You're no good alone

You hung back, watching the rest of them pass jokes and argue over who was cooking dinner.

Tucker was the chef of the group, apparently, but because it was Dean’s parents' place he felt like he also had to contribute to cooking.

Hannah was pouring drinks for everyone. Allie was helping taste test a salad that Grace had just prepared. Logan and Garrett were proving to be useless.

“Baby, you burnt pasta the other week.” Allie argued with her boyfriend, because he insisted on helping Tucker cook.

“I’ve learnt since then…” He whined back.

“Get out of my kitchen, Dean.” Tucker pressed his hands into a prayer sign.

You laughed to yourself as you watched the chaos unfold before you.

A moment later Garrett came and stood next to you, shoulder nearly touching yours.

“Are they usually like this?” You asked.

“Yeah.” Garrett rolled his eyes in that way you knew he loved his friends no matter how annoying they were. “Tuck loves his kitchen. Dean loves annoying Tuck.” Garrett shrugged like he had explained it all so perfectly.

“So this is normal?”

“This is normal.” Garrett nodded.

You had only been here for approximately two hours and yet you seemed to already grasp the dynamics of the group perfectly.

Tucker was the youngest and so often got teased, yet his brilliantly clever girlfriend was always there to defend him. Allie and Dean were constantly roleplaying as five-year old mischievous children. Logan and Grace were the parents of the group, and Garrett seemed to be the glue of the group alongside Hannah.

“Garrett!” Tucker shouted from across the room.

“What?”

“Stop flirting and come help.”

The blush came over you instantly and you had to tilt your head downwards to avoid all eye contact. Garrett coughed beside you, clearly taken aback by Tucker’s abruptness.

“I’m not flirting.” Garrett shouted back at the same time Dean tried to argue why Garrett got to help and he didn’t.

“You’ve been hogging Y/N all evening.” Logan chimed in.

“We’ve been talking.” Garrett scoffed.

“Flirting.” Logan pretended to cough out.

You lifted your head back up and tried not to think too much about any of it. You caught Hannah’s eye from across the room, her eyebrows already raised as if to silently say she was seeing things that maybe others weren’t.

You watched Garrett shuffle away from you and towards the kitchen, looking back over his shoulder with a nervous smile towards you.

——

Half an hour later you were all sitting around a large table.

Tucker had created the most amazing food. There were bowls of pasta salad, a variety of meats, hummus and bread, as well as a selection of herby vegetables.

Garrett had been polite enough to save you a space next to him, which you watched Hannah bite her tongue over.

“So, Y/N, what do you do?” Logan asked from across the table.

“I’m at University too. I study Film.” You kept your answers short and to the point, not wanting to hog the limelight or take space away from the already established group of friends.

“Oh, so cool.” Grace smiled, “Do you want to be a director?”

“I’d love to write for the big screen, I think.”

“I’d watch any movie you write.” Hannah added.

Your fork clinked as you set it down on the side of your plate, giving your best friend a shy smile.

You were grateful that Dean took the conversation somewhere else then. Sometimes situations like this, where you get asked questions in front of a large group, felt like an interrogation and so you were often relieved when people moved on to something else.

You reached for your drink when Garret spoke softly from beside you, clearly showing that his conversation was just for you.

“What sort of films do you want to write about?” He asked, before stuffing his face with a huge forkful of food. Damn, this guy could eat. His plate was stacked high too.

“It’s silly.” You brushed his question off.

“That’s for me to decide.”

You looked at him and noticed that he was patiently awaiting your response - like he genuinely wanted to hear more.

“Um… historical or fantasy romance, I guess.” You answered.

“So… Not silly.” Garrett said, “Actually sounds really interesting. Does that mean you like The Princess Bride, then?”

“Love it!” You smiled widely, beaming as though he’d just brought up your favourite topic.

Garrett chuckled, looking back at his food for a split second before deciding to brave looking at you again. The smile on your face was instantly reflected upon him.

“It’s one of my favourites.” He said.

“I hope to write something even half as good one day.”

“I’m sure you will.”

The small conversation between you and Garrett then filtered off and you both rejoined the wider group's conversation, but you couldn’t help but feel like maybe there was something there between you and him.

Or maybe that was just you hoping.

——

After you’d finished dinner, you sat with full bellies and half empty glasses of wine chatting to one another. It was fun getting to know Hannah’s new friends, and it comforted you to know they were good people.

As Grace and Logan stood up to start clearing things away, Garrett took your plate for you. You tried not to notice how he didn’t take anyone else’s but yours.

“Thank you.” You politely smiled at him as he stood up.

“Of course.” He smiled back.

You watched as people started to move. Just as you were about to start collecting dishes to help put them away, Hannah came and sat beside you.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” You laughed at her eager eyes, which she always got after having a few drinks.

“So…”

“What?” You squinted your eyes to try and figure out what she was about to throw at you.

“You know Garrett’s single?” She leaned in close to tell you.

“No, I didn’t know that.” You looked down at the table and around the room to avoid eye contact with her. It was obvious as to why she was bringing this up now. It was sort of the reason you’d suspected she’d invited you in the first place.

“Well, he is. And guess who else is single?” She fake gasped.

“I know.” You sighed as she was obviously talking about you.

“Garrett’s a good guy, even if you’re only looking for a little bit of fun. That’s all I’m saying.” Hannah said, as if she hadn’t just dropped the biggest open ended invitation on your lap without any further discourse.

“I’m only here for 6 weeks.”

“That’s a lot of weeks stuck in a lake house with one of the hottest, single, guys at Briar U.”

“But…”

“Well,” Cici’s voice was sweeter than honey, the corners of her mouth lifting into a gentle, knowing smile. “Hey there, sweetheart.” 

After last night, she had known better than to bring it up. Amidst all the reasons she’d gotten chewed out by Anna over the years for harmless meddling, she knew painstakingly well that, after Harry had left their backyard long after dusk, Cici was to never bring it up again. Even if asked. But if she was asked, for whatever reason, she would have confidently said that she knew he would come back. 

It wasn’t necessarily because she possessed some sort of extraordinary intuition, though she seemed to be proven time and time again that she kind of did, in a way. It wasn’t because she fancied herself capable of predicting the behavior of strikingly handsome young men with freshly shattered worlds. In fact, it was far simpler than that. Cici had lived on this earth and inserted herself in other’s mess long enough to recognize the distinguishable look of unfinished business. Harry had walked away from this house yesterday carrying far too many questions and nowhere near enough answers. Men could outrun many things, but not the kind of truth that had uprooted the very foundation beneath their feet.

For several silent moments, she did nothing more than take a hard look at him. Standing before her was someone almost unrecognizable. 

It wasn’t the same Harry who'd once twirled Anna around the living room after dinner, dragging Cici and Izzy up from the couch until they were all laughing and stepping over one another to whatever song he'd insisted they needed to hear. Not the Harry she'd watched awe-stricken from a crowd while he danced across a stage miles away, catching glimpses of him between swaying bodies as she, Anne, Izzy, Anna, and Gemma sang along from their seats. Not the young man who had, over the course of nearly five years, slipped so easily into their routines. Comfortably barefoot in her kitchen, stealing a cookie from the jar on the counter before dinner, lingering on the porch long after the sun had gone down with a laugh that tilted his head all the way back. The same Harry who had begun to feel less like a visitor and more like someone who rightfully belonged. 

She was looking at this Harry. Or, more fittingly, the surface level version of him that remained. The sight of him in this sort of disheveled physical state pounded heavily against her chest.

From the very first moment, dating years back now, that Cici had first been introduced to Harry, she was quite taken by him. She was enchanted by the way he always carried himself with an effortless sort of confidence. It was never arrogance - the two are easily mistaken. But she was drawn to that quiet assurance he had. Someone who occupied whatever room he stepped into without needing to demand anyone's attention. Harry had never been particularly still, either. Even in his most relaxed state, there had always been an irrepressible current humming beneath his skin. Unignorable and constantly felt. He spoke joyously with animated hands, laughed with his entire body and face, leaned casually against doorframes while teasing Anna just enough to earn an eye roll before inevitably making her laugh anyway. He had a habit of arriving with wind-tossed hair, sometimes pushed back by sunglasses, and enough charisma to somehow leave the whole house feeling brighter than it'd been five minutes earlier. That young man was nowhere to be found.

The broad shoulders she remembered so well seemed impossibly burdened now, bowed ever so slightly beneath a weight invisible to everyone except those who were privy to last night’s sequence of events. His posture wasn't defeated so much as it was seemingly and infinitely more heartbreaking. It was the bleak posture of a man forcing himself to remain upright simply because collapsing wasn't an option yet.

The summer heat had already begun laying claim to him despite the early evening sun beginning its slow descent. His white Oxford shirt had seemingly surrendered to humidity in soft, uneven creases that ran across his torso and gathered at the bends of his elbows. The sleeves were rolled to his forearms with none of Harry's usual meticulous symmetry, one cuff sitting slightly higher than the other as though he'd absentmindedly pushed them up without so much as sparing them a second glance. Cici let her eyes wander on his tattoos, even the ones mildly visible beneath the fabric of his shirt. The top two buttons hung undone, exposing the shallow hollow at the base of his throat, where each measured breath lifted and fell with painstaking restraint.

Even from the doorway, she could tell he'd lost sleep. Not the ordinary sort of exhaustion remedied by an early night and a quiet room, but the profound weariness that settles into a person's very countenance after life has cleaved itself into two irreconcilable halves: before and after.

It lingered beneath his eyes in soft shadows the color of fading bruises, stealing some of their usual brilliance. Nearly extinguishing it entirely. Those recognizable green eyes, so startlingly vivid they'd always reminded Cici of sunlight filtering through linen blinds after a summer storm, seemed quieter now. It was as though they were dimmed beneath the immeasurable burden of too many thoughts chasing one another through an overworked mind. They no longer wandered with idle curiosity or a whimsical twinkle. Instead, they searched with quiet desperation. She watched as they began drifting instinctively beyond her shoulder toward the interior of the house. Like he was trying not to get caught looking for someone, he returned to meet her gaze with practiced politeness. It didn’t matter that every instinct in his body was pleading to look for someone else.

“Sorry t’pop in like this.” His voice was low, burdened by rasp. “...Again.”

Cici’s eyes focused on his features as he spoke. A fine layer of stubble darkened the line of his jaw, enough to suggest he'd neglected to shave that morning. Cici suspected it had very little to do with forgetfulness and everything to do with priorities abruptly rearranging themselves. Yesterday, he'd awakened believing one version of his life to be true. Today, he was learning to inhabit another.

His mouth, ordinarily so quick to offer a crooked grin or some dry remark, rested in a firm, contemplative line. Not hard. Not angry, just heavy. It was as though each word he'd spoken over the last twenty-four hours had demanded more from him than the one before it. Like he’d physically exhausted himself. Then, of course, there were his hands.

Cici had always believed that a person’s hands were a telltale sign of what faces worked hard to conceal. As she suspected, Harry's were no exception to this belief. They rested at his sides with studied composure. Though, every so often, she’d notice his fingers flexed almost imperceptibly before curling back into themselves again. She realized it wasn’t impatience, but nerves. The kind of nerves born not from uncertainty over what one intended to say, but from not knowing whether one would still be welcome after saying it.

Despite all the perceivable exhaustion etched into every feature of his physical form, for all the sorrow that seemed to cling to him like the dense humidity the month of June had to offer, there remained something achingly familiar about the young man standing before her. It was something steadfast. Something decent.

He looked like he had aged within the past twenty-four hours, as though heartbreak had reached forward through time and quietly borrowed years from his face. But beneath the fatigue, the grief, and the impossible reality he was only beginning to try to grasp, Cici could still see the same boy who'd once stood barefoot in her kitchen stealing biscuits before supper, who'd insisted on helping Ollie unload shrimp from the dock despite being spectacularly bad at it, who'd loved her daughter with a sincerity no amount of fame had ever managed to erode. Only now he’d returned as Charlotte’s father.

“Save those sorry’s for someone else.” Cici waved her hand as if his apology was the silliest thing she’d ever heard. “Can pop up on my porch anytime you damn near please, you know that.” 

“Appreciate y’saying that…” he admitted. “Wasn’t entirely sure I’d still be welcomed.” 

There was a curt nod of his head, followed by an ambiguous shrug of his shoulders, before they both allowed more silence to linger between them again. Harry’s eyes fell to his shoe laces, letting the stretching of quiet hang just long enough to become noticeable. Simply...uncertain. Both of them stood poised on the precipice of words too heavy to say aloud, searching for footing that neither seemed capable of finding.

Cici watched him for another long moment, her heart aching in ways she hadn't anticipated. She fixated on how tired he came across. Not the sort of tiredness cured by an early night and a strong cup of coffee. The deep, marrow-weary exhaustion that settled into a person's bones after life had reached inside their chest and rearranged everything they thought they knew. She saw it in the slight slump of his shoulders, in the careful way he carried himself as though every movement required conscious effort, in the distant quality of his eyes despite the fact they never stopped searching the house over her shoulder.

Her once sweet, spirited boy. The same one she'd fed Sunday suppers until he swore he couldn't eat another bite, only to find him sneaking another piece of cornbread ten minutes later. The one she'd hugged goodbye on countless front porches, snug and lingering, reminding him to call when he landed. The one she'd always imagined would someday stand in this very doorway as family. 

Every maternal instinct she possessed begged her to gather him into her arms. She ached to just smooth a hand over his head of hair, then reassuring circles on his upper back. She wanted to create a space for him to just let go, and remind him that it was all right to fall apart. That they would figure this out. That somehow, in time, the sharp edges of this grief would dull. But she hesitated.

Yesterday had changed everything. Harry no longer belonged solely to the chapter of Anna's life she'd watched unfold. He belonged to Charlie's, too. The distinction was subtle, yet immeasurable. For the first time since she'd known him, Cici found herself wondering whether her comfort was still hers to give. She held herself back. For all of three seconds. Then her heart overruled her head.

"Oh, sweetheart..." she said softly, the endearment escaping before she'd made the conscious decision to speak. Her expression softened until it nearly broke her own heart. "Are you okay?"

The question settled gently between them.Cici knew the answer the instant it left her mouth. Of course he wasn't. She wasn't sure anyone standing in his shoes could've been. She knew it was a stupid question to ask. But she had to ask, anyway. 

Across from her, Harry remained rooted to the porch, though his attention betrayed him almost immediately. His eyes wandered with a fervent, driven instinct. They slipped past her shoulder for the briefest of moments, searching the familiar hallway beyond the foyer before retreating the instant he realized he'd been caught looking. A heartbeat later, they drifted back again, lingering just a fraction longer this time. He was listening to the barely audible laughter of children and chatter. Waiting. Hoping.

Every muffled laugh floating in from the backyard, every pair of hurried footsteps from beyond, every distant creak of the old house seemed to pull at him with invisible thread. Charlie. 

The name lived behind every glance. It was almost painful to witness. Yesterday, he'd left this house unable to escape the reality that he'd missed nearly four years of her life. Today, he looked like a man desperate to miss not a single second more.

“Suppose’ve been better…” he admitted quietly, his accent roughened by too little sleep and too many thoughts. “M’a bit frazzled, I guess. Dunno - a lot t’take in.”

His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly before relaxing again. One hand disappeared into the pocket of his trousers while the other brushed absently against the seam, restless fingers searching for something to occupy themselves with. He shifted his weight once, then thought better of it, settling back onto both feet as though even moving felt uncertain now.

