did the thing it always did watching him with her. Soft and aching at the same time, a wound that never quite closed because it kept getting reopened by moments exactly like this one. Seven years, and he still crouched down every single time. He still looked at her like she was the best thing that had ever happened to him, because she was, because she was the best thing that had happened to both of us, and some mornings that was the only fact I could hold onto when everything else about this arrangement felt like standing on a ledge I'd built myself and refused to step back from. "You ready, bug?" He straightened up, Maya's hand already finding his. "Ready." She looked back at me. "Bye, Mama. Love you to the moon." "Love you to the moon and back." I said it the way I always did, the way we'd said it since she was small enough to fit against my chest, and watched her tug Kai toward the elevator, already talking a mile a minute about something that happened at recess. Kai lingered in the doorway a second longer than Maya did. "Thanks for the bag," he said, which wasn't really what either of us was thanking the other for, not really, not underneath it. "Anytime." He almost said something else. I saw it happen, saw the shape of a sentence forming behind his eyes before he seemed to think better of it, whatever it was, and just nodded instead. "See you Wednesday," he said, and turned to follow Maya down the hall. I stood in the doorway longer than I needed to, watching him go, watching the easy way he swung her backpack over one shoulder like it weighed nothing, watching the two of them disappear around the corner toward the elevator. I told myself, the way I told myself most Sundays, that this was fine. That this was enough. That building an entire life around the shape of him showing up every week for his daughter was a perfectly reasonable way to spend seven years. I was still telling myself that when his phone buzzed in his hand, loud enough that I caught the sound of it even from the doorway, and he glanced down at the screen without thinking, the way you do with a habit you don't even notice yourself performing anymore. I saw his face change. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't a smile exactly, not yet. It was something softer than that, something that flickered across his features before he caught himself and tucked the phone back into his pocket, and I recognized it immediately even though I'd never once seen it aimed at me in seven years of mornings just like this one. I caught one word on the screen before he turned the phone face down. A name. Victoria. I closed the door and stood there for a while, not really doing anything, just standing in the quiet of an apartment that suddenly felt too big for one person on a Sunday morning. Victoria. I didn't know the name yet, not really, not as anything more than four letters on a phone screen. But I knew that look on his face, and I knew I'd never once put it there myself, and something about that fact settled into my chest like a stone dropping into still water. I made coffee I didn't really want and sat at my kitchen island, and my mind did the thing it always did when I gave it too much quiet. It went back. Seven years is a long time to know exactly how someone takes their coffee, exactly which side of the bed they sleep on when they crash on your couch after a rough night, exactly what their face looks like when they're trying not to cry. I knew all of that about Kai Chen, and none of it because we were together. We'd never really been together, not in the way people meant when they used that word. We'd had one night. One reckless, unplanned night almost eight years ago now, both of us a little drunk on a rooftop after a mutual friend's engagement party, both of us saying things we probably wouldn't have said sober. I remembered waking up the next morning more embarrassed than anything, already rehearsing the speech about how this didn't have to be weird, how we could just forget it happened. He hadn't let me forget it. Not the way I expected. When I found out I was pregnant six weeks later, I called him shaking, certain I was about to watch a good thing turn into an obligation he resented. Instead he'd shown up at my apartment within the hour, sat across from me at this exact kitchen island, and asked what I needed. Not what I was going to do. What I needed. I needed a lot, it turned out. I needed someone at every appointment, because my own mother lived four states away and my father had been gone since I was nineteen. He came to every single one. I needed someone in the delivery room when things got scary near the end, blood pressure spiking, a doctor's face going careful in a way that terrified me more than any pain did. He held my hand through twelve hours of labor and didn't leave once, not even to eat. I needed someone at three in the morning when Maya wouldn't stop crying and I was crying right along with her, convinced I was failing at the one thing I was supposed to know how to do instinctively. He drove across the city more nights than I could count and just sat with me, sometimes not even saying anything, just being a second set of hands and a steady presence until the crying, both of ours, finally stopped. I needed someone who didn't make me feel broken when the postpartum depression hit hard enough that some mornings I couldn't make myself get out of bed. He never once made me feel like a burden. He made me feel like a person who was allowed to struggle, which somehow was the thing I needed most and hadn't known how to ask for. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, long before Maya turned one, I'd fallen in love with him. Not because he was Maya's father. Because of who he'd chosen to be once he found out he was. I never told him. What was I supposed to say? Thank you for showing up the way any decent person should, and also I've fallen in love with you somewhere in the process? It felt unfair to put that on him, unfair to turn his decency into an obligation he hadn't signed up for. So I kept it folded up small and tucked away, and I told myself that having him in my life this much, this often, was enough. Seven years of telling myself that. Seven years of practice at looking normal while my whole chest rearranged itself every single time he walked through my door. My phone buzzed on the counter, breaking through all of it. Priya. "Drinks tonight? I need to complain about my boss and you need to leave that apartment before you turn into a houseplant." I smiled despite myself and typed back a yes before I could think of an excuse not to. The bar Priya picked was loud in the good way, the kind of loud that made it easy to talk without anyone else catching the details. She'd already ordered when I got there, two glasses of wine sitting on the table like she'd known exactly how the night was going to go before I even sat down. "You look tired," she said, no preamble, the way she always started things. "Thanks." "I mean it kindly." She pushed a glass toward me. "Tired like you didn't sleep, or tired like something's eating at you." "Can't it be both?" She raised an eyebrow, waiting, the particular silence she used when she knew there was more and had all night to wait for it. I gave in faster than I meant to. "Kai got a text this morning. From someone named Victoria." I turned the glass slowly on the table, watching the wine catch the light. "His whole face changed. I've never seen him look like that." "Like what?" "Like someone who's about to fall for someone." The words tasted strange coming out of my mouth, like admitting them out loud made them realer than keeping them in my head ever had. "I don't know why it hit me the way it did." Priya didn't say anything right away. She just looked at me, really looked, the way only someone who's known you since college can look at you, like she was reading something I hadn't actually said yet. "Jasmine." She set her glass down. "How long has it been. Since you and Kai." "There is no me and Kai. There's never been a me and Kai." "That's not what I asked." She leaned forward, voice softer now, no judgment in it, just the kind of directness that only comes from real care. "I asked how long it's been since you fell in love with him and decided not to tell him." I opened my mouth to argue, to say something about how that wasn't fair, how it wasn't that simple, and nothing came out. Because she wasn't wrong, and we both knew it, and pretending otherwise at this point felt less like protecting myself and more like lying to the one person who'd earned the truth. "Seven years," I said finally, quiet, the number landing heavier out loud than it ever had in my own head. "It's been seven years, Priya." "And you've never once told him." "What was I supposed to say? He never gave me a single reason to think he wanted more than what we already have." "Are you sure about that?" She held my gaze, steady. "Or are you just really, really good at not looking for the reasons, because it's safer to keep loving him quietly than to risk him saying no?" I didn't have an answer for that. I picked up my wine instead, needing something to do with my hands, and Priya let the silence sit there between us, patient in a way that felt like its own kind of accusation. My phone buzzed against the table, breaking it. A text from Kai, sent late enough that it caught me off guard. "Hope Maya's card made your day too. Also, wanted you to hear it from me before it's a whole thing. I've been seeing someone. Her name's Victoria. It's still new but I think it's serious. Wanted to be upfront with you, the way we always are with each other." I stared at the screen for a long moment, the bar noise fading into something distant and muffled around me, and felt every single one of those seven years crash down at once.