“Mm.”
“What was my daddy like?”
The question lands the way it always does. Not sharp exactly—more like pressure on something that never fully healed. I sit with it for a moment before I answer.
“He was big and strong,” I say. “Fierce. Protective.” I smooth the edge of the blanket. “He would have done anything for us.”
Hannah considers this with her eyes half-closed.
“Like Nikolai?”
The air goes out of the room.
I keep my hands still on the blanket and breathe through the ache of it—the particular cruelty of a four-year-old’s intuition, landing exactly where it hurts without knowing it’s aimed at anything.
“Yes, baby,” I say quietly. “Like Nikolai.”
She seems satisfied with that. Her grip on Mr. Brummy loosens slightly, the way it does when she’s going under. I watch her face settle—the little furrow between her brows smoothing out, her mouth going soft—and I think about what it will mean when she’s old enough to understand. What she’ll make of these weeks, looking back. Whether she’ll be grateful or angry, or both.
I can’t give her a father she might have to lose.
That’s the line I keep coming back to, the one thing I’m certain of when everything else feels like shifting ground.
Her lips part.
“I like Nikolai,” she murmurs, mostly asleep now. “He’s funny.” A beat. “I like Claire too.”
I go still.
“Do you, baby?” I keep my voice even. “What do you like about her?”
“She’s nice,” Hannah says, eyes already closing. “She makes me pancakes. But she asks a lot of questions.”
I keep my voice easy. “What kind of questions, sweetheart?”
“Where I go to school.” A pause, drifting. “And yesterday, before you woke up, she asked if I like Nikolai. I said I do.”
“What did she say to that?”
“She said that’s nice.”
Hannah’s breathing begins to slow and deepen. I don’t ask anything else.
I sit with it instead. The school question turns over in my mind—not the kind of thing a tutor asks, not idle curiosity either. We’re not from Chicago. Hannah’s school is in Atlanta, four states away, and there is no reason on earth for Claire to be asking about it. The question about Nikolai is something else again—a four-year-old as a source, asked before I was awake.
I don’t like any of this.
I must talk to Nikolai tonight, before Claire comes back tomorrow.
Hannah is fully under now, one arm thrown over Mr. Brummy, cheek pressed into the pillow. I lean in and kiss her temple, then straighten and move toward the door.
At the threshold I stop.
I look at her—small and certain in her bed, the bear tucked against her chest, the bear that Nikolai chose and carried up here himself—and something that’s been shifting in me for days moves the rest of the way.
Every child deserves to know who their father is. I’ve told myself I’m protecting her. From loss, from confusion, from having something given and taken away. But I was also givensomething true and told it was gone, and I spent four years building a life around a lie. I know what that costs.
Hannah won’t be four forever. The longer this goes on, the harder the truth becomes to give her. And if I wait too long—if she’s older when she finds out, if she pieces it together herself—she won’t remember this time as something tender.