He opened his mouth - closed it, then opened it again. Whatever words he'd rehearsed on the drive over dissolved the moment he'd found himself standing on the Wilsons' front porch. He hadn't thought this far ahead. Getting here had been the only certainty. Everything after that felt impossibly undefined. He wanted to ask where Anna was. Wanted to know if she'd even agree to see him.

God, more than he could adequately put into words - he needed to catch another glimpse of Charlie. Even if only for a fleeting second. He needed to reassure himself yesterday hadn't been some elaborate fever dream. That she was real. That she was here. That his daughter existed just beyond the walls of the house he'd once entered without so much as knocking. Instead, he swallowed against the tightness climbing his throat, his voice quieter than either of them was accustomed to hearing.

“Was hoping,” he had to clear his throat once. Then twice. “I could talk t’Anna, if she’s around.”

Cici was earnestly eager to respond, her hair bobbing in unison with the enthusiastic nod of her head. “Of course you can. She’s here, just out back helpin’ to wrangle the troops. I can go grab her if you’d like.” 

“Thanks.” Another curt nod as he kept his lips mildly pursed. “If y’don’t mind.” 

“Not at all.” Cici insisted, tone soft and sweet as ever. She hesitated before turning towards the hall. “You wanna come inside, honey?” 

“M’alright here f’now… till Anna comes.”

“You sure? I can even fix you somethin’ to eat. A little bit of food in your belly might do you some good.” 

“M’sure.” He politely insisted, feet glued to his spot atop the welcome mat. “Think I have a bit of PTSD from yesterday.” 

A whispered laugh escaped Cici's lips, warm and airy, though it carried none of the amusement it would have on any other regular day. A gentle smile lingered for only a moment before slowly fading, her expression settling into something gentler, touched by quiet heartache. She gave a small shrug, nodding to herself as though she understood far more than Harry had actually said.

Her gaze wandered over him again, taking him in with the same careful tenderness only a mother could possess. There was something profoundly sorrowful about seeing someone she'd watched grow into manhood look so utterly untethered. It gnawed deep within her, leaving her restless.

She lingered for another beat, wrestling silently with herself. Before she could overthink it, she closed the small distance between them. Her hand rose almost of its own accord, settling lightly against the scruff of his jaw. The pad of her thumb brushed once across his cheekbone, slow and affectionate. It was her way of smoothing away nothing at all and somehow attempting to soothe everything. Harry stilled beneath the touch.

"You listen to me," she said softly, her voice lowering into the familiar cadence she'd used on her own children more times than she could count. "Sometimes the good Lord's gotta plow the field before He can grow somethin' worth harvestin'."

Only then did she turn toward the hallway, leaving Harry standing alone on the porch, somehow feeling both immeasurably heavier and just the slightest bit less alone. Out back, the world remained blissfully unaware that anything had changed.

The slow disappearance of the afternoon sun had begun to fracture across the pool deck in molten ribbons of gold. Remaining rays were glinting off the rippling water as the shrieks of delighted children ricocheted through the yard. Cicadas, as though on cue with impending dusk, started singing louder from the towering oaks overhead, their familiar chorus weaving seamlessly into the laughter echoing around the backyard.

Anna sat cross-legged near the edge of the upper deck, a faded Bluey towel spread across her lap. Half of her hand had Charlie’s hair, the other half white knuckling the brush. 

"Hold still for me, Lottie girl."

Charlie obeyed for all of three seconds. Then her head tipped sideways as another fit of giggles escaped her, sending damp ash-brown curls cascading into her face.

"Mama," she whined dramatically, squirming away from the brush. "It snags."

"I know it snags." Anna smiled despite herself, catching her gently beneath the chin before the little girl could wriggle completely free. "That's why we're using detangler."

Charlie regarded the brightly colored bottle with all the suspicion of someone twice her age. "It smells funny… like watermelon. It smells like... pink."

Anna couldn't help but laugh. "Pink has a smell now?"

Charlie nodded with complete conviction. "Mhm."

The solemnity with which Charlie delivered the verdict drew another laugh from Anna as she shook her head, misting another spritz from the baby blue bottle across the tangled ends before carefully working the brush through them. Every now and then she'd pause long enough to separate a stubborn knot with her fingers before trying again, hyper aware of every tiny wince that flickered across Charlie's face.

Just beyond them, chaos unfolded in predictable Wilson fashion.

"Tony!" Vivienne groaned, half laughing, half exasperated as the black Labrador barreled across the deck with the unmistakable enthusiasm of a dog who had discovered mud and considered it life's greatest achievement. "Absolutely not - get back here!"

The lab skidded to an ungraceful stop, tail whipping like a helicopter blade while muddy paw prints stamped themselves proudly across the pale concrete.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Vivienne sighed, lunging for his collar with a towel in one hand. "Would you stand still for two seconds?"

Tony responded by enthusiastically offering her exactly none. He danced sideways, front paws lifting from the ground in a playful bow before darting just out of reach again, earning delighted squeals from Cooper and Blake as they abandoned whatever game they'd been inventing to cheer him on.

"Traitors," Vivienne muttered under her breath.

"Lilly," Anna called over her shoulder, still focused on coaxing another knot free from Charlie's curls, "can you do me a favor and hand your mom that towel by the chair?"

Without hesitation, Lillie scooped up the forgotten towel and toddled across the deck, stretching onto her tiptoes to offer it with both hands. "There ya go, Mama."

"My angel." Vivienne accepted it with theatrical gratitude before casting Tony another look. "Unlike someone else around here."

The dog barked once, entirely unrepentant. Anna smiled to herself as she took in the noise mixed with laughter, children talking over one another. Vivienne bargaining with a dog who had no intention whatsoever of honoring the agreement. Vivienne just bargaining with a dog, in general. It was loud in the way only family could be. Comfortably and beautifully.

Charlie's head eventually grew heavier against Anna's knee as the brush began gliding more easily through the last of the tangles. Anna's fingers instinctively swept a loose curl behind her daughter's ear before giving the end of her hair one final pass. 

"There." She admired her work with exaggerated pride. “The rest we’ll scrub outta ya with some shampoo.” 

Anna pushed herself to her feet with a quiet exhale, dusting invisible blades of grass from the backs of her shorts before reaching down for the Bluey towel draped around Charlie's shoulders. She hurled it over her shoulder in one sweep, playfully poking at Charlie’s cheek before nodding her head in the direction of the patio door.

"And with that," She gently nudged the little girl toward the patio steps. "We march upstairs to rinse off that chlorine."

Charlie slipped her tiny hand into Anna's without protest, letting it fit perfectly as it has been for the past four years. She was still childishly preoccupied with explaining to Lilly, who was close behind, why Honey the bunny absolutely could swim if she "just had little floaties." Anna smiled contently to herself, stooping briefly to retrieve the abandoned hairbrush from the deck. The familiar groan of the screen door carried across the backyard. 

It was a sound she'd heard thousands of times growing up, and usually paid it no mind. Though this time, something in her enticed her to glance up instinctively. Ollie stood framed in the doorway, one broad shoulder resting against the weathered wood, his hand still wrapped around the handle as the screen eased shut behind him with a soft, protesting creak. He didn't say anything. He simply looked at her, his head half poked out of the crescent he created between the door and its frame.

There was something different in his expression. It wasn’t an expression made up of urgency or concern. It was just that quiet, unreadable patience fathers seemed to possess when they already knew how a conversation was going to end. As if on cue, Anna's brows knit together.

"What?" she asked, more with her face than her voice.

But Ollie didn't answer. Instead, the corner of his mouth lifted into the faintest half-smirk. The kind that never reached a full smile but somehow said everything all the same. Anna stared back at him. The silence stretched for only a second or two before something shifted. Her heartbeat faltered because she knew that look.

He'd worn it proudly on the upper deck just minutes earlier… when she'd insisted Harry wouldn't come back. It was that same infuriatingly calm confidence. The same unwavering certainty that had irritated her because, deep down, she'd feared he might be right.

"Told you he would." Ollie's smile warmed just enough to soften the quiet triumph behind it as he tipped his head toward the front of the house. "There's somebody out front askin' to talk to you."

Anna didn't even move, though she felt her hand go limp around Charlie’s expectant grip. For one suspended heartbeat, the sounds around her receded into something distant and indistinct. The children's laughter, Tony's excited barking, Vivienne calling after him - all of it faded beneath the sudden rush of blood in her ears. She didn't have to ask who. She already knew.

“Mama?”

Anna looked down, where she was met with those green eyes peering up at her from beneath a fringe of still-damp curls. She was open and curious, one tiny brow lifting with the beginnings of concern. A single droplet of pool water clung stubbornly near Charlie’s temple and crept slowly down the soft curve of her cheek. For one disorienting second, Anna found herself staring at it as though it were the only thing in the world she understood. At Charlie. At the warm little hand tucked trustingly into her own. At the child standing innocently between the life Anna had built and the man waiting on the other side of the house to undo it.

Her heart gave one cumbersome thud against her ribs. Harry was here. He had come back. The realization should not have startled her. Not really. In hindsight, she was stupid to think this would have unfolded any differently. Ollie had told her he would, hadn’t he? Even if he hadn’t, even with the time that had passed. Anna knew Harry. And she knew he was obviously never going to let this go.

She had rolled her eyes and rationalized, reminding her father that no one could possibly know what Harry would do now because the man who had walked out of their backyard yesterday was no longer the same one who had walked into it. That man had been given four years’ worth of truth in the span of a few merciless minutes. He had left furious and broken and barely able to look at her without something wounded and vicious flashing behind his eyes.

She had warned Ollie, maybe even herself, not to be so sure. She had spent the hours since pretending she wasn’t waiting to find out whether he was right. And now Harry was standing out front, waiting for her.

Anna became abruptly conscious of everything all at once. The damp ends of her hair sticking to the back of her neck, frizzing from the moisture and humidity. The faint, sticky film of sunscreen on her shoulders. The fact that she was barefoot, that her shorts were slightly wrinkled from sitting cross-legged on the deck, that there was probably chlorine somewhere in wet spots on her shirt from Charlie climbing into her lap.

The awareness irritated her almost immediately. It did not matter what she looked like. This was not that. Why was she even worried about how she looked? 

This was not some overdue reunion between two former lovers who had spent years wondering what might have happened if one of them had turned around sooner. There was nothing romantic about Harry standing at her front door after learning she had kept his daughter from him for nearly four years. There was nothing sentimental about the conversation waiting for them.

This was about Charlie and only Charlie. Anna repeated that silently to herself, hoping the words might steady the nervous flutter that had already begun in the pit of her stomach.

Charlie tugged gently at her hand again. “Mama?”

“Sorry, bug.” Her voice sounded normal enough, which felt like an accomplishment. She tucked a damp curl behind Charlie’s ear and tried to smile. “I was just thinking.”

Charlie furrowed her eyebrows in harmless, adolescent curiosity. “About what?”

Anna’s stomach twisted. Before she could summon an answer, Vivienne stepped fully onto the deck.

“I got her.”

Her voice was quiet, meant only for Anna. She looked at her sister-in-law, face flushed from chasing the dog. She extended one hand toward Charlie without ceremony, her expression carrying the calm assurance of someone who knew when someone needed rescuing without ever needing to come right out and ask.

Anna hesitated. It lasted no longer than a second, but she knew Vivienne saw it. Her gaze dropped once more to Charlie where she stood barefoot on the sun-warmed deck in her swimsuit, completely oblivious to the fact that somewhere at the front of the house stood a man whose entire life had been shattered by the simple existence of her. A man who had her eyes. Her dimples. Her stubborn little chin. A man who had come back to take all of those similarities in for himself. 

Something tightened painfully in Anna’s throat. “Why don’t you let auntie Vivi help you get cleaned up for dinner?”

Charlie frowned immediately. “But you said you were.”

“I know.” Anna crouched until they were eye level, smoothing both hands over Charlie’s sun-kissed arms. “I just have to talk to somebody for a quick minute.”

“Who?”

Of course she’d ask. If the occasion were any different, Anna would’ve laughed at Charlie’s insatiable need to know everything. A trait she very well could’ve inherited from either of her parents. Instead, she glanced toward Vivienne, who had the decency to look elsewhere.

“Just somebody.” Anna shrugged innocently. 

Charlie considered this with a seriousness that would have been comical under almost any other circumstances. “Is it Mimi?”

“No.”

“Zizi?”

“No, baby.”

Charlie narrowed her eyes. Anna pressed a kiss to her forehead before the interrogation could continue. “Go with Vivi, detective.”

“Mama, I’m not a detective.” 

“No?” Anna gasped. “Well, this is news to me. What exactly are you, then?”

“I’m a mermaid.”

“My mistake.”

That earned the faintest smile, and Anna held onto it for a second longer than necessary. If anything, she was relieved Charlie had given up on peppering her with questions in search of an answer. Then Vivienne reached for Charlie’s hand, her other occupied by Lilly’s. Charlie surrendered easily enough, slipping her small fingers into hers and content as can be doing a simple task with her cousin. \

Anna stood. For just a second, she and Vivienne  looked at one another over Charlie’s head. Anna drew a slow breath through her nose and turned toward the house. The walk from the back deck to the front foyer could not have been more than a few dozen yards. It felt like miles.

She stepped through the screen door into the kitchen and was immediately swallowed by the familiar warmth of the house. The scent of dinner hung thick in the air. Something buttery, something roasted, a trace of garlic and herbs she would normally have stopped to identify. One of Cici’s dish towels lay abandoned near the sink, where she shot Anna a quick wink as she went to collect it. A half-cut lemon rested on the butcher block beside a knife. Somewhere behind her, the screen door creaked again as Vivienne brought Charlie and the gaggle of kids inside alongside her.

Regardless, Anna kept moving. Her bare feet made almost no sound against the old hardwood floors. The house was achingly familiar to her, every warped board and faded patch of sunlight part of a landscape she had known since childhood. But as she moved through it now, everything seemed altered by the knowledge that Harry was waiting at the end of the hall. She began to feel like a stranger in her own home.

She passed the breakfast nook. The narrow table where she had done homework as a child. The chair Charlie now insisted belonged only to her because it gave her the best view of the backyard. A purple crayon lay abandoned beneath one of the legs. Anna’s throat tightened again. She walked faster, then impulsively slowed. Because suddenly reaching him felt far more terrifying than making him wait. Her pulse climbed higher with each step. 

She wondered what he would look like. Whether he would still be angry. Whether he had slept. She didn’t. She wondered if, like herself, if he had spent most of the night imagining all the things she had robbed him of. Surely, she thought, that was how he saw it now. Every birthday. Every Christmas. Every fever soothed in the middle of the night. Every first word and first step and sleepy morning cuddle that belonged only to the people who had been there. 

She wondered if he hated her. It occurred to her that there was no way he didn’t. The thought arrived so quietly she almost missed it. Once it arrived, it felt like a booming sensation between her ears. Like standing next to a bunch of fireworks before their ascent. It shouldn’t have mattered. She told herself that immediately because his opinion of her was no longer the issue at hand. Yet, even still, the lie sat heavily in her chest.

Anna reached the narrow hallway leading toward the foyer and stopped, though only for a second. She could see the edge of the open front door from where she stood. A blade of late-afternoon sunlight cut across the floorboards, bright and golden, stretching almost to her bare toes. Beyond it, she could hear nothing.

There were no voices, no movement. Just the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock and the distant commotion of her family behind her.

Her body had gone strangely cold despite the heat. She drew in another breath and forced her feet forward. One step. Then another. The front door came further into view. And then, through the screen of the door, she was finally able to make him out.

Harry stood on the porch with his back half-turned toward the house, one hand buried in the pocket of his trousers while the other hung loosely at his side. He seemed to be staring out across the front yard without really seeing it. His shoulders were broad beneath a wrinkled white shirt, his posture rigid with the particular kind of stillness Anna knew did not come naturally to him.

