MY DAUGHTER'S FATHER NEVER KNEW I LOVED HIM

Chapter 4: Devon

We texted for two weeks before he asked me to dinner, easy, low-pressure conversations that never once felt like work. He asked good questions. He remembered small details, the lake trip, my job, the fact that I took my coffee with too much cream, and brought them back up days later like they mattered.

I told myself that was a good sign. I told myself a lot of things those two weeks.

He picked a small Italian place near my apartment, the kind with candles stuck in old wine bottles and a menu that hadn't changed in probably twenty years, and he was already there when I arrived, standing to greet me instead of waiting for me to sit down first.

"You're taller than your photos," I said, which wasn't the smoothest opening line in the world, but it made him laugh, easy and unguarded.

"You're exactly as pretty as your photos. Better, actually." He pulled my chair out, which felt old fashioned in a way I didn't hate. "I was worried you'd cancel. Most people cancel the first real date."

"I almost did."

"Honesty. I respect that." He sat back down across from me, and there was something steady about him, grounded, none of the careful performance I'd half expected from a man I'd met on an app. "What changed your mind?"

I thought about lying, some easy line about being excited to meet him. Instead I told him something closer to the truth. "I decided I was tired of being the person who always finds a reason to stay home."

He didn't push for more than that, didn't ask what I meant by it, just nodded like it was a completely reasonable answer and moved the conversation somewhere lighter, and I found myself grateful for that more than I expected to be.

Dinner went easily. He worked in architecture, talked about it with the kind of genuine passion that made even structural engineering sound interesting for a solid twenty minutes. He asked about my work too, actually listened when I answered, asked follow up questions that told me he'd actually been paying attention instead of just waiting for his turn to talk again.

"Tell me about your daughter," he said, over dessert, careful the way people are when they're not sure if a topic is welcome. "I saw a picture on your profile. She's beautiful."

"Maya. She's seven." I felt myself soften automatically, the way I always did talking about her. "She's funny and stubborn and currently obsessed with light-up sneakers."

"And her dad?"

"We're not together. We never really were, not like that." I turned my water glass slowly on the table, choosing my words with more care than the question probably required. "We co-parent well. Really well, actually. She has two people who love her a lot."

"That sounds like a good setup for her."

"It is." I looked up at him, and something in his face was open, unbothered, nothing guarded or wary about the way he was taking all of this in. "Does that scare you off? The whole package deal thing?"

"Should it?" He smiled, and it reached his eyes in a way that felt real. "I like kids. I like honesty even more. You just gave me both in one conversation. I'd say that's a pretty good first date."

Something in my chest eased, just slightly, the tight coil that had been sitting there since the phone call with Kai two weeks ago loosening a fraction. It wasn't the feeling I'd had watching Kai laugh with Victoria on the sidewalk below my window. It wasn't anything close to that. But it was warm, and easy, and it didn't hurt, and after the last two months, easy felt like something I could actually use.

We talked until the restaurant started clearing out around us, until a waiter hovered near the register in the specific way that meant they wanted to close, and Devon walked me the four blocks back to my building without either of us really deciding to end the night, it just happened, the conversation carrying us the whole way.

"I had a really good time," I said at my door, and meant it, which surprised me a little.

"Me too." He stood there a moment, hands in his pockets, something almost shy in it despite how confident he'd seemed all night. "Can I see you again?"

"Yeah. I'd like that."

He leaned in slow, giving me plenty of room to step back if I wanted to, and I didn't, and the kiss that followed was good. Genuinely good, careful and warm, nothing rushed or performative about it.

It just wasn't the kiss that had been living somewhere in the back of my mind for seven years, the one I'd never actually had, the one I'd built up in my head out of nothing but proximity and hope and a thousand mornings just like the one where his hand had lingered over mine on Maya's backpack strap.

"Goodnight, Jasmine," he said, stepping back, smiling in a way that made it clear he had no idea what had just crossed my mind mid-kiss.

"Goodnight, Devon."

I let myself into my apartment and leaned back against the closed door, replaying the whole evening. It really had been good. He was kind, funny, genuinely interested in me and in Maya both. Any reasonable version of myself should have been walking on air right now.

Instead I found myself standing in my dark apartment, running an inventory I hadn't given myself permission to run in a very long time, and every single measurement came back the same way. Good, kind, easy, warm. And every single one of them measured against a man who'd never once given me a real reason to.

My phone buzzed on the counter. I crossed the room and picked it up, expecting Priya wanting a full debrief.

It was Kai.

"Hey. Random question, but does Maya still have that stuffed rabbit at your place? She's been asking Victoria about it all night and I have no idea what she's talking about."

I smiled despite everything still churning in my chest, because of course that was the text, of course seven years of habit didn't care what kind of night I'd just had, and I was halfway through typing a reply about the rabbit being under her bed when a second message came through right behind it, and this one made my stomach drop clean through the floor.

"Also, I think I'm going to ask Victoria to marry me. Soon. Wanted you to hear it from me first."