Anna laughs. Jeremy is already photographing my hand.
Outside the robins are doing their thing and somewhere in this house there is a room that doesn't know yet it's about to become the place where I finally learn what it feels like to dance just for me.
Rye's arms are still around me.
I squeeze my left hand into a small, quiet fist and smile into his chest.
I’m Daddy’s good girl. Forever.
EPILOGUE
ELODIE
Five years later
Five years of photographs and he still doesn't know how many I have of him.
I'm cross-legged on our bed, the late afternoon sun cutting across the duvet, scrolling back through years of snaps and secret files.
It started as a bad habit with the first phone I got at twelve. Now it's something closer to a documented life.
Rye in this kitchen the morning after he put the ring on my finger. Shirtless, frowning at oven instructions like they'd personally insulted him.
Rye at the Ford Center the night of my modern dance debut, standing in the back in his black coat, arms folded, eyes tracking only me. Rye in the maternity ward chair, our daughter asleep on his chest, his massive hand curved around her entire back like a shell.
He doesn't know that one exists yet. He doesn’t like his own pictures. Only ones that I’m in.
Downstairs the particular rhythm of his footsteps I could pick out of any crowd, plus the smaller set that shadows him everywhere now.
Mara is three and has decided that whatever Daddy is doing is the most important thing happening in any given room at any given moment. I don't disagree with her.
My mother is down there too. In my kitchen. Teaching Rye the pierogi recipe that's survived three generations of her family, which would have been unimaginable four years ago when she spent six months not speaking to either of us.
The world is genuinely full of surprises.
Jeremy ended up moving to Vancouver with the Saran Wrap guy from the first night at Club Echo. Derek. They grow organic marijuana and have three dachshunds. I fly out to see them about twice a year with Rye and now with Mara because my husband refuses to let either of his girls travel more than two miles to the grocery store without him.
Anna still lives close. She’s gone solo poly. The club actually changed all our lives for the better. She has four current partners at varying levels of involvement but she lives in her own space. Runs her own show and engages with whomever she wants, however she wants as long as everyone is aware of her relationship anarchy style. It suits her perfectly.
Go Anna.
My father is likely napping on the sofa after spending the morning with Mara talking about her stuffed rabbit. He’s soberfive years. Happy most days, sad some. Like most of us. He’s stable and he and mom…happier than I’ve ever seen them.
Rye still runs the clubs. I know more about that world now than I ever expected to, and I've enjoyed a new expression of our love and dynamic we keep just for us.
Or, whoever is at the club that night.
He has rules and he enforces them with the kind of quiet authority that I watched clear a room the night I stumbled into Club Echo in a red dress that Anna picked out.
My own career looks nothing like what I trained for and exactly like what I didn't know I wanted.
I stop on a photo from last year. Him at the barre in the studio we had built off the back of the house, spotting Mara through something loosely resembling a plié. Both of them in profile, her tiny hand in his enormous one. I wasn't trying to take it. I was walking past with coffee and just stopped.
It's framed in the hallway now. He pretended to be annoyed about it for approximately four minutes.
Alexander disappeared after that day at his house. I had to come clean with Rye that I’d had my doubts about his intentions all along and there were mumblings among the other dancers that he was a bit of a opportunist and predator.
Daddy was not happy I’d hidden that information from him. I got a hot red bottom that night and some new rules about being one hundred percent honest with him from that moment forward.