For a moment, she simply watched. Something inside her shifted in a way she refused to name. Honestly, all she could tell herself was that he looked… terrible. She felt a pang of guilt for thinking it, but there was no kinder way to put it.

His hair was disordered, falling unevenly across his forehead and at the back of his neck. It was as though he had spent the better part of the day dragging impatient hands through them. It was that obvious to her. Stubble shadowed his jaw. His shirt was creased. Even from several feet away, she could see the exhaustion carved beneath his eyes. She could tell he hadn’t slept much. Which, strangely, helped her find a bit of ease. At least they had that in common right now.

He looked like a man who had tried and failed to make sense of the impossible. He looked exactly as she had feared he might. Anna’s chest tightened.

Perhaps he sensed her there, because suddenly Harry turned. Their eyes met, but neither of them moved. The world did not stop. Though, for a split second, she swore she could feel the earth shift at the soles of her feet. She felt like an idiot for thinking so dramatically. A child shrieked with laughter somewhere toward the back of the house. Cooper, if she had to guess. The air-conditioning clicked to life overhead. And still, for one suspended moment, it felt as though every other thing had become secondary.

Harry stared at her, and Anna stared back. She could see the change in his face the instant he recognized her. Nothing that clued surprise. He had come here for her, after all. Why would he be surprised to see her at her own house? It was something more complicated than that. Something that flickered behind his eyes too quickly for her to name and disappeared beneath exhaustion before she could examine it. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her now.

Was he seeing the woman he had once loved? The woman who had left? Was he looking at her differently now? Did he see the mother of his child? Or did he see the person who had kept that child from him.

Anna folded her arms loosely across her stomach before realizing the gesture was defensive and immediately letting them fall again. The silence stretched. The longer it went on, the more she could physically feel her heartbeat everywhere. Crawling all over every inch of her skin and consuming her whole.

Finally, because someone had to say something and because practical words had always been easier than honest ones, Anna tipped her head slightly and looked him over once more.

“Hey,” She said in one exhale. “You look terrible.”

Harry opted to not answer right away. He let himself study her instead, searching her face for something useful. A crack. Maybe a flicker of guilt. Some sort of visible indication of what she was thinking. Though, in all honesty, he knew better than most that Anna had never been one to show her hand before she was good and ready.

But, almost right away, he noticed she looked tired, too. Not like him, perhaps, but enough that he noticed the faint shadows beneath her eyes and the slight heaviness in her expression. The sun had caught her at some point that afternoon, leaving a delicate flush across the bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks. He caught a few new freckles above her eyebrows and on the sides of her nose. Subtle. Her lips were pinker than usual, a little fuller somehow from the heat, and her hair hung loose around her shoulders in imperfect waves coaxed out by humidity and poolside moisture.

She looked annoyingly pretty, and it almost pissed him off.  Harry’s jaw tightened. He was still angry with her. Furious, actually. That seemed important to remember. Then her words replayed in his head.

You look terrible.

And something in him shifted. There it was, that tell she thought was always so coy. Anna had never been particularly generous with her concern when she felt exposed. She disguised it beneath sarcasm, tucked it behind insults, dressed tenderness up as irritation and hoped no one looked closely enough to notice. 

Harry had always looked closely enough. The faintest hint of understanding passed through his expression. She’d noticed. More importantly, she cared that she had. 

Harry’s mouth twitched faintly, but whatever almost-smile threatened there never quite arrived. “Cheers, Anna.” he said, voice flat. “Been an eventful twenty-four hours. Didn’t feel particularly compelled to do m’hair f’this.” 

Anna’s expression shifted. It was only slightly, but it was enough for Harry to notice it. The defensive wit that had risen so instinctively to her lips, so naturally and of second nature, seemed to falter as she took another look at him. This time she did not allow herself to immediately look away. Ollie’s words from earlier that afternoon moved quietly through the back of her mind. He’s scared too. She had resisted that truth then, or at least resisted the weight of it, because acknowledging Harry’s pain felt dangerously close to diminishing her own.

But standing in front of him now, she could no longer pretend not to see it. He looked exhausted. Not inconvenienced, or sulking. He wasn’t merely angry like he was when he left last night. No, now he was wounded. Anna swallowed hard.

“Sorry,” she said, the word coming a little awkwardly, as though she hadn’t planned on offering it. Her fingers shifted restlessly at her sides. “That was... more direct than I meant it”

Harry studied her for a moment, visibly surprised by the retreat. How uncharacteristic of her, he thought, to offer up an apology so quickly. Without even having to be asked, needled, begged, or prodded for it. If he wasn’t so emotionally stunted right now, he would’ve feigned surprise or even shock. But he didn’t, and instead, his face remained flat and expressionless. 

Anna gave the smallest shrug, her eyes dropping briefly before finding his own again. “I just meant you look tired.”

He merely blinked twice. “I am tired.”

“I know.”

The answer came too quickly. For a second, neither of them said anything. Then Anna drew a slow breath and stepped slightly aside from the doorway, some of the earlier sharpness leaving her face.

“I’m gonna take a guess and say you came back to talk.” 

“Would be a solid guess t’make.” He agreed flatly, breathing in through his nose before letting it tumble out slowly past his lips. “Think we left a lot t’discuss after yesterday, yeah?” 

Harry’s gaze dropped before he meant it to. A child’s pool towel was draped carelessly over Anna’s shoulder, the fabric still mildly damp and darkened in uneven patches where it had absorbed too much water. Bright cartoon characters crowded the faded blue cotton, childish and cheerful and entirely at odds with the tension gathering between them.

For a fleeting second, something bitter moved through him. He wondered if she had left it there on purpose.

The thought was unfair, and he knew it almost as quickly as it arrived. It didn’t matter, though. The anger had made him suspicious of everything. Every look, hesitation, each seemingly innocent detail now had the potential to feel sharpened at the edges. He wondered whether this was another quiet reminder of everything he had missed, another accidental cruelty he was meant to absorb without complaint. Whether Anna had come to the door carrying some visible piece of Charlie’s life because, consciously or not, she wanted him to see just how completely that life had existed without him.

The thought twisted something ugly in his stomach. Then he looked at her again. Really looked. At the loose golden waves in her hair, still slightly damp from the humidity. At the flush across her cheeks. The towel slung over one shoulder with the absentminded familiarity of someone who had probably carried a hundred damp towels through this house without ever stopping to think about it. 

Almost involuntarily, the anger faltered. Because of course she hadn’t done it on purpose, this was simply Anna’s life. Though that realization landed with a quiet brutality of its own.

He had been so consumed by the fact that he had become a father practically overnight that, somewhere in the chaos of it all, he had forgotten the more obvious truth. Anna had been a mother the entire time.

While he had spent the last twenty-four hours trying to understand how one revelation could split a life cleanly in two, Anna had spent nearly four years waking up every morning as somebody’s mother. She had learned how to soothe fevers and untangle damp hair, how to carry snacks and spare clothes and tiny shoes, how to recognize different cries from another room. She had probably spent years walking through this house with towels over her shoulder and toys beneath her feet, measuring time in bedtime routines and preschool schedules and the length of afternoon naps.

Harry had only just learned there was a child to miss, while Anna had spent years knowing exactly what it meant to have one. The towel no longer looked like a weapon. It looked ordinary. And somehow, that hurt worse.

Harry drew in a breath, his mouth parting as though he had finally settled on where to begin. “I-”

Then he stopped. Abruptly. Something had reached him from somewhere deeper in the house.

At first it was little more than a sound caught beneath the low hum of the air-conditioning and the distant commotion still filtering in from the kitchen. It was so faint that he almost wondered if he had imagined it. A tiny, wavering voice somewhere far down the hallway, softened by walls and distance but unmistakably distressed.

But Anna heard it too, and he knew because her entire body changed. Her shoulders stiffened first. Then the muscles in her stomach visibly tightened beneath her shirt as though her body had recognized the sound before her mind had even caught up with it. Her head turned slightly toward the hallway, every bit of her attention pulled away from Harry in an instant.

And then it came again, just closer this time. A whiny little whimper that wobbled dangerously at the edge of tears.

“Mommy.”

The word travelled faintly through the house. Harry went perfectly still. Anna’s lips parted. She could hear Charlie before she could see her, could already recognize the particular tremor in her voice, the shrill little catch that meant tears were coming if they had not already started. There were countless versions of Charlie’s cry, and Anna knew every one of them. The indignant cry. The frightened cry. The exhausted cry that arrived after bedtime had been pushed ten minutes too far. The injured cry that sent panic tearing through Anna before she had even located the source. This one was softer, needier. The sort of cry that asked for her before anything else.

“Mommmmmmy.”

The second call came louder, stretched thin beneath a trembling whimper, and something inside Anna pulled taut. She turned fully toward the hallway, trying to ignore the weight of Harry’s stare. Harry didn’t move. Not yet. He stayed exactly where he was, staring at the empty corridor as though the small voice echoing through it had rendered him incapable of movement.

It was the voice of his daughter. Calling for her mother. The simplicity of it struck him with such force that for a moment he forgot whatever he had been about to say.

He had spent the last twenty-four hours thinking about fatherhood in enormous, impossible terms. Birthdays missed. Christmas mornings lost. First words he had never heard and first steps he had never witnessed. He had thought about nearly four years as an immeasurable stretch of stolen time, so vast and abstract that sometimes his mind could barely hold the shape of it.

But this was different. This was small. Ordinary. A little girl somewhere down the hall crying for her mom. Somehow that made it more real than anything else had. Anna had already taken a step forward before she seemed to realize it. Pure instinct, he thought.

Harry saw it all happen almost in slow motion. That immediate shift from woman to mother, so seamless she likely didn’t even realize she had done it. Whatever tension had existed between them vanished from her face, replaced by sharp concern as her gaze fixed on the far end of the hallway. Then came the soft slap of small, damp feet against the hardwood. One step. Another. Followed by another. For Charlie, this was nothing. Meanwhile, it felt as if Harry’s heart was ready to lurch out of his chest. 

Anna knew what was coming before Charlie ever rounded the corner. So did he. And for the first time since arriving at the house, Harry forgot entirely about the conversation he had come to have.

As if on cue, Charlie appeared at the far end of the hallway a moment later. She stood framed by the doorway with all the small, disheveled tragedy of a nearly four-year-old whose world had apparently suffered some unbearable injustice.

She didn’t even notice Harry. At least, not at first. Her entire face was crumpled with distress. Her little brows drawn tightly together as she searched for Anna through a shimmering veil of incoming tears. Her cheeks were still pink from the afternoon sun, the color deepened now by crying, and her damp lashes had clumped into tiny dark points around eyes so startlingly familiar that Harry felt something inside his chest give way before he had time to brace against it.

Christ, he thought. Those eyes. Of course, he had seen them yesterday. Of course he had. He had looked directly into them for a fleeting moment. He had already suffered the brutal recognition of seeing pieces of himself scattered across a child he had not known was his. But yesterday had been pure chaos. Yesterday, his mind had been frantically attempting to outrun a truth too enormous to comprehend. Any glimpse of Charlie had filtered through disbelief and anger and the frantic, desperate hope that perhaps someone would still tell him there had been some terrible mistake.

Looking at her now, though, there was certainly no room for denial. Not when she was standing less than twenty feet away from him. His daughter. His little girl. Harry nearly forgot how to breathe.

Charlie’s once wet hair had begun drying unevenly around her face. He studied how the ends had begun curling in soft, unruly bends where Anna’s brush had failed to tame humidity. Some strands clung stubbornly to her temples, while others had puffed into delicate waves around her ears and at the ends. The texture of it struck him with peculiar force. He knew that hair. The stubborn curl of it. How the moisture encouraged it into rebellion, the small wisps already beginning to coil near the nape of her neck.

His mother had photographs of him with hair exactly like that. And that exact thought arrived without warning. A small boy in Holmes Chapel, curls damp from a bath, cheeks pink, Anne trying unsuccessfully to smooth his hair for a photograph while he wriggled away. Harry’s throat practically closed in on itself.

Charlie took another small step into the hallway, still searching only for Anna. She was barefoot, her little toes curling slightly against the cool hardwood as she walked. Her swimsuit was still damp from the pool, the fabric darkened in small patches where water had yet to dry. There was something so painfully childlike about the softness of her knees, the slight roundness still lingering in her cheeks, the way one shoulder sat higher than the other as she drew in another shuddering breath.

She was so little. That was what struck him most. So impossibly, devastatingly little. For the last twenty-four hours, Harry had thought of nearly four years as something enormous. A gaping expanse of time. Forty-six months. Hundreds of weeks. More than a thousand mornings he had not been there to see.

But Charlie herself was tiny. She could still be carried to bed. She still cried for her mother when something hurt. Her fingers were small enough to disappear inside his palm, though he knew that only because he had imagined it, not because he had ever actually held her hand. He immediately yearned to hold her hand just to see if he was right. The distinction cut through him with surgical precision.

A tear escaped from the corner of Charlie’s eye and slipped slowly down her flushed cheek. She made no effort to wipe it away. Another followed, catching briefly against the curve of her nose before falling, and Harry found himself staring at those tears with a helplessness so profound it nearly humiliated him. He wanted to know why she was crying. The instinct came swiftly and violently.

What happened? Was she hurt? Who had upset her? What did she need? How could he help?

The questions crowded his mind before he could stop them, startling in their ferocity, and yet he remained motionless because he had no right to ask any of them. She didn’t know him. He couldn’t come out and ask. He couldn’t aid her worries the same way Anna could. The reality of him being all but a stranger to her, his own child, struck him hard and fast. That truth seemed to wait around every corner.

Charlie knew who Harry was, perhaps. She had seen him at Isabelle’s wedding. She had spoken to him last night. She might have recognized his face from somewhere or heard his name in passing. But she did not know him in the way a little girl ought to know her father.

She did not know the sound of his footsteps approaching her bedroom at night. Did not know what his hand felt like against her forehead when she was sick. Did not know whether he was the sort of father who would check beneath the bed for monsters or cut sandwiches into triangles or let her have one more story when bedtime had already come and gone.

It dawned on him that he did not know those things either. Harry’s jaw tightened painfully.

Charlie sniffled, her tiny nose scrunching with the effort, and he saw himself again. Not metaphorically. Not sentimentally. Wholly Himself.

There, in the fleeting wrinkle beside her nose. In the shape of her eyes. In the slight pout of her mouth as she fought against another sob. In the deep indent of a dimple threatening at one cheek despite the tears. Every resemblance felt like evidence. Every feature accused the last four years of existing without him.

And still, somehow, she was not merely a collection of inherited traits. She was so unmistakably her own person that the realization humbled him. A whole human being had been growing and changing and collecting preferences, fears, habits, jokes, favorite songs, favorite foods, people she loved and things she hated, all while he had been somewhere else in the world with no idea she existed. There were nearly four years of Charlie already inside her. Harry knew none of them.

The thought was unbearable. Then, finally, she saw Anna. Everything in Charlie’s face changed at once. Not because the tears vanished. They very much persisted onward. If anything, the sight of her mother seemed to grant her permission to cry harder. Her lower lip trembled, her little chest hitching as relief poured through her entire body.

“Mommy.”

And Harry watched, silent and utterly transfixed, as Charlie moved toward the one person she had never had to wonder would be there. Anna.

The screen door gave a soft, complaining creak as Charlie pushed through it with both hands, her little body still trembling with the effort of trying not to cry too hard. She stepped out onto the porch in bare feet, damp hair clinging in uneven wisps around her flushed face, and went straight to Anna without so much as glancing in Harry’s direction. It happened so naturally that Harry almost felt invisible. To Charlie, maybe he still was.

