I shook my head. “I don’t know. After she left, she never came back.”
She frowned. “Why?”
I shrugged and felt my chest getting tight. This was not my favorite subject but my daughter deserved to know her family history. “I don’t know.”
Without warning Andi threw her arms around my neck and hugged me tightly. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close to me. Her fever was coming back up. She was due another dose of Tylenol. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
I hugged her back, kissed the top of her head, and breathed in the scent of children’s shampoo and the ghost of the baby she used to be that I’d missed. “Thank you, baby girl,” I whispered, grateful the words held steady.
When she settled back down, she curled up beside me, and I could feel her body relaxing, her breathing evening out as she started to doze off.
Then, half-awake, she murmured, “Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t go anywhere, okay?”
My heart shattered hearing her say that.
I squeezed her shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere, I promise.”
I knew from the first time I saw the girls that I would do anything for them, protect them, sacrifice for them, and I knew I loved them, but this feeling now, now they were mine on an entirely different level. I would kill for my girls, die for my girls, Andi and Joey were all that mattered. And Billie, too, even if she didn’t know it.
37
BILLIE
Packingup my things was always going to feel bittersweet, but as I looked around the room that had become my makeshift home—my safe, orderly little retreat for the past weeks—the bitter far outweighed the sweet. Everything was in my bags except for what I’d be wearing tomorrow and my toiletries, and it was all I could do not to cry. I ran a hand over my pillow, breathing in the faint scent of dryer sheets. I saw a strand of blonde hair from one of the girls on it and felt