I gazed up at the stunning canopy bed with the ethereal white curtains I had copied from Phoebe Howard. The walls were a light gray, on the lavender side so they felt warm, not steely. It probably wasn’t a color I would have chosen for Jack the bachelor. It was a color I had chosen for me, a color I had chosen for our life together. As I lay there, feeling totally at peace, I finally admitted that, all this time, I had been decorating this house for me.
I could feel Jack’s eyes on me, and I smiled at him and rolled over.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m just thinking what a treat it is to wake up beside you.”
I smiled back. “The feeling is mutual.” I glanced at the alarm clock on his bedside table. I most certainly did not approve that Sony with the radio for the design scheme. I had about a half hour until the girls woke up. I had thought ahead enough to bring my exercise clothes with me so I could come in after they were all awake and act as though I just got back from a walk. I thought I was quite sneaky.
I groaned. “I need to get back over there before the girls get suspicious.” Oh, the girls. They were all grown up now. But I still needed to protect them. I still needed to set a good example.
“Speaking of the girls...” Jack said, but then he trailed off.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing. Never mind.”
I crossed my arms. “Jack.”
“I don’t want to mess up this tentative hold I have on you,” he said.
I leaned over and kissed him. “It’s not tentative, Jack. It’s permanent. And that means we tell each other the truth and ask the hard questions.”
“OK, if you say so,” he said. “So here’s what I want to know: Why did you never tell the girls? I mean, it’s not like you would have to tell them the whole truth.”
Ah, yes. The big question. Might as well go ahead and get it all out there in the open. I had grappled with telling the girls for their entire lives.
“It’s tricky,” I said. “It’s not like an adoption where you’re meeting your birth parents, someone who had you and gave you up. In their minds, I don’t even know the man. In their minds, their father is Carter. The other half of their genes is a test tube.”
He nodded. “I guess I get that. Do you ever want to tell them?”
I laughed. “Oh, Jack. I’ve wanted to tell them a million times. Of course, for years I never thought it would be possible. Carter didn’t want to know who you were, so the girls certainly couldn’t. But then once he found out...”
Sloane had developed a fascination with her biological father when she was studying genetics. She pushed us to find her father, and Carter and I had agreed. It was incredibly difficult for him, of course, because he had found out that Jack was Sloane and Caroline’s father, inadvertently, when we ran into him on the dock in Peachtree Bluff. Jack’s shock over my Emerson-pregnant belly told Carter everything he never wanted to know. Carter was terrified Jack would take over a piece of his role in their lives. Carter knew Jack. He knew he was a wonderful man, and in some ways, that made things even harder for him. I had known for years that Jack wanted to know the girls, so I knew he would be thrilled. I still don’t know how she did it, but Caroline talked Sloane out of it. To be fair to both of them, they had to agree. They had the same father and they knew it. You couldn’t tell one and keep it from the other.
“Then we decided,” I said, “we would tell them when Caroline graduated. We didn’t want her going out into the world and looking for you. But Carter hadn’t been dead a year when she graduated, and that seemed like a terrible time.”
For years after Carter’s death, I grappled with whether to introduce the girls to Jack and let them know the truth. It felt like a cheap ploy, a Band-Aid for their suffering. You lost your real dad, but here’s a replacement one—and only for Sloane and Caroline, not Emerson.
“There were so many times I decided to sit down and tell them, and then something would always happen. Caroline was getting married; Adam was getting deployed. Emerson was feeling low, and I thought this would intensify it and make her feel distant from her sisters, like we had this whole family she wasn’t a part of.” I sighed. “Now, I can argue it’s a bad time because Adam is MIA, but there’s always going to be something. It’s always going to be a terrible time. So I think I should just tell them. Alone. And then hope they will come to you.”
Jack shot up in bed. “Ansley, no.”
I was incredulous. “What do you mean, no? I thought this was what you wanted.”
He rubbed his head with his hands. “I do want them to know eventually. I really do.” He pulled me in close to him. “But I just got you, Ansley. I can’t lose you. If they aren’t happy with this news, then it will drive you away from me again.”
I had spent years grappling with Jack’s role in my life. His contribution to it had weighed on me for decades and shaped everything I felt about myself. It had taken me what seemed like a lifetime to get here, but I couldn’t see myself walking away from him now, no matter what. I told him that and then said, “I guess I think, what’s the worst that can happen? They know they were from a sperm donor. Besides that one time, they’ve never asked about it.”
“What if they don’t want to know?” Jack asked.
I answered instantly, as if my mouth was on autopilot. “Then we have to respect that.”
He nodded. “Let’s wait a little while, OK?”
“OK.” I smiled. I thought it was sweet that he was concerned and, really, I’d waited thirty-four years. What was a few more weeks?
Then he leaned over and kissed me. “Let’s do this whole morning over again,” he whispered. Then he kissed me again. “Let’s pretend we are long-lost first loves finding one another again and none of this is even a concern.”