Charlie did not pause to assess the scene or wonder why he was standing there. She did not seem to notice the tension that had occupied every inch of space between him and Anna only seconds earlier. She simply crossed the small stretch of porch and folded herself beneath Anna as though there had never been any question of where she belonged. She didn’t even stop to pay attention to the guest studying her just a few inches away.

Anna’s entire posture softened instinctually. Whatever guardedness had tightened her shoulders moments before disappeared so completely it was almost startling. One hand rose instinctively to the top of Charlie’s head, smoothing gently over damp, frizzy hair before settling there. Her palm was warm and steady. Her fingers made slow, absent circles against her scalp as Charlie pressed herself closer, one cheek resting against Anna’s lower stomach. Anna looked down at her daughter’s crumpled face and, almost without thinking, pushed her own lips into an exaggerated pout to mirror Charlie’s.

“Bub,” Anna murmured. “What’s got my girl so worked up?” 

Her voice had changed. He noticed that immediately. It was softer than the voice she had used with him. Warmer. Completely stripped entirely of any remnants of sarcasm or defense or the careful emotional restraint she wore like armor. This was a voice meant only for Charlie, low and soothing and impossibly tender.

Charlie sniffled hard enough to make her little shoulders jump. Anna’s thumb stroked slowly across the top of her head. And as all of this transpired, Harry remained completely quiet and eerily still. He doesn’t think he could’ve spoken even if he tried. Even if he wanted to.

There was something so intimate about watching Anna this way. Not romantic, entirely. Not exactly. It was something deeper and stranger and infinitely more difficult to name. She was so practiced in this, so instinctive, as though her body had spent years learning how to bend around Charlie’s needs before Charlie ever had to ask. And Harry had never seen it.

He had known Anna when she was angry. He had known her laughing so hard she could barely breathe, stubborn and sharp-tongued and impossible to reason with. He had known her half asleep, barefoot in kitchens, furious in airports, curled against his chest in the dark. He had seen her laser focused in a sketch, buried beneath pounds of fabric. He was so sure he had known every version of her that there was to know. But he had never known her like this. He had never known the version of her that was someone’s mother.

Charlie shifted closer, tiny fingers curling into the fabric at Anna’s waist, and Harry watched Anna lower her head until her cheek nearly brushed the top of Charlie’s damp hair. For those few seconds, Harry ceased to exist entirely. And somehow, quite strangely, he completely understood why.

“Blake is being really mean to me.” Charlie’s pout deepened with theatrical injury, her lower lip pushing forward so dramatically that under any other circumstances Anna might have laughed. “He’s saying I can’t ride Tony like when we ride on the horsies.”

Anna exhaled slowly through her nose. For the briefest moment, discomfort flickered across her face. It wasn’t because she was unsure what to tell Charlie. Ironically enough, this would now be the third time she’d have to explain to her that riding a dog is not equivalent to riding a horse. It was more so because she had now become acutely aware again of Harry standing only a few feet away, watching this small domestic crisis unfold as though he had stumbled into the middle of a life that had been carrying on without him.

Still, motherhood overruled awkwardness with astonishing efficiency. As always, Anna eased back into instinct. It was a reflex. Something so thoroughly ingrained in her now that there was no pause between recognizing Charlie’s distress and reaching to soothe it.

“Baby, we talked about this.” Her hand moved over the crown of Charlie’s pool-tangled hair, smoothing gently through the damp strands. “You can’t ride Tony like a horse because he isn’t a horse. Tony is a dog.”

Charlie’s face tightened with immediate disagreement. “But he’s sort of big like a horse,” she huffed.

From his place near the door, Harry had to press his lips together. The argument was delivered with such wounded conviction that something dangerously close to amusement threatened to pull at the corner of his mouth, though he restrained it before Anna could catch him.

“He’s really not,” Anna said, holding firm despite the coaxing softness of her tone. “You know it’s not the same thing.”

Charlie frowned up at her, clearly unconvinced by both logic and species classification. Anna rubbed one hand slowly along the back of her head, then tipped her chin down until Charlie had no choice but to meet her eyes.

“Bean, I’m talking to someone right now, and you’re sorta interrupting.” 

The words were gentle, but they landed. Charlie’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly, her pout softening as she finally seemed to remember there was, in fact, another person standing on the porch. Her gaze moved at a slower pace, carefully moving from Anna to Harry. And Harry felt the full force of it before she ever said a word.

He had been content, for those few quiet seconds, to remain an invisible spectator. To watch Anna navigate tears over a dog and horseback riding as though this were the most natural thing in the world. There had been something almost comforting in being temporarily forgotten, because it allowed him to look without being looked at. 

But now Charlie was staring directly at him. And suddenly he had no idea what to do with his hands. Charlie’s gaze lingered on Harry for no more than a second before something in her expression changed. 

The indignant pout disappeared first. Then the small crease between her brows softened, replaced by a flicker of recognition that was not quite familiarity and certainly not trust. She knew his face, Harry could see that much. There was a glimmer of recognition buried there. Somewhere in the recesses of her nearly four-year-old mind, she had placed him among the collection of grown-ups she had encountered recently. Maybe he was a distant face from Aunt Izzy’s wedding. Or maybe he was the stranger who had appeared in Mimi and Pop pop’s kitchen, speaking to the adults in voices too serious for her to understand. Or did she recognize him as the man who handed her the bunny she had fretted over, who was left behind in the kitchen?

She knew she had seen him before, that much was clear. She just did not know him. The distinction seemed to occur to Charlie all at once.

Her eyes widened faintly, and the confidence she had carried onto the porch only moments ago began to evaporate. She drew closer to Anna, her small shoulder pressing into the outside of her mother’s thigh before she quietly maneuvered herself behind it altogether. One little hand curled around the back of Anna’s leg, fingers clutching loosely at the fabric of her shorts, and within seconds, most of Charlie had disappeared from view. Harry’s stomach dropped. Anna looked down at her, seeming to understand immediately.

“What’re you doing back there?” she asked softly.

Charlie did not answer. Instead, one cautious green eye appeared from behind Anna’s hip. Harry saw it, though he pretended not to.

He had no idea why that seemed like the right thing to do, only that every instinct told him not to frighten her back into hiding. So he deliberately shifted his gaze toward Anna instead, loosening his posture as much as he could manage while something brutal worked its way through his chest. 

A moment later, Charlie peeked out again. A little more of her face this time. Harry could feel her studying him. The curiosity was subtle but unmistakable. She stared for a second or two, then retreated the instant his eyes threatened to drift in her direction. A few seconds later came another stolen glance, this one longer, her cheek still pressed firmly against Anna’s leg as though her mother were both shield and sanctuary. 

Harry let her look. And God, how he looked back. Carefully at first. Almost furtively, afraid that if he allowed himself to stare too openly, someone might tell him he had exceeded whatever invisible allowance he had been granted and then take it away all at once. But restraint quickly became impossible. 

There she was. His daughter. Not as an abstract truth screamed across a backyard. Not as a catastrophic revelation he had spent a sleepless night trying to comprehend. Not as a name attached to photographs he had not yet seen or memories that belonged to everyone except him. She was right there, just three feet away. Small enough to hide behind her mother’s leg.

Harry’s eyes moved slowly over her, absorbing every detail with an aching concentration that bordered on desperation. It felt absurdly important to memorize her exactly as she was in this instant. It felt like the universe had already deprived him of so much that he no longer trusted it not to steal this moment too. He was scared that he’d only be given a few minutes. Like he needed to make each of them count.

Her hair was still damp from the pool, though it had begun to dry in unruly waves around her shoulders, the shorter strands curling stubbornly at her temples and near the nape of her neck. Anna’s efforts with the hairbrush were evident in places, but the Georgia humidity had already begun undoing them, and something about the soft chaos of it made his throat constrict. 

Harry knew that hair. He wondered whether Anne would see it too. Or his sister.  The thought nearly undid him. 

Somewhere across an ocean was a whole other family who would love this little girl instantly, fiercely, completely. And they had yet to lay their eyes on her quite like he was right now. Harry had to force himself not to indulge that thought any further. Instead, he kept looking.

Charlie’s cheeks were still rosy from the sun, round with the lingering softness of early childhood. Her nose gave the slightest scrunch when she sniffled, and once again the resemblance struck him with such unnerving precision that it felt almost accusatory. 

How had he not known? How could he have looked at her yesterday and not understood immediately?

But that was unfair. He knew it was unfair. People saw what they expected to see, and Harry had spent years believing Anna had moved on. He was so sure she had built a life separate from him. Perhaps that’s why he was so quick to assume that she had a child with someone else. The possibility that Charlie belonged to him had not merely seemed unlikely. It had simply never existed. Until suddenly it was the only thing that did.

Charlie leaned out again, just enough for the rest of her face to emerge. This time, their eyes met. Harry forgot whatever he had been thinking. She froze and, in turn, so did he.

There was something deeply unnerving about looking into a pair of eyes so much like his own and finding no recognition there beyond the hesitant curiosity afforded to a stranger. He could see traces of himself in their color, in their shape, in the way her lashes framed them when she narrowed them slightly with suspicion. 

But Charlie did not know that. How could she? She’s only a child. She did not look at him and see herself. She did not know there were photographs of him at her age wearing the same furrow between his brows. She did not know his mother would probably cry the first time she noticed their matching dimples or that somewhere in England there were relatives who had unknowingly shared blood with her every day since the moment she was born. Charlie only knew that a vaguely familiar man was staring at her. That was the only capacity she knew him at right now.

Harry looked away first. He had to. His chest hurt. Any longer, he wasn’t sure what would become of him. The sensation was becoming alarmingly physical now, a deep pressure lodged behind his sternum that made each breath feel too shallow. He swallowed and glanced briefly toward the porch railing, willing himself to get a grip.

She was just so little. For some reason, that continued to be the hardest part. Every time he tried to comprehend four years, his mind turned it into something immense. An expanse. A theft measured in birthdays and Christmases and thousands of vanished days.

But then he looked at Charlie and saw tiny bare feet tucked behind Anna’s ankles. Small fingers gripping her mother’s leg. Knees still softened by babyhood. A swimsuit with some brightly colored pattern he couldn’t quite make out from where he stood. Nearly four years sounded enormous. Charlie was not. It was oddly reassuring to him to think that there was still so much he could be present for. 

She still needed help washing shampoo from her hair. She still cried when her cousin told her she could not ride a Labrador like a horse. She still hid behind her mother when uncertain people looked at her for too long. She was still a baby in so many ways. His baby. The thought came without permission, and Harry’s jaw tightened as his heart locked up. He wanted to know everything. The hunger for it was suddenly overwhelming. 

What made her laugh hardest? Was she afraid of thunderstorms? What’s her favorite color? Her favorite song? Does she even like music? What did she ask for when she was sick? Did she sleep through the night? Was she particular about food? Did she sing to herself when she thought nobody was listening? Did she wake early or have to be dragged from bed? What stories did she demand at bedtime? What made her angry? What made her nervous? What did she call the moon?

He knew nothing. That realization had been haunting him since yesterday, but standing here now gave the ignorance shape. He didn’t know whether she preferred chocolate or vanilla. He didn’t know the name of her doctor. He didn’t know her favorite song. He didn’t know whether she had ever needed stitches or broken a bone or woken from a nightmare crying for someone to make the monsters disappear. He did not know how she liked to be comforted. Anna did, though. The thought drew his gaze upward.

Anna stood with one hand resting absently against Charlie’s shoulder now, her fingers moving in slow, reassuring strokes as though she barely realized she was doing it. She did not need to look down to know where her daughter was. She seemed to feel her there instinctively, adjusting her stance so Charlie could remain tucked safely behind her.

Harry watched them together. Mother and daughter. A unit formed so naturally, so completely, that there seemed to be no visible seam between where one person’s instincts ended and the other’s trust began. For one ugly second, jealousy flared. Not just toward Anna, specifically. Not exactly. But toward time. Toward all the years that had allowed Charlie to know without question that Anna was her safety, comfort, home. All while Harry remained a face she remembered only vaguely as of yesterday.

The bitterness arrived swiftly enough to shame him. Charlie had done nothing wrong. None of this is her fault. Anna’s closeness with her daughter was not something to resent. It was beautiful. It was exactly what Harry would have wanted for his child had he been given any say in the matter. And perhaps that was the problem. He had not been given any say. 

His eyes returned to Charlie, and he noticed she was watching him again. This time she did not immediately hide. Her head remained partially tucked behind Anna’s leg, but both eyes were visible now, cautiously taking him in with the solemn appraisal only children seemed capable of giving. Harry wondered what she saw. 

A tall man. A tired man. A stranger. Someone her mother knew. Someone who kept looking at her as if she were the most astonishing thing he had ever seen. Someone who kept showing up at her house without warning. He hoped he wasn’t frightening her. Carefully, almost imperceptibly, Harry softened his face.

He did not smile too broadly. Something told him that would be too much. He only let the tension leave his brow and offered her the smallest upward curve at one corner of his mouth. Charlie stared while Harry waited. For one impossible second, he thought she might smile back. She didn’t. Instead, she ducked behind Anna’s leg again, hiding completely this time. And Harry had to lower his eyes so nobody would see just how badly that hurt.

“Sorry.” Anna breathed out awkwardly, her hand instinctively twirling one of Charlie’s stray curls. “We’re working on manners.” 

Harry nearly smiled. Not because the apology was necessary. It really wasn’t, and he almost caught himself insisting how silly it was to apologize for something so trivial. Charlie was three, nearly four if he had to guess, and had done nothing more offensive than hide behind her mother’s leg when faced with a man she barely knew.

But there was something about Anna saying it that caught him off guard. Something disarmingly ordinary.

For the first time since their argument the night before, he was not looking at the woman who had stood across from him with her arms folded and her chin lifted, answering fury with defiance and every accusation with another sharpened edge. He was not looking at the person who had kept an impossible truth from him, nor the version of Anna he had spent the sleepless hours since trying to understand and, at times, trying very hard to hate. He was looking at a mother. And somehow, that made her human again. 

Her fingers moved idly through Charlie’s pool-tangled hair, separating a damp curl and smoothing it back without thought. Charlie remained half hidden behind her, pressed close enough that the small curve of her body disappeared against Anna’s leg, and Anna adjusted herself instinctively to accommodate her. No thought or performance. In fact, there was nothing conscious about it at all. The bond between them was almost palpable.

Harry could see it in the way Charlie had sought her out without hesitation. She was crying for her from halfway across the house as though there had never been another possible destination. Like her body had an effortless, mindless, magnetic pull to wherever Anna was. No matter how near or far. He saw it in the way Anna had immediately forgotten their unfinished conversation the second she heard her daughter’s voice. In the quiet strokes of her hand. In the softening of her face. In the complete and unquestioned trust with which Charlie leaned into her. They belonged to one another in a way that required no explanation.

For one dangerous moment, Harry felt something inside him soften almost completely. It became harder to reconcile this Anna with the woman he had spent the night resenting. It suddenly felt increasingly harder to reduce her to a single unforgivable choice when she stood before him with a shy little girl tucked into her side, her palm resting protectively over the crown of their daughter’s head. 

Their daughter. The softness vanished almost as quickly as it had come. Because he could have had this too.

Maybe not in the same way. Maybe Charlie would always have run to her mother first when she was hurt. Perhaps Anna would always have known the subtle differences between every cry before he did. But he certainly could have learned. He’d like to think he would’ve learned quick enough to know, too. Just as Anna seemingly did. He could have been there. He could have known how to settle her after nightmares and coax shampoo from her hair and tell from one little whimper whether she was injured, frightened, tired, or merely furious that somebody had forbidden her from riding the family dog like a horse.

