MY DAUGHTER'S FATHER NEVER KNEW I LOVED HIM

Chapter 2: Victoria

I typed out three different replies and deleted all of them.

"That's great, I'm happy for you." Deleted. Too much like a lie I wasn't ready to tell yet.

"Who is she?" Deleted. Too much like I had a right to ask.

"Thanks for telling me."I sent that one, finally, because it was true even if it cost me something to type it, and set my phone face down on the table before Priya could see my hands shaking around it.

"What did he say?" she asked.

"He's seeing someone. Victoria." I picked my wine back up just to have something to do. "He wanted to tell me himself before it became, and I'm quoting him here, a whole thing."

Priya's face did something complicated, sympathy and frustration tangled together. "How considerate of him."

"He is considerate. That's the whole problem." I laughed, and it came out wrong, more breath than sound. "He's always been considerate. That's exactly why I never had a reason to say anything. You can't accuse someone of leading you on when they've never once given you anything to hold onto."

She didn't argue with that. She just reached across the table and squeezed my hand, and we sat there a while longer, the bar noise filling in the space where neither of us had anything useful left to say.

I didn't see Victoria in person for another three weeks, and some small, cowardly part of me had started to hope I might not have to for a while longer. That hope lasted exactly until the following Wednesday, when the buzzer rang for Maya's pickup and I opened the door expecting just Kai.

She was standing half a step behind him.

Tall, put together in that effortless way that clearly took real effort, dark hair pulled back, the kind of coat that probably cost more than my rent. She had a warm smile already in place before I'd even fully opened the door, which somehow made it worse, because some petty, wounded part of me had wanted her to be cold. Easier to dislike someone cold.

"Jasmine, this is Victoria." Kai said it easily, like it was nothing, like introducing the two most important women in his life to each other on my doorstep was a completely normal Wednesday. "Victoria, Jasmine."

"It's so nice to finally meet you." Victoria extended a hand, manicured, warm grip, everything about her calibrated to be exactly likeable enough. "Kai talks about you and Maya constantly. I feel like I already know you."

"All good things, I hope." My voice came out steadier than I expected, which felt like a small miracle given what was happening in my chest.

"Only good things." She smiled again, and it did reach her eyes, which was almost worse than if it hadn't.

Maya came skidding into the hallway a second later, backpack half on, and stopped short at the sight of Victoria standing there.

"You're pretty," Maya said, with the blunt honesty only a seven year old can get away with.

"Thank you." Victoria crouched down to her level, easy, unhurried. "You're pretty too. I love your shoes."

Maya beamed, already sold, already chattering about the light-up soles and how they only worked in the dark, and I stood there in my own doorway watching my daughter warm up to this woman in real time, feeling something twist low in my stomach that I didn't have a name for yet.

"We should get going," Kai said. "Reservation's at six."

"Right. Of course." I stepped back to let them pass, playing my part perfectly, the way I always did, the composed co-parent who had absolutely nothing complicated going on beneath the surface. "Have fun, bug. Love you to the moon."

"Love you to the moon and back," Maya called over her shoulder, already halfway down the hall with her hand in Kai's.

Victoria gave me one more polite, easy smile before turning to follow them, and I closed the door slowly, carefully, like moving too fast might c***k something I was trying very hard to keep steady.

I went straight to the window.

I don't know why I did it. There was no good reason to stand there watching three people walk to a car, no version of that decision that made anything easier. But I stood at the glass anyway, arms crossed, watching them cross the street below, Maya swinging between them holding both their hands.

Kai unlocked the car. Victoria said something I couldn't hear from up here, and he laughed, really laughed, head tipping back slightly, the kind of laugh I realized, with a sick, sinking clarity, I had genuinely never once pulled out of him in seven years of knowing him.

Then she touched his arm. Just a light touch, casual, resting her hand there for a second while she said something else, and he looked at her.

I'd seen Kai look at me a thousand different ways over seven years. Grateful. Exhausted. Fond. Amused. Even, on rare nights I'd never let myself examine too closely, something that felt like it might have been more.

I had never once seen him look at me the way he looked at Victoria in that moment on the sidewalk below my window.

Something in my chest, some quiet, stubborn hope I hadn't even fully admitted to carrying, went still and cold and did not shift back.

I watched him open the car door for her. I watched Maya climb into her booster seat in the back, still talking about the shoes. I watched the car pull away from the curb and disappear around the corner, and I stood at that window long after there was nothing left to see, my own reflection staring back at me in the glass, a woman who had spent seven years waiting for a man who had just, without even realizing it, shown her exactly what it looked like when he actually fell.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from Kai, sent from what must have been a red light, quick and easy, the kind of message he sent a dozen times a week without thinking twice about it.

"She loved meeting you and Maya. Thank you for being so welcoming"

I read it twice, feeling the words land somewhere hollow, and was still staring at the screen when a second text came through right behind it, and this one wasn't from Kai at all.