Finally . . .
“But you’re already my daddy,” she said, as though I’d just told her the sky was blue or water was wet.
“I know, baby, but legally—” I stopped, realizing that ‘legally’ meant nothing to her. “What I mean is, I want to adopt you, Debbie. I want us to go before a judge and tell the world that you’re my daughter and I’m your daddy, now and forever. I want this so bad, baby, so that no one can ever take you away from me, and I can never lose you, and we can be a real family forever.”
Her face lit up with understanding, then something that looked like pure joy.
“Now and forever? Really?”
I choked on broken, whispered words as tears poured down my cheeks. “Now and forever, Button.”
“Even when I’m old, like Mrs. Rodriguez?”
I huffed a sobbing laugh. “Even when you’re older than Mrs. Rodriguez.”
She seemed to consider this seriously for a moment, then asked the question that nearly undid me: “Will you still love me when I’m not little anymore?”
“Oh, Debbie,” I said, my voice and heart and mind utterly wrecked. “I’ll love you when you’re six and sixteen and sixty. I’ll love you when you’re taller than me and when you have kids of your own and when you’re so old you forget my name. There is nothing you could do and nowhere you could go that would make me stop loving you.”
She smiled then, the kind of smile that could power small cities, and said, “Then yes, Daddy. You can be my daddy for real. I give you my permission.”
I’ve never felt such relief and love and overwhelming gratitude wash over me like the cleansing tide of those words. No amount of chocolate smear or flour dusting could’ve stopped me from pulling her into me and holding her with all the force I could muster. My chest heaved, as emotions long contained—long suppressed and hidden—poured freely. Debbie, usually a squirmer, held me back, as though she, too, never wanted the morning to end.
“Thank you, baby,” I whispered, kissing her head over and over.
Finally, after what felt like a blissful forever, she sat back and stared intently. “Can Willie Wee be my daddy, too?”
The question may as well have been a baseball bat for how hard it slammed into the side of my head, completely derailing the emotional moment I’d been having.
“Can . . . what?”
“Willie Wee,” she said matter-of-factly. “Can he be my daddy, too? I like him. He has nice eyes, and he brings good presents, and he thinks my tiara is the best tiara in the whole world.”
I stared at her, my brain trying to catch up with the casual way she’d just reorganized our entire family structure, the one I’d so carefully laid bare—along with my soul—only minutes before.
“Sweetie, that’s . . . that’s not really how it works. People don’t just become daddies.”
“But you did,” she pointed out with five-year-old logic that was impossible to argue with.
I opened my mouth to explain the difference, then closed it again, because she wasn’t wrong, exactly. I had become her daddy, slowly and then all at once, through love and circumstance and the daily choice to show up for her every single day.
“Willie Wee would have to want to be your daddy,” I said carefully. “And we’d have to get married first, and that’s . . . that’s complicated.”
“Do you want to marry Willie Wee?”
Jesus, Mary, and the baby goat.
The directness of the question made my face flame. “I . . . we barely know each other, Button.”
“But you want to?”
I looked at her expectant face, at the complete trust and acceptance there, and felt something shift in my chest, something that felt like yet another granting of permission—or maybe just clarity. Yeah, it had to be that.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “Someday. If he wanted to, but sweetie, we just met. I can’t bring someone into our lives until I know for sure—”
She clapped her hands together like I’d just agreed to buy her a pony.
“Can I be the flower girl?”