He could have had a place in this bond. He should have. Instead, he stood several feet away like a guest, watching his own daughter hide behind her mother’s leg. And just like that, the anger found him again.

Not as violently as before. Not with yesterday’s blistering heat and bitter cruelty. But it was there, just quieter now. It was deeper and, somehow, even harder to ignore.

“Want you to brush my hair,” Charlie murmured quietly, the last remnants of her earlier distress still clinging to her voice as she bunched a handful of Anna’s shorts in her tiny fist. “And braid it.”

“I can’t do anything with this messy head.” She teased the words gently, reaching down to rough up what she could of Charlie’s pool-matted hair until the little girl ducked her head and let out the faintest protesting whine. “Please go let Auntie Vivi scrub the chlorine off, and I’ll come braid it as soon as I can, okay?”

Charlie did not immediately agree. Instead, she remained pressed close to Anna’s side, fingers still twisted stubbornly into the fabric at her thigh as though the promise of a braid was not quite enough to persuade her to surrender the person who was meant to do it. 

Harry watched the whole thing in silence. There was something almost painfully intimate about the ease of it. Not the kind of intimacy in the way he had once known Anna, but something quieter and far more entrenched. It was a rhythm built from repetition. It was a language made up of small promises and familiar routines.

I’ll come braid it as soon as I can.

The words were nothing. Yet, at the same time, they were everything. How many times had Anna said some version of them before? How many nights had she sat behind Charlie with a brush in her hand, working carefully through wet curls while the little girl talked herself sleepy? How many mornings had she tied ribbons, fixed crooked ponytails, redone braids after impatient little fingers pulled them loose? 

Harry had never once pictured Anna doing any of it. Not because he thought her incapable. The opposite, perhaps. When things were good, he romanticized the idea of Anna mothering a child that looked a perfect blend of both her and himself. He often conceptualized the thought of her rocking a swaddled baby to sleep. He’d fallen asleep on occasion with the lucid dream of Anna bathing a giggling baby, gently combing little hairs into place. 

Somewhere beneath all his anger, the sight of her like this in real life made a terrible sort of sense. Anna had always loved in practical ways. She remembered details. Fixed things before anyone asked. Pretended not to fuss while fussing endlessly. Of course she braided Charlie’s hair. Of course Charlie wanted only her to do it. That knowledge settled uneasily inside him.

Charlie finally tipped her face up toward her mother, still suspicious. “Promise?”

Anna gave her a look of exaggerated offense. “Have I ever broken a braid promise?”

Charlie thought about it, which almost got Harry to nearly smile again. Apparently this was serious business. And, apparently, Charlie was pretty hard-headed. He was amused by that.

“No,” she conceded at last.

“I rest my case.” Anna brushed her thumb over Charlie’s temple, smoothing away a damp strand of hair. “So go get clean, and I’ll be up soon.”

Charlie hesitated one final time before reluctantly loosening her grip on Anna’s shorts. She took one small step away, then another, but stopped before she reached the screen door. For a moment, Harry thought she might turn back toward her mother. But instead, she glanced at him. Just once. It was quick and shy and uncertain before she disappeared into the house. Harry, without shame, stared after her long after the screen door had swung shut.

“Is she always like that?” Harry asked, and though he tried to keep the question casual, there was something unmistakably tender threaded through it. A mild, almost reluctant longing that softened the edges of his voice.

Anna’s brows drew together. For a second, she simply looked at him, trying to work out what he meant internally before saying anything else. Her body remained angled slightly away from his, one shoulder still turned toward the screen door Charlie had just disappeared through. The physical distance between them was not large, but Anna was suddenly conscious of it all the same. She was suddenly conscious of maintaining it.

She had spent most of the last twenty-four hours defending herself against Harry’s anger. That had been easier, in some ways. Anger gave her something solid to push against. She could meet accusation with explanation, fury with defiance, cruelty with something sharp enough to protect herself. This was different.

There was no accusation in his face now. Only a question, and Anna found herself unusually afraid of answering it badly.

Ollie’s words from earlier returned to her again with irritating persistence. Harry was scared too. Harry was grieving. Harry had spent nearly four years not knowing there was anything to miss, only to discover all at once that an entire little person had been living and laughing and growing without him. Anna understood that now. Or perhaps she was only beginning to. Either way, she did not want to twist the knife by accident.

“Like what?” she asked plainly, though her expression remained careful. “Like, inserting herself, you mean?”

Harry shook his head immediately. “No, ‘course not. I don’t mind.” The answer came with enough insistence that Anna believed him. If anything, his gaze flicked once toward the door Charlie had vanished behind, as though part of him was still hoping she might reappear. 

“I just mean, like...” He hesitated, searching for a way to ask without revealing too much. “Is she always that attached t’you... like that?”

Anna’s face changed almost imperceptibly. If anyone else had asked her that very same question, she would’ve answered with a yes almost immediately. She would’ve said that Charlie is glued to her. She would’ve explained, as she has in the past with a joking smile, how she essentially has two shadows. One her size, and one Charlie’s size. The question was simple enough. The answer, however, was not. 

She glanced toward the screen door, then back at Harry. For the first time since he had arrived, she seemed to recognize the ache beneath what he was really asking. He wasn’t truly asking whether Charlie was needy. He didn’t want to know if she interrupted often. He wasn’t looking to see if Anna was always the person she ran to. Whether that place had already been filled so completely that there was no room left for him.

“Oh.” Anna felt like she could finally release the breath she’d been holding in. “Sort of, I guess. Yeah. I think I unintentionally kind of fostered that.” 

The brazen response had barely left Anna’s mouth when a sudden, unwelcome wave of jealousy rose inside him.

Not jealousy of Anna herself, particularly. It was something a bit stranger than that. It felt like something more primitive and far less reasonable. As he looked at her standing there, at the faint wrinkles in her shorts where Charlie’s tiny fist had clutched them only moments ago, he was seized by the irrational sense that Anna had been hoarding something from him.

That effortless, unquestioned devotion. The instinctive way Charlie had sought her out from the other end of the house, crying for her before she had even come within view. The way she had tucked herself behind Anna’s leg when she felt shy, wholly certain that the woman standing in front of her would become a shield without ever needing to be asked. There had been no hesitation in it. Charlie had simply known where safety lived.

And Anna had gotten to have that all to herself. The thought was unfair. Harry knew it was unfair, and still it came with enough force to make something ache beneath his ribs. For one fleeting moment, he imagined the roles reversed.

He imagined himself standing in the middle of a conversation when a small, tearful Charlie came searching for him. He pictured the soft slap of her bare feet against the floor, the plaintive call of Daddy travelling down the hallway instead. He imagined her pushing through a door and finding him, relief appearing instantly on her little face before she crossed the room and tucked herself behind his leg.

His leg. Her small fingers clutching the fabric of his trousers. Her cheek pressed against his thigh. Her body instinctively seeking refuge in the quiet certainty that nothing could hurt her so long as she was standing behind him. The image was so vivid that Harry almost resented himself for conjuring it. Because he could almost palpably feel what that might have been like.

The weight of her leaning against him. The warmth of a small hand wrapped trustingly around one of his fingers. The invisible declaration contained within such a simple gesture.

You are safe. You are mine. I know you will protect me.

Unconditional love, expressed without a single grand proclamation. And he wanted it. God, he wanted it so badly that the sheer force of the longing frightened him. He couldn’t think of anything he’d ever wanted more in his entire life.

But when Charlie had been frightened moments ago, she had hidden from him. She had taken refuge behind Anna. The jealousy sharpened briefly, cruelly, before reason began to temper it. Charlie's devotion to her mother was not something Anna had stolen. Harry knew that. It had been built slowly, patiently, over nearly four years of scraped knees and sleepless nights, tantrums and fevers, bedtime stories and damp pool towels. Anna had earned every ounce of the trust Charlie placed in her. But Harry could have earned it too.

“She’s always that shy?” His tone was softer now. Nearly desperate.

“Yes and no.” Anna swayed her head slightly, as though physically demonstrating the fifty-fifty split. “Only around new people or strangers.”

The words were out before she could stop them. And the instant they landed, she wished she could take them back. Something flickered across Harry’s face so quickly she nearly missed it. A shadow passed over green eyes as his jaw tightened. His mouth pressed into a thinner line. Anger, perhaps. Hurt, undoubtedly. But for one awful, fleeting second, Anna thought he might cry.

Her stomach turned, and she decided to look away first. It was becoming impossible to know what she was allowed to say. Every answer seemed capable of drawing blood. Every harmless detail about Charlie carried the threat of becoming another reminder of time Harry had not been given, another small piece of a life that had unfolded entirely beyond his reach. Anna found herself suddenly wary of her own words, measuring them before they left her mouth, trying to determine which truths were necessary and which might simply be cruel.

She didn’t want to tell him too much. That thought made her feel terrible almost immediately, because hadn't secrecy been what brought them here in the first place? But this was different. At least, she told herself it was.

She wasn’t trying to keep Charlie from him now. She was trying not to overwhelm him with nearly four years’ worth of memories all at once. She didn’t want to casually mention a phase he had missed or a habit he had never seen and then watch another piece of him collapse under the weight of it. She didn't want to indulge too freely in stories about first words and sleepless nights and scraped knees when he was only just beginning to comprehend how much of it had happened without him. And more than that, though Anna could barely admit it to herself, she did not want to hurt him any more than she already had.

So she hesitated. She guarded even the smallest details now, not because she believed they belonged solely to her, but because she had begun to understand that, to Harry, every piece of Charlie's history was both a gift and a wound. And Anna had no idea yet how to give him one without inflicting the other.

“It’s good you came back.”

There it was again, Anna thought as soon as she said it. Cici’s newly inherited aversion to prolonged breaks in conversation, though Anna was considerably less graceful at remedying them than her mother. Where Cici could fill a silence with warmth and make it seem natural, Anna tended to shove words into the empty space and then regret them almost immediately.

Her fingers shifted restlessly at her sides. “I mean, like, I wasn’t sure-” She stopped, already hating how uncertain she sounded. “I didn’t think you’d come back.”

“Of course I came back.” There was only the faintest smattering of irritation in his tone, lightly peppered with something closer to offense, as though the suggestion had struck him somewhere personal. “Why would y’think I wouldn’t?”

Anna felt mildly jolted by the force of it. She stared at him for a moment, almost incredulous, before one brow lifted despite her better judgment.

“I don’t know.” Her voice turned dry before she could stop it. “Telling me you hate me and throwing in a ‘fuck you’ on your trek out might’ve given me some inclination.”

Harry’s jaw shifted. For a second Anna thought he might let it go. Which was stupid of her to assume because, of course, he did not.

“Is there another way y’would’ve preferred me t’leave after that unfolded?” His question was pointed, delivered with enough bite to almost resemble an insult. “Suppose I should’ve skipped down th’driveway? Jumped to kick m’feet in glee?”

Anna’s mouth opened, then just as quickly closed. The sarcasm was familiar enough to sting. Once upon a time, exchanges like this had been effortless between them. A volley. One remark sharpened into another until one of them laughed or crossed the room and ended the argument in some less verbal way. This was not that.

There was no safety beneath the sarcasm now. No certainty that either of them knew where the line was. Anna could feel the old instinct rising anyway. That all too familiar and immediate urge to retaliate, to lob something equally clever back at him before he could say anything else that might make her feel small. She had always been good at that. Harry knew it better than most. He knew exactly how quickly she could turn vulnerability into wit and guilt into irritation if given even half an opening. But Ollie’s voice returned to her again.

He’s scared too.

Anna looked at Harry more carefully. The anger was there. Of course it was. It lived in the taut line of his mouth, in the faint tension around his eyes, in the way his shoulders seemed to brace after every sentence as though waiting for her to strike back. But beneath it was something else - disbelief that she could genuinely have thought he might never return. She was not going to play into his hand. She was going to try her best to avoid regressing. To avoid falling back into old, and clearly detrimental, habits.

Anna swallowed down the retort already forming on her tongue. “You can do whatever you want. I was just telling you what was on my mind and why, that’s all.” 

“Appreciate it.” Though it was said in a way that did not sound appreciative at all.

Anna narrowed her eyes. There was something almost insultingly familiar about the tone, that dry little edge he used when he wanted to be dismissive without granting the other person the satisfaction of a full argument. Once, she had known every variation of it. The amused version. The irritated one. The one reserved for people he thought were being particularly stupid. This one sat somewhere between wounded and annoyed, which somehow made it worse.

It didn’t matter, though. She couldn’t help herself. Sarcasm had always been one of Anna’s more reliable vices, and especially now, when sincerity felt far too much like standing naked in front of an open window.

“I’m going to take that as genuine rhetoric and assume you said it to be polite.”

Harry’s eyes flicked toward her. “Well, I assumed the sarcasm was obvious,” he muttered. “So it looks like we’re both quite shit at making assumptions.”

Anna stared at him. For a second, she genuinely could not decide whether she wanted to laugh, scream, or shove him off the porch. The old familiarity of the exchange unsettled her almost as much as the hostility beneath it. It was too easy and far too instinctive. Four years had vanished, and somehow they could still fall into the same sharp little rhythm within minutes of being alone together. She didn’t know whether to be impressed or disgustingly unnerved by the ease of resuming old patterns on both their parts.

“I don’t understand you.” Famous last words. Anna let both hands fall dramatically against her sides, frustration overtaking the careful restraint she had been trying so hard to maintain.

“Was last night not exhilarating enough?” Her brows lifted in incredulity. “Did you seriously choose to drive all the way back here just to have another go at me?”

Harry’s expression changed. Not dramatically. He did not raise his voice or step toward her. But something tightened in his face, a subtle hardening that told Anna she had found another nerve.

“No.” The answer came quickly, too quickly to be rehearsed. He held her gaze, and for a moment the sarcasm disappeared altogether to make room for condescending snark. “I didn’t come back here t’have another go at you.”

Anna folded her arms, then immediately regretted the defensive gesture. “Could’ve fooled me.”

Harry looked away with a sharp breath through his nose. “Right. There you go again.”

“There I go again doing…what, exactly?”

“Making everything into a bloody contest, Anna. That sort of thing. Don’t pretend you don’t know exactly what m’saying.”

Anna’s mouth parted in disbelief. “Oh, I’m sorry. I must’ve missed the part where I started this conversation by acting like every word out of my mouth was personally offensive to you.”

“Well that might be because half of them actually are.”

“Then maybe stop asking me questions.”

“I didn’t come here to bloody stare at you for hours.” Harry quipped. “I came here to ask you questions.”

“Then maybe try doing that without biting my head off.” Anna snapped at him quickly, like it was nothing more than an old reflex that kicked in. To some degree, it almost was.

Harry said nothing. For once, not because he had nothing to say, but because far too much of it was clawing for a way out at once.

He could feel the old heat beginning to rise again, the same jagged resentment that had carried him through nearly every waking hour since leaving the Wilson house the night before. It sat too close to the surface now, ready to sharpen anything Anna said into an insult and every hesitation into evidence of something more sinister. Anger had become dangerously convenient for him now. It felt much cleaner than grief. It was easier than helplessness, and infinitely less humiliating than admitting how completely the last twenty-four hours had reduced him to someone he barely recognized.

