The screen fills immediately with an enormous pair of mouse ears, a blurry flash of castle turrets in the background, and then Ivy's face, flushed pink and absolutely vibrating with news.
"GEMMA!" she shouts, loud enough that the people around her — and there are quite a few people around her, at least three strangers and what appears to be a woman in a full Belle costume who looks very surprised to be part of this conversation — all turn to look. "ARE YOU DADDY'S GIRLFRIEND NOW?"
The coffee maker beeps. Very politely. Very quietly.
"Good morning to you too," I say.
"DADDY KISSED YOU, DIDN'T HE. THAT MUST BE WHY YOU'RE ANSWERING HIS PHONE, RIGHT?" The second part is technically a question. The first part is a verdict. Ivy has solved this case without a single piece of evidence and from another time zone. "I TOLD MOMMY SOMETHING WAS GOING TO HAPPEN AND SHE SAID I WATCH TOO MANY MOVIES BUT I KNEW."
The Belle costume woman is visibly listening. So are the strangers. So is, I'm fairly certain, a man in a Goofy hat behind Ivy's left shoulder who has put down his churro.
"Ivy," I say, "can you use your inside voice?"
"I'M OUTSIDE," Ivy points out. She's got me there. She's technically correct.
"Your outside voice, but quieter?"
She drops her volume approximately three percent. "Did Daddy kiss you?" Her voice drops to what she probably considers a whisper.
Here is the thing about six-year-olds: they do not accept deflection. They accept answers. Ivy in particular has a truth-seeking instinct that would make her an excellent detective, a terrifying lawyer, or a deeply inconvenient podcast host.
"That's kind of a question for your dad," I say.
"He won't answer," Ivy says, with the exhausted certainty of someone who has been trying to extract information from Beck Delano for six years. "He'll make a face and say 'hm.' He always does that."
That is an extremely accurate impression.
Beck walks into the kitchen at exactly this moment, hair damp from the shower, wearing a grey t-shirt that has seen better days and is doing something deeply unfair to his general outline. He has a towel over one shoulder. He stops when he sees the tablet. He sees Ivy on the screen. He sees the peoplebehind Ivy. He processes the fact that I answered his daughter's FaceTime call.
He goes very still in the way he does when he's calculating how bad something is going to get.
"Hi, Daddy!" Ivy announces. "DID YOU KISS GEMMA?"
The Belle costume woman makes a sound.
Beck looks at me.
I look at him.
"You were in the shower," I say.
"Hm," he says.
"SEE?" Ivy says.
"Ivy." Beck crosses to the counter and angles himself into the frame with the posture of a man walking toward something he already knows he can't fix. "Why are you calling from the center of a theme park?"
"Because, Daddy," Ivy says, with the patience of someone who has clearly thought about this much longer than anyone else in the conversation, "this is important. Gemma is my best friend and if you kissed her then she's your girlfriend and she could come to my class for show-and-tell because Tommy brought his dad's motorcycle helmet and that was cool but having a paramedic girlfriend who saves people is way cooler and also I told Clarence and he already knew but he wants to hear it from you?—"
"Ivy." His voice is flat, but there's a muscle working in his jaw that means he is trying very hard not to react to any of this. "Where's your mother?"
"Getting churros," Ivy says. "I have two minutes. Are you dating Gemma? Yes or no."
I press my lips together.
Beck looks at the ceiling.
"We're figuring it out," he says. Which is, I will give him full credit, substantially more than I expected him to say.