But he had not driven back here to do this again, and he really had to remember that. Now more than ever. Last night had been enough. More than enough. Last night was enough for a lifetime and then some. He could still feel the aftermath of it somewhere deep in his body, as though every raised voice and vicious accusation had lodged beneath his ribs and refused to leave. The shouting, the disbelief, the unbearable moment when the truth had finally been spoken plainly enough that there was nowhere left to hide from it. All of it had wrung him hollow.

He did not need another screaming match, nor did he want one. And more importantly, another fight would get him no closer to the one thing that mattered. Charlie. That was the end goal. It had to be. Not punishing Anna until she hurt as badly as he did. Not dragging them both back through every wound in search of some impossible winner. Not proving, over and over, that he had every right to be furious. What he needed now was a way forward, however narrow and ugly and uncomfortable that path might be.

Harry exhaled slowly, forcing some of the tension from his jaw. His shoulders loosened by the slightest degree, and the hard line of his mouth softened as he searched for the words he should have been using from the beginning. Anna, unfortunately, mistook his silence for agreement.

Her expression tightened, frustration creeping back into her face as she watched him stand there without offering any defense. Or offering anything, for that matter.

“If that’s why you came here, to just argue again, then I don’t know what to tell you.” Her hand shot up to snatch the towel from her shoulder, the damp fabric slapping lightly against her thigh as she sighed in annoyance. “I’m not doing that with my entire family inside and within earshot.”

He ran a hurried hand over his face, dragging his palm down over tired eyes and the coarse shadow along his jaw before sucking in a breath.

“S’not why I came, okay?” His voice had lost most of its earlier bite now, roughened instead by frustration and fatigue. “It’s really not.”

“Doesn’t really feel that way.”

Anna’s lips curled into a faint frown as she kept her gaze fixed on her bare feet, studying the old porch boards with more concentration than they deserved. It was easier than looking at him. Easier than having to decipher whether the exhaustion in his face was anger, grief, or some miserable combination of both.

“I know, I’m so—” Harry stopped.

The apology had already begun to form. He could feel it sitting there, precariously close to escape, the word nearly shaped against his tongue. Sorry. Something in him resisted. Some small, bitter corner of resentment tightened its grip before he could surrender the word. Because what exactly was he apologizing for? His tone? His anger? The fact that he had not yet figured out how to discuss a daughter he had learned about less than twenty-four hours ago without occasionally sounding wounded by it?

He could soften. He could try harder. He could admit that he had come too close to turning this into another fight. But apologize? Not yet. He wouldn’t do it. What was he truly sorry for, anyways? The stubbornness of that realization left a sour taste in his mouth. Harry cleared his throat instead, swallowing the unfinished word along with everything else he still didn’t know how to say.

“I wanted to talk about...” His gaze shifted briefly toward the house, and the hesitation that followed seemed to catch even him by surprise. “Her. About Charlotte.” 

The name landed differently coming from him, and Anna felt it shift something within her immediately. Not Charlie, but Charlotte.

Formal and careful, as though Harry had not yet earned the intimacy of the nickname everyone else had been using since before she could remember it. As though he were still standing at the perimeter of his own daughter’s life, forced to rely on the full name he had only just learned belonged to her. 

Something inside Anna tightened. Just as quickly, the defensiveness began to rise. It came on instinct now. A reflex so deeply ingrained she barely noticed it until it was already there, heat gathering beneath her skin, every protective instinct preparing to lock into place before Harry had even finished explaining himself. 

Anna pressed her lips together, just once. Then ran her tongue slowly across the backs of her teeth, trying to subdue whatever sharp response was already threatening to surface. She could feel the old patterns waiting for her. The urge to assume the worst. To anticipate an attack before one came. To answer questions he had not yet asked and defend choices he had not yet challenged. It had always been easier to build the walls first and decide later whether they were necessary. She couldn’t afford that right now. At least, not if they were ever going to get anywhere. 

So Anna forced herself to remain still and decided she would let him lead. She would willfully let him steer the conversation wherever he had come here intending to take it. It was the only way she could keep herself from regressing into every self-destructive instinct she had spent years perfecting, from rebuilding those walls so high and wide that neither of them would ever find a way through.

She drew a quiet breath and nodded once. “Okay.” Harry watched her carefully. Anna held his gaze this time, though every muscle in her body seemed poised for impact. “What about Charlotte?”

“What comes next.” His tone was firmer now. More authoritative. Not loud, but steadier, as though he had finally reached the part of the conversation he had driven all the way back to have. “Getting t’know her, vice versa. That sort of thing.” 

“Oh.” Anna’s voice emerged smaller than she intended. “I...” She hesitated, glancing down for a moment before looking back at him. “I don’t really...” Another pause. “I’m sure this isn’t what you wanna hear, but I haven’t given it a lot of thought between now and yesterday.”

She was right. It was definitely not what he wanted to hear, not even remotely close. Harry wanted a plan. He wanted answers. Timelines. Something tangible he could hold onto after spending the last twenty-four hours feeling as though every certainty in his life had been ripped away from him without warning. He wanted Anna to tell him exactly what happened now, what happened tomorrow, what happened next week and next month and every month after that. He wanted dates and schedules and carefully arranged steps leading from where he stood now to some future version of his life in which Charlie knew him, trusted him, loved him.

He wanted a roadmap. Something idiot-proof. Something impossible to misread. And for one hot, irrational second, anger surged through him again.

He wanted to throw his hands up. To ask what the hell she had been doing for the last twenty-four hours if she had not been thinking about precisely this. He wanted to accuse her of having four years to prepare for a possibility he had been given less than a day to comprehend. He wanted to tell her she did not get to drop something this enormous into his life and then stand there shrugging because she had not had enough time to think through what came next. The resentment gathered quickly, familiar and intoxicating in its simplicity.

Then something stopped him. Perhaps it was the uncertainty in her face. Perhaps it was the quiet tremor in her voice. Or perhaps, finally, Harry began to recognize the truth beneath his own frustration. He didn’t know either.

The realization arrived without ceremony, but it dismantled the argument forming in his mind before he could give voice to it. He had no plan or answers. He had no roadmap, either. He had driven back to the Wilson house because staying away had become intolerable. Because every instinct in him had screamed that he needed to return to Charlie, to see her again, to begin somehow. But beyond that, he had no real idea what the beginning was supposed to look like.

Was he meant to introduce himself properly? Spend an hour with her? Ten minutes? Was Anna supposed to explain who he was first? Were they supposed to wait days? Weeks? Was he meant to stay in Georgia? Fly back to London and return? How often should he see her? What was too much? What was not enough?

The questions multiplied faster than he could answer them. And slowly, the anger began to reveal itself for what it really was. It was fear. That was the more honest word for it.

Fear disguised as impatience. Fear dressed up as indignation. Fear sharpened into sarcasm because sarcasm was easier to carry than admitting he was terrified of doing the wrong thing and losing even more time. 

Harry looked at Anna differently then. Of course she didn’t know. How could she possibly know? There was no handbook for this. There was no neatly ordered set of instructions for introducing a nearly four-year-old little girl to the father she had never known she had. There wasn’t some pre-existing, universally accepted play-by-play for navigating something this unconventional, this painful, this completely and utterly fucked up. They were both standing at the beginning of a road neither of them had expected to travel. Neither of them had a map to hold in their hands to guide them along.

Harry exhaled slowly, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. “Right,” he murmured.

The single word carried less irritation than before. More resignation. More honesty. He looked down briefly, scraping the edge of his shoe against the porch board before meeting her eyes again.

“I pushed my flight again,” Harry said, almost like the admission had slipped out before he’d decided whether to share it. “Till tomorrow. Extended the hotel too.”

“Oh.” Anna paused, then nodded once. “Good.” The word sounded inadequate the second it left her mouth.

She shifted her weight, glancing down before looking back at him. “I mean... how long can you realistically keep doing that?”

Harry let out a breath through his nose, the sound carrying more defeat than amusement. “Not very.”

Anna’s stomach tightened slightly. He looked away for a second, toward the yard, before adding, “I’m probably gonna have to go back to London for a bit.”

Anna nodded slowly, lips pressed into a thin line. “Yeah. Bummer.” The word had barely left her mouth before Harry’s expression tightened.

“Anna, can y’please not do that right now?” There was a sharper edge to his voice again, though not enough to turn it into a fight. “S’not really appropriate.”

“It’s knee-jerk, I’m sorry.” She threw both hands up in a quick show of surrender, her face pinching with genuine discomfort. “This is just... a lot. And I think I’m super uncomfortable, so apparently my personality’s decided to make that everyone else’s problem.”

Harry let out a short, exasperated breath. “Yeah, well. Likewise.” Anna’s hands dropped back to her sides.

He looked away for a moment, jaw working before he continued. “M’not exactly keen on leaving, am I? Not after everything that’s happened.” His voice lowered slightly. “Not when I’ve already missed as much as I have.”

Beneath the irritation, there it was again. That same raw, almost unbearable truth Harry kept circling back to whether he meant to or not. Every decision now had to pass through the filter of nearly four lost years. Every flight, every hotel extension, every day spent somewhere other than Georgia carried a weight it never had before. Anna’s gaze softened despite herself.

“I’m...” Anna hesitated, as though the words required some degree of physical effort to get out. Her fingers tightened around the damp pool towel still hanging at her side. “I’m open to suggestions. You know. Figuring out some sort of... resolve. Or arrangement. Whatever we’re calling this.”

“I dunno.” His voice came muffled as he brought his thumbnail between his teeth, worrying at it anxiously before seeming to catch himself and lowering his hand. “Few things have crossed my mind.”

Anna eyed him cautiously. “Like what?”

He hesitated. That was the first thing she noticed. Harry had never been particularly good at disguising when he was working his way toward something. He liked to think he was subtle, and perhaps with most people he was, but Anna had spent too many years studying the pauses between his words, the restless movements of his hands, the almost imperceptible changes in his face whenever he was trying to decide just how much of his mind to reveal.

“Surely you’ve got t’go back to New York at some point, yeah?” he asked finally. “Unless y’live down here full-time now.”

Anna’s brows lifted slightly at the seemingly abrupt change of subject. “No. We only stay in Georgia for the summer.” She paused. “We fly back September first. Charlie starts school on the eighth, so I like getting there about a week early. Gives us time to unpack, get settled, get her sleeping properly again before school starts. Logistics and what not.”

Harry nodded slowly. “So you’ve got some flexibility, then.”

It was not quite a question. Anna’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean...” Harry shifted his weight, one hand rising to rub distractedly at his temple as though he might physically coax the right phrasing from his head. “Y’can go back and forth. New York, Georgia. Your work allows f’that.”

“Within reason.”

“Right.”

Anna waited, and Harry said nothing. The silence lasted just long enough to make her suspicious.

She folded her arms loosely. “Harry.”

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

His brow furrowed with manufactured innocence. “M’not doing anything.”

“You are absolutely doing something.”

“I’m asking questions.”

“You’re asking very specific questions in the least direct way humanly possible.”

Harry gave a faint roll of his eyes, but there was no real humor behind it. “Just trying t’understand what sort of flexibility y’have.”

Anna studied him for another second. “Okay.”

He seemed to take that as permission to continue. “So there's nothing necessarily keeping you in Georgia for the entire summer.”

“I wouldn’t say nothing.” Anna’s answer slowed deliberately, caution creeping into every syllable now. “My entire family is here, for one thing. This is home.”

“Course. Yeah.” Harry nodded, but she could already see him preparing the next point. “And that’s important. Obviously. Family’s important.”

Anna’s eyes narrowed further while Harry chose to ignore it. “S’a good point, actually. About family.” He shifted again, gaze flicking briefly toward the house. “Because if summers are a bit more flexible, then she’s also got family across-”

“No.” Anna shook her head immediately and, in turn, Harry stopped. “No. If you’re about to ask what I think you’re about to ask, don’t even bother. We’re not doing it.”

His face hardened. “Christ’s sake, Anna, y’didn’t even let me bloody finish my sentence.”

“I didn’t need to.”

“How d’you know?”

“Because I know you.”

“Apparently not as well as you think.”

“Harry, I’m sorry.” Her hand flew briefly to the bare skin above the neckline of her tank top, fingers pressing lightly against her chest. “Really, I am. And I’m trying to be open here. I swear. But if you’re about to suggest what I think you are, then no. That’s not happening.”

Harry folded his arms across his chest. The resemblance to Charlie moments before was uncanny. Just flat out stubborn, displeased, brows pinched as though the world had committed some personal injustice against him. It was striking enough that Anna almost found it funny. Almost.

“How d’you even know what I was gonna say?”Anna stared at him as he asked. “M’willing t’bet you couldn’t even tell me.”

“Oh, please.” She gave an exasperated roll of her eyes, far too familiar with this particular brand of Harry theatrics. “You weren’t just spending the last five minutes tiptoeing around asking whether you could take Charlie to the UK for the summer?”

Silence. Brief, contemplative silence.

Anna lifted both eyebrows. “Am I wrong?”

Harry’s lips pursed. She knew that face too. He was going to spin it.

“I wouldn’t say you’re necessarily right.”

Anna gave a short, humorless laugh. “Oh, good. Please elaborate, then. The floor is all yours.”

“I wasn’t going t’ask to just take Charlotte.”

The distinction came quickly, defensively, though the truth was that Harry was not entirely certain what he had been planning to ask. He had been following a thought more than a strategy, chasing the unbearable idea of returning to London while his daughter remained thousands of miles away and trying to invent some reality in which that did not have to happen. Anna waited.

“Obviously,” he continued, “I wouldn’t just spring something like that on you. Her going overseas for three months without you.”

“Right. Obviously.”

He caught the sarcasm immediately, correcting it just as swiftly. “Can y’not?”

Anna held up one hand. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

Harry hesitated again. Then, deciding there was no graceful way to arrive at the question, abandoned subtlety altogether. “I dunno, Anna. Would it really be th’worst thing in th’world for you to just throw me a fucking bone here and spend the summer in London so I can get t’know my child?”

Anna’s eyes closed. “Oh my God.” She dragged both hands slowly over her face.

Harry’s frustration rose immediately. “M’not asking for anything completely mental.”

Anna’s hands fell away. “You are asking me to move to another country for three months.”

“I’m asking you to spend a summer somewhere else.”

“With a three-year-old.”

“Who happens to have a father that lives there.” Harry tried to rationalize. “A whole ‘nother family that lives there.”

“And a whole life here.” Anna started to rebuttal. “With family she knows and rarely gets to see during the year. I’m not trying to minimize anything, Harry, but come on. That’s a lot to spring on a toddler who’s biggest concern right now is riding the family dog like a horse.”

“I get it!” He insisted. “S’just f’the summer, Anna. Not forever. Y’blowing this out of proportion. S’gonna have t’happen at some point, no?”

“Okay.” She nodded rapidly, already beginning to talk with her hands. It was a sure sign she was losing patience. “You’re right. Fine. This doesn’t need to be blown out of proportion.” Harry’s shoulders relaxed by a fraction. “Because I’m telling you right now that we’re not doing it.”

His expression fell. “Oh, fucking hell, Anna can-”

“No.”

“Well you can quit fucking cutting me off!” He griped. Y’just get t’decide, then?”

“In this particular instance? Yes.”

“Y’not even gonna hear me out?”

“I did hear you out.”

“No, you very well did not! Bloody ambushed me before I even got th’question out.”

“Because the answer was always going to be no!”

Harry threw his arms outward. “And apparently that’s that, is it?”

“For someone who just said this doesn’t need to be blown out of proportion, it’s starting to feel like you’re blowing it wildly out of proportion.”

“Because you’re being entirely unreasonable.”

Anna’s mouth fell open. “I’m being unreasonable?”

“Yes.”

“You’re asking me to leave the country for the summer.” Her hands were moving in earnest now, punctuating every word. “To rearrange my work schedule, my plans, my daughter’s entire schedule-”

“Our.” The word cut cleanly through hers. Anna stopped. Harry’s expression had hardened. “Our daughter.” The correction landed heavily between them. “That,” he said, voice lower now, “is the whole problem, Anna. She’s our daughter.”

Anna’s jaw tightened. She looked away for half a second, gathering herself before answering. “I know that.”

“Do you?”

Her eyes snapped back to his. “Don’t.”

“Because every other sentence is my daughter, my schedule, my plans. And I’m standing here trying t’work out where exactly I fit into any of it.”

“I told you I’m open to suggestions.”

“Right, of course.” He scoffed. “Except mine.”

“Except this one,” Anna shot back. “Yes. I’m sorry, but not every idea you have is automatically going to be a good one just because you’ve decided you want it.”

Harry gave a disbelieving laugh, but Anna pressed on before he could interrupt.

“She’s still a child. She needs structure. Consistency. Familiarity. She has routines and people she knows and a home she feels safe in. I’m not uprooting her for three months and flying her across the Atlantic twenty-four hours after you found out she exists.”

Harry bobbed his head once, jaw clenched. “A father.” Anna went quiet as he held her gaze. “She also needs a father.”

The words were not loud. That was what made them sting. Anna swallowed. “I know.”

“Do you, Anna? Because th’way m’hearing it, doesn’t really sound like y’do”

“That’s cruel and you know it.” Anna’s finger pointed directly at him. “Harry, spin it however you want. It doesn’t matter. I am not going to give on this. I’m sorry, but I just won’t.”

Something flashed across his face. “Right.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Act like I’m telling you that you can’t know her. That’s not what I said.”

“Then what are you willing t’give on?”

The question came out sharper than he intended, almost a hiss. Anna blinked. Harry stepped no closer, but there was something undeniably forceful in the way he held himself now, frustration and desperation bleeding into one another until it was difficult to distinguish where one ended and the other began.

“Because y’doing an awful lot of dismissing,” he continued, “and m’not hearing many alternatives coming from you.”

Anna opened her mouth, but found that nothing came out. Harry waited and that silence, more than anything else she could have said, seemed to prove his point. The tension between them had begun to crest again.

Harry was still waiting. He was still watching her like the answer might materialize if he held his ground long enough. If he hardened his stare. All the while, Anna could feel it pressing in on her. The expectation, the urgency, the unspoken demand that she meet him somewhere she wasn’t ready to go became impossibly tangible. Her jaw tightened, her grip on the towel shifting as she searched for something, anything, that wouldn’t sound like surrender.

 But of course, nothing came. The silence stretched and stretched, expanding beyond the porch and trickling over into the rest of the front yard. That is, until, the screen door creaked open behind them. Neither Anna nor Harry looked toward it immediately.

They were still staring at one another, Harry waiting for an answer she did not have and Anna resenting the fact that he seemed to expect one. The air between them had tightened almost imperceptibly, charged by that dangerous familiarity they seemed to fall back into far too easily. That habitual, old ease of raised voices, defensive posturing, the insatiable desire to come up victorious in an argument neither of them could afford to lose. The door gave another low groan and, this time, Anna couldn’t help but glance over.

Ollie stood half in the doorway, one large hand still curled around the edge of the screen. Nothing about his expression looked particularly alarmed, nor did he carry the exterior of a father rushing to his daughter’s defense. If anything, he looked mildly reluctant to be there at all. It’s what made his presence infinitely more conspicuous. Oliver Wilson was not a meddler.

He had raised three children largely based on the belief that they were entitled to make their own mistakes. Of course, that belief was counting on none of those mistakes pertaining to felonies, bankruptcy, or setting fire to something that could not easily be rebuilt. He offered advice when asked, occasionally when it was very obviously needed, and almost never inserted himself into arguments between grown adults. Even so, he rarely inserted himself into the trivial arguments between his grandchildren. 

Which meant that if Ollie had come outside, they had gotten loud enough for even him to reconsider his principles. In turn, Anna’s shoulders sank a fraction.

“Dad.”

“Mm-hm.” That was all he gave her at first.

Ollie stepped onto the porch and allowed the screen door to close behind him with a gentle slap, his gaze moving slowly between the two of them. Harry shifted slightly where he stood, some of the fight leaving his posture almost instantly. There was something uniquely sobering about being thirty-something years old and realizing someone’s father had just come outside because you were arguing loudly enough to disturb the household. It honestly made him want to vomit.

“I ain't much for stickin' my nose where it don't belong,” Ollie said eventually, his thick drawl slow and unhurried. “Reckon everybody here knows that. Ain’t neither of y’alls first rodeo.”

Anna closed her eyes briefly. Here we go, she thought. Here we fucking go.

“But,” he continued, slipping both hands into the pockets of his shorts, “y’all are startin' to sound an awful lot like two people more interested in bein' right than gettin' anywhere.”

Anna immediately bristled. “That’s not what-”

Ollie lifted one hand. Not sharply. He didn’t need to. “I know, sugar.”

The easy endearment somehow made it worse. Ollie’s attention shifted toward Harry, and something in his expression softened. It wasn’t quite pity, but more so understanding. Harry had suffered enough of that for one day. The quiet acknowledgement of a man who understood that desperation had a way of making people ask for unreasonable things and then become furious when the world failed to accommodate them.

He tipped his chin slightly. “Why don’t you tell me what’s got the two of you so riled up?”

Harry blinked, caught off guard by the invitation. “Well, I-” He gestured vaguely between himself and Anna. “M’just trying to say that I should be able to spend time with my daughter without-”

Anna, standing just behind Ollie’s shoulder, silently mouthed along with him. I’m just trying to say. Her expression exaggerated his cadence just enough to be unmistakable. 

“See? See- look at her!” Harry’s eyes widened. “Can’t even be taken seriously. Everything’s a bloody joke t’her!”

Anna dropped the act instantly. “It is not!”

“You’re doing it again!”

“I’m not doing anything!”

“Christ,” Ollie muttered, dragging a hand down his face. “The two of you are a fuckin’ mess.”

The silence that fell over the porch was immediate and total. Anna went completely still as Harry came to an abrupt halt mid-gesture. Afterwards, they both stared at him. Ollie did not swear. Not casually. Not emphatically. Not ever. The weight of it landed harder than anything else he’d said all afternoon. Ollie looked between them, entirely unbothered by the shock he’d just caused.

“M’sorry, Ollie.” Harry was the first to back down, rubbing a tired hand over the back of his neck. “Don’t mean t’cause a scene... again. S’just, soon as I brought up London...” He glanced briefly toward Anna before looking away. “Conversation sort of took a left turn.”

“You're headed off to London now?” Ollie's brows knitted together as he looked between them, trying to piece together the conversation he'd only caught the tail end of.

“No.” Anna answered almost immediately, the word arriving with considerably more force than she'd intended. “No. I'm not going to London. Nobody's going to London.”

“Well, alright.” Ollie blinked. “Don't need t'get sassy with me. I'm just tryin' t'get caught up.”

“I wasn't being sassy.”

Harry's brows lifted. “I heard it too,” he offered with a small shrug. “A little bit of sass.”

Anna slowly turned her head toward him. The look she gave him could've curdled milk. Harry, to his credit, had the decency to look only mildly pleased with himself. She elected not to dignify him with a response, instead rotating her body back toward her father as if Harry had ceased to exist entirely.

“This is just...” She dragged a hand down her face and kneaded her eyes with her knuckles. “Extremely overstimulating. I feel like I can't say anything right.”

“Y'certainly not off to a great start,” Harry muttered beneath his breath and, in turn, Anna's head whipped back around. “Can tell y'that much.”

“And I'm supposed to feel inclined to live overseas for three months when you're over here acting like the fucking peanut gallery?” Both hands flew outward as she spoke, every ounce of composure she'd managed to reclaim evaporating. “Just making little comments under your breath every five seconds?”

“Anna, what the hell else am I supposed to do?” The sarcasm disappeared from Harry's face as quickly as it had arrived. “I don't want t'just leave, but I can't stay in a hotel up th’road forever.”

Silence settled over the porch. Thoughtful, introspective silence. Ollie looked at Harry, letting his eyes do a once over with intentional focus.

The young man standing in front of him had arrived less than two days ago expecting nothing more than a wedding and would now leave knowing he had a daughter sleeping a few hundred feet away. He'd extended flights, extended hotel reservations, and was now trying to bargain with time itself because every mile between him and Charlie suddenly felt unbearable.

Ollie's gaze drifted to Anna, where she remained tightly wound with arms folded once more, despite repeatedly forcing herself not to do it. It was just protective by instinct and exhausted by circumstance. Every answer Harry offered seemed to make her brace for the next question before she'd even finished responding to the first. 

He knew that look. She'd worn it over 4 years ago when she'd shown up on this very doorstep pregnant and heartbroken. His eyes wandered past them both, then toward the direction of the backyard, where he envisioned the pool glinting in the late-afternoon sun. The little guest house sitting quietly beneath the live oaks, ompletely renovated and empty, suddenly popped into the forefront of his thoughts.

Ollie's jaw shifted before he began nodding almost absentmindedly, one slow nod melting into another as the pieces quietly assembled themselves in his mind. Anna caught it first.

Her brows pinched. “What?”

Ollie didn't answer. He was still looking toward the back of the property. Harry followed his line of sight, then looked back at Ollie, his own curiosity beginning to build.

Anna frowned harder. “Dad.”

“Hm?”

“What're you thinking?” 

Only then did Ollie look back at them. He shrugged once, took his time, and let another thoughtful beat pass.

“Well...” His eyes flicked toward the backyard one last time. “Seems t'me I've got a perfectly good pool house sittin' back there collectin' dust.”

Anna's stomach dropped because she knew that tone. She knew it all too well. With a force so unignorable, she suddenly had a terrible feeling she already knew exactly where her father was about to take the conversation.

“I just spent six months renovating the thing,” Ollie continued conversationally, as though discussing the weather. “Brand new floors. Kitchen's finished. Got a bathroom nicer than the one me and your mama use. Reckon it’d be nice to get my money’s worth outta the thing.” 

With each word that came out of Ollie’s mouth, Anna could hear her own pulse grow louder. It thudded dully against her ears, each beat more prevalent than the last until it seemed to drown out everything else on the porch. She knew that casual, almost absentminded way her father spoke whenever he'd already made his mind up about something and was simply taking the scenic route to get everyone else there with him.

She watched his eyes drift toward the backyard. Toward the pool. Toward the guest house. He was going to offer it. He was going to offer it to Harry. 

Anna opened her mouth, every instinct urging her to intercept the idea before it ever became words. But nothing came out quickly enough. By the time she'd gathered a breath, she could already see it happening. The slow, thoughtful nod of Ollie's head, the faint shift in Harry's expression as he unknowingly followed his line of sight toward the back of the property. The train had already left the station and there wasn't a damn thing she could do to stop it.

Anna’s face changed almost instantaneously. “Don’t say it. Whatever you’re about to say, don’t say it.” 

“Sorry?” Harry frowned, still a step behind. 

Ollie tipped his chin toward the backyard. “Why don’t you just stay there for a bit?” 

Anna unfolded her arms with startling speed. "Woah alright." She lifted a hand immediately, as though physically halting the idea before it could gain any further momentum. "Hold on. Can we maybe not start jumping to anything crazy?"

Ollie glanced at her. "Don't see what's crazy about it."

"Really?" Anna’s eyebrows shot up. “You don’t?”

"No."

"Dad."

"Sugar."

The calmness of his reply only seemed to irritate her more. Harry shifted awkwardly, looking from Ollie to Anna and then quickly away again, as though he had abruptly found himself in the middle of a family dispute he had no desire to inflame.

"I wouldn't want t’impose," he said finally. "Really. S'very kind of you, but-"

“Exactly.” Anna curtly interjected. “See? He doesn’t want that either. Case closed.”

Ollie ignored her. "How exactly would you be imposin' if I'm the one offering?"

Harry opened his mouth but nothing came out. In turn, Ollie lifted his brows as if to say exactly. Anna, meanwhile, stared at her father with mounting disbelief.

"Maybe this is something we could've discussed beforehand," she muttered under her breath.

Ollie politely ignored her. Again. He looked toward Harry instead, his manner remaining so maddeningly reasonable and leveled that Anna suspected he knew perfectly well it would make arguing with him nearly impossible.

"Seems like a win-win to me. You don't have to fool with findin' some rental, havin' things delivered, signin' paperwork, whatever else comes with settin' up house somewhere for a few weeks."

Harry's expression had gone strangely still, as though he was in need of little convincing. As if Ollie was actually making perfect sense. And, perhaps, maybe he really was.

Ollie continued. "And you're right there, close as can be. You'd get all the time with Charlie there is to be had without anybody havin' to shuffle her back and forth across town or turn every visit into some big production."

“That...” Harry admitted slowly, looking out toward the backyard again, “actually solves quite a bit.”

Anna's stomach dropped. “No, it doesn't.”

Harry looked back at her. “Well...”

“It doesn't.”

“Kinda does.”

“It absolutely does not.”

He glanced toward the guest house again.“I mean... proximity-wise...”

“Oh,” Anna groaned. “Don't say proximity-wise.”

“It solves the proximity problem.”

“There isn't a proximity problem.”

Harry gave her a look. “There is absolutely a proximity problem.”

Anna threw both hands into the air. “Well, sure, if you want to get technical about it.”

“Maybe I do want t’get technical about it.”

"Might be good for both of you too, it seems." Ollie added, cutting gently across Anna before she could build any real momentum. "Give y'all a chance to work out whatever comes next without tryin' to solve your entire lives standing on my front porch."

That silenced her. Not because she agreed. Absolutely not. But because the words found their mark anyway. Harry looked toward the house once more. This time, he lingered. The longing in his face was so naked that Anna had to look away.

The guest house was only a few hundred feet from where Charlie slept. Close enough that he would hear the chaos of the pool during the day. Close enough to see her running through the backyard or eating breakfast on the deck or trailing after her cousins barefoot through the grass. Close enough that getting to know her would not have to be arranged in sterile little increments on a calendar. He could simply be there.

Anna felt her stomach knot. Because that was exactly what frightened her. And judging by the way Harry was staring toward the back of the property, it was exactly what he wanted. 

Ollie gave another small shrug, as though he had merely suggested they order pizza for dinner rather than fundamentally altering the landscape of all their lives. "Just seems sensible, is all."

No one answered. Instead, they all let the suggestion settle over the porch with surprising weight, leaving it hanging in the humid Georgia air as though it had become something tangible between the three of them.

Anna stared at the weathered floorboards beneath her bare feet, her thoughts racing faster than she could organize them. The idea was absurd. Completely, obscenely absurd. Harry living fifty yards from the house? Waking up every morning within sight of Charlie? Walking the same backyard, eating dinner on the same porch, becoming another fixture in the rhythm she had spent nearly four years so carefully constructing?

Every instinct inside her screamed to say no. Immediately and unequivocally. Yet, for whatever reason, the words refused to come. For every argument she hurriedly assembled in her mind, another quieter voice dismantled it just as quickly.

He wouldn't have to keep extending hotel reservations. Charlie wouldn't have to shuttle back and forth to unfamiliar places. She wouldn’t have to go to another country. He'd be close enough to begin building something with her without uprooting the only world she'd ever known. Anna hated how much sense it made.

Across from her, Harry remained unusually still. His eyes drifted almost absentmindedly beyond the porch, following the same line of sight Ollie had only moments before. The guest house sat tucked beneath the sprawling live oaks beyond the pool, peaceful and unassuming in the late-afternoon light. It wasn't London. It wasn't New York. It wasn't a solution to the impossible. But perhaps it was a beginning.

Ollie looked between them once more, reading everything neither of them had managed to say aloud. He gave a small, satisfied nod.

"Y'all don't have to decide right this minute," he said simply. "Just somethin' to think on."

“She’s the other Dr. Abbot?” Nazley says under her breath to Crus, “she’s so much younger than him,” 

“Yeah,” Crus murmurs back but you and Jack don’t hear them, the two of you in your own world for a moment, “they kinda don’t give a fuck,”

“Hey,” Jack says, his voice dropping to something much softer. He’s in awe of how beautiful you look under the harsh fluorescences of the ER. 

“Hi, Dr. Abbot,” you smile, shaking your head, rubbing in the purell on your hands. The little group of nurses and doctors gather around you. You nod hello to Crus and Mateo, pausing on Nazely, “I don’t think we’ve gotten to work together yet,” you hold out your hand to her introducing yourself.

“Nazley Toomarian, intern,” she says, “I- I just started tonight,”

“Jesus and they put you on the night shift?” You turn to Jack, “free her.”

“I didn’t assign her to the night shift,” Jack holds his hands up in self defense.

“Well, it’s really nice to meet you Dr. Toomarian,” you say, “you’ve got a good teacher here,” you wink at Jack.

“You’re not biased or anything,” Jack smiles.

“Not at all,” you roll your eyes playfully, “whaddya got for me?” 

“This is Judith. G1, P0 with no prenatal care. Preeclampsia with severe hypertension,” Nazley says, standing up a little straighter as she speaks to you, before turning back to Judith, “How's the headache?”

“Still a 10,” Judith moans.

“More fentanyl?” Crus asks.

“Yep,” Abbot says, trying to suppress the smile that wants to form on his face now that you’re in the room. He leans into you and murmurs under his breath, “missed you,”

“Jack, you saw me two hours ago,” you smile, "remember? We carpooled from our house?”

“BP's good,” Crus says, eyes on the monitor, “another fifty,”

Your eyes linger on Jack as he beams at you while you walk over to the patient's bedside.

“Hi Judith,” you say softly, “I’m Dr. Abbot from OB,”

“I thought he was Dr. Abbot,” Judith looks towards Jack.

“He is. I- uh- am too,” you smile at her, “we’re married,” 

“Oh,” Judith sighs, “that’s nice. That you get to work together I mean. Do you have kids?”

“No,” you say, and you don’t have to turn your head to see that Jack has walked up next to you, to feel the tension radiating off Jack at her question. Thankfully Crus intervenes before Jack boils over.

“Some jelly on the belly. Gonna take a quick look with ultrasound.” Crus says, handing you the wand and gel. 

“No, no, no.” Judith wraps her arms around her stomach, “ultrasound can harm the baby.”

“Not true.” Jack says curtly.

“I understand that you feel scared but not doing the ultrasound can end up harming you and the baby,” you say gently, “I want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Ok,” Judith huffs, dropping her arm, “just do it as fast as you can,”

“Why no prenatal care, Judith?” You say, no judgment in your voice, squirting the gel on her stomach.

“I wanted a free birth,” she says defensively, “no doctors, no hospital, no medicine.”

“Mm,” Jack says from beside you, “you have a midwife? A birth doula?”

“No, I don't need one,” Judith says, as you drag the wand over her belly, “women have been having children on their own for thousands of years.”

“Yeah,” Jack says, clearly getting irritated, “with an infant mortality rate of 30% for most of those thousands of years,” 

“You know Judith,” you say, cutting off your husband, speaking softly while keeping your eyes on the screen, “for a lot of those years birthing was a community event. Women relied on midwives and the other women in their lives to help them during childbirth.”

“What is this good cop bad cop?” Judith moans. 

“I know this isn’t how you envisioned it,” you say, turning to her, “but there are a lot of people here who are more than happy to help you, if you’d let us.”

“Dr. Abbot is the best doctor in this hospital,” Jack says, feeling his heart swell at the patience and care you’re offering such a difficult patient, “I’d listen to her if I were you,”

“Femur length seven centimeters,” you say to Jack, “37 weeks. I’d induce.”

“What?” Judith says, panicked, “no, no, no. Absolutely not.”

“At 37 weeks, the cure for preeclampsia is to deliver the baby,” Jack says firmly, but with a little less bite, “we need to get you upstairs so Dr. Abbot can induce labor to save you and your baby.”

“No.” Judith sits up, shaking her head. “No, no, no.”

You stand, exchanging a knowing look with Jack before walking over to the phone and calling up to the OB department for a room.

“Labs are coming back.” Nazley says, pulling the labs up on the computer, “Hemoglobin 7.5, platelets 40. LFTs are sky high.”

“HELLP syndrome,” Jack shakes his head, looking at the results.

“Hemolytic anemia, elevated liver enzymes, and low platelets,” Crus explains to Nazley.

“They're cleaning a room,” you say, hanging up the phone, “I can bring her up in ten minutes.” 

“How you doing, Judith?” Jack says, walking back to her bedside. 

“I- I-” Judith’s eyes roll back, her body starts to spasm.

“Oh, she's seizing,” Nazely says.

“Oh, shit,” you say, moving next to Jack, “10 of IV diazepam. Have another 10 ready,”

“With all the movement, we can't get a fetal heartbeat,” Mateo says, checking the CTG.

“Putting on 15 liters by mask. Should we intubate?” Crus asks.

“Hold intubation. Let's try to break this. We don't want to mask seizures with paralysis unless we have to,” you say to Nazley, explaining your rationale. 

“Nazely, what's the diagnosis?” Jack asks.

“Um, with the seizure, now it's eclampsia,” Nazely says.

“Fetal heart rate is about 90,” you shake your head, “way too low,”

“Mom's sats are going down,” Mateo says, his eyes on the monitor.

“Time to tube her?” Crus asks, looking between you and Jack. The two of you stare at each other, seeming to telepathically communicate.

“Set up for it, but wait,” you speak for the pair of you, “another 10 of diazepam. Push 4 grams of Keppra.”

“Pulse ox is 88,” Mateo says, shaking his head.

“Dr. Abbot?” Crus says, looking at Jack, “Intubate?”

But Jack looks at you.

“Let’s do it,” you say. 

“Nazely, what do you suggest for rapid sequence induction?” Jack says.

“Etomidate and roc,” Nazely offers her best guess.

“Mm, not quite, Dr. Toomarian,” you say, snapping on a pair of gloves, “120 of propofol, 60 of succinylcholine.”

“Why is that, Crus?” Jack says, pulling on his own pair of gloves.

“Propofol for the anti-seizure effect, sux to avoid prolonged paralysis so we can check her neuro exam.” Crus says.

“Exactly,” Jack nods.

“Pushing the propofol,” Mateo injects the medication into Judith’s IV.

“Once she's flat for intubation we need to displace the uterus to the left,” you say across the table to Jack.

“Nazely, that's you. Big hug, both arms. Get the baby off the vena cava.” Jack mimes the movement, guiding her.

“What's she had so far?” Shen says, walking in the room.

“30 of diazepam, a full load of mag, Keppra, and propofol,” Jack says, eyes on the monitor.

“Damn.” Ellis’ eyes follow Jack's, “What's your next step?” 

“Any ideas?” Jack asks the room, “Nazely?” 

“Dilantin? Valproate?” Nazely offers.

“Infusion is too long. Push 100 of ketamine. That's had results with refractory status,” you say, nodding at Nazely. She injects the ketamine into the IV and immediately the heart rate picks up, but not as much as you’d like, “little better.”

“Yeah. She should be upstairs with the rest of OB,” Shen shakes his head.

“Best of OB is down here with us,” Jack says, looking at you with adoration. You smile and shake your head at his compliment. The phone in the room rings and Ellis moves to pick it up.

“Ok, got it.” she says, “OB says send her and Dr. Abbot up. They have an OR ready.” 

“This one looks like it took a turn for the worse,” Robby says walking into the room, and as if he spoke it into existence, Judith’s heart starts to fail, “fuck. V-fib”!

“Chest compressions, Dr. Toomarian, Charge to 200,” you say, commanding the room, “Prep the belly. Get a baby warmer. Call the NICU. Start a timer.”

“Charged. Clear.” Mateo says. Everyone raises their hands off Judith and steps back. A shock jolts her body but her heart doesn’t pick up again on its own, “continue compressions!”

“Gown up, baby, it's you and me.” Abbot looks across the table at you and you give your head a little shake at the pet name in this dire circumstance.

“Dr. Toomarian, do you know the four-minute rule?” You ask as Mateo helps you slip on a gown.

“Uh, not sure.” Nazely says, tying Jack’s gown for him.

“Pregnant patient with a viable fetus, you have four minutes after cardiac arrest to save the baby.” You say, sliding your goggles up your nose.

“And the mom,” Jack adds, “we don't call it a postmortem C-section anymore. It's a resuscitative hysterotomy to try to save them both.” 

“But she doesn't want any medical intervention.” Nazley says tepidly. 

“Doesn't matter. Mom and baby are both dead if we do nothing.” You say. “OK, charge to 200. One more rhythm check and then Jack and I are gonna cut. Ellis, you and Crus on Mom resuscitation. Shen, you and Nazely take the baby. OK, hold compressions.” 

Everyone steps back, raising their hands off Judith’s limp body.

“Still V-fib.” Crus shakes his head.

“We need to get this baby out right now,” Jack says to you, and you nod, “let’s have eyes on Dr. Abbot, this is a priceless demonstration we’re about to get,”

“Ok, ten blade,” you say, holding out your hand, grateful you’re masked up so the trauma room can’t see you blush. Mateo places the scalpel in your hand.

“First incision is from the xiphoid to the pubic symphysis through the skin to the linea alba.” You say, dragging the blade down her belly.

“Second incision goes through the peritoneum, exposing the uterus,” you’re laser focused, making an identical incision on the deeper layer of skin.

“Ellis, gentle traction,” Jack says, pulling back his retractor and she mirrors his movements. 

“Ok, making a small vertical incision through the lower uterus so as not to cut the baby,” you say, taking the scissors from Mateo, “using scissors to extend superiorly.”

“Ellis, hand retract the uterus with me.” Jack says, knowing what you need before you have to ask. 

“Amniotic fluid looks good,” you say, as it spills out, “give me some fundal pressure.”

“Breech position,” Jack says, as you reach into her uterus.

“Baby's out. It's a girl!” You say, and Jack can hear the smile in your voice. He knows that this is your favorite part, usually much more joyful and with the mother conscious. 

“Ok, blue and flaccid. We got mommy, you take baby,” You say to Shen. Everyone works in frantic precision. You pull out the placenta in a smooth motion, getting it all out in one go.  

“Hold compressions.” Jack says.

“I got a weak carotid.” Mateo says, and you breathe out in relief. 

“No seizure activity on the EEG.” Crus says, eyes on the monitor. 

“Ah!” Shen calls from across the room, “Baby girl just scored the winning point! APGAR of 8 is pretty normal.”

“Holy shit,” Dr. Pettyfer, your OB colleague pushes in the room, “what did I miss?

“Eclampsia with status, HELLP syndrome, cardiac arrest, resuscitative hysterotomy.” Jack says, resting his hands on his hips.

“I was in the OR with a septic twin C-section,” Pettyfer says, looking between you and Jack, “got your text 12 minutes ago.”

“Shit happens fast down here,” Jack shrugs.

  “Dr. Abbot did a resuscitative hysterotomy in 36 seconds.” Crus says, awe in his voice.

“Impressive,” Pettyfer crosses his arm, looking down at Judith.

“You’re not gonna ask which one?” Jack says, crossing his arms.

“I don’t have to,” Pettyfer smirks.

“NICU's sending a team down,” Mateo says, hanging up the phone.

“Alright well I can take mom along with my star resident,” Pettyfer nods at you before turning to the ER crew, “you guys are rock stars,”

“We like to be referred to as crawlers of the night,” Jack says, a playful lilt in his voice.

“My god,” you roll your eyes at him, before turning back to Pettyfer, “can I meet you up there in five? I wanna wait for NICU to come get the baby,”

“Yeah, no problem,” Pettyfer says as Crus and Ellis help him roll Judith out of the room, the rest of the ER staff clearing out leaving you and Jack alone. You lock eyes and let out a long, deep breath.

“You were amazing,” Jack says, walking towards you, the tip of his boot bumping against your sneaker.

“I fucking hate anti-vaxx, make america healthy again bullshit people,” you mumble, wrapping your arms around his waist, resting your head on his shoulder. 

“Could’ve fooled me,” Jack teases as he moves his arms around your body, holding you against him. You pinch his side and he yells out a little yelp.

“She was scared,” you say, breathing in his smell, “idiots can be scared too, Jack,”

“So true, baby,” he says, rubbing his hand up and down your back, “you were good with her,”

“I was,” you sigh.

“I didn’t like it when she asked if we had kids,” Jack says into your hair.

“She was just scared, looking for a little connection,” you say, pulling back so you can look your husband in the eye, “it’s ok that we’re doing things our own way. We’re allowed to not want kids.”

“I love you so much,” he says, squeezing your hip.

“I love you so much,” you echo.

“Fuck kids,” Jack says.

“Fuck kids,” you say so enthusiastically Jack can’t help but laugh, “...for us though. For other people it’s super important to my livelihood.”

“Right,” Jack nods in mock seriousness. You smile at him, running your hands up his arms, locking your fingers behind his neck.

“I want you all to myself,” you whisper, leaning up, quickly biting his ear lobe. Jack grips down on your waist and lets out a small, soft groan. 

“You got me,” he rasps. 

“I know,” you smile, placing a kiss on his cheek. “I gotta get back upstairs my love,”

“Ok,” he says, trying not to be so disappointed, especially after getting to spend a little extra time with you. 

Jack shoves his hands in his pockets as the pair of you walk towards the elevators, knowing he’d be too tempted to take your hand if he didn’t.

“If I give you constructive feedback will you still love me?” You say, as the pair of you move slowly through the pitt.

“I’ll love you no matter what,” Jack hums.

“You should try to call Nazley Dr. Toomarian,” you say, clasping your hands behind your back, “she just became a doctor. And I know you have your whole fun-attending-night-crawlers thing but… she worked hard to get here and I think it could mean a lot. Especially because the night shift down here is kind of a boys club,”

“We have Ellis!” Jack says.

“Jack…” you stop in front of the elevator giving him a somewhat incredulous look,“Ellis is the head of boys club,”

“Point taken,” he laughs, pausing, letting his eyes run over your face. “Ok. I’ll work on that. Can I give you some constructive feedback?” He pushes the elevator button for you.

“Of course,” you smile. Jack leans towards you, letting his finger brush against the back of your palm, against your wedding band.

“Your ass… looks amazing in those scrubs,” he whispers.

“Jack!” You laugh, as the elevator dings open, starting to walk through the doors.

“Hey,” Jack says in almost a whine, grasping your hand in his.

“What?” You smile.

“No kiss?” He says, his eyes wide and puppy-like.

“We are at work,” you smile, squeezing his hand and he gives you this look like he knows you want to kiss him just as badly. You sigh, “fine. A little one,”

“Just a little one,” Jack says, crinkling his nose, leaning towards you, placing a soft kiss on your lips. You giggle against his mouth, turning your head away.

“That’s all you get,” you smile, pulling away, backing into the elevator.

“I’ll see you later,” Jack says, the tips of his ears red, burying his hands in his pockets.

“Bye, Dr. Abbot,” you say, drawing out his name with a flirty twang.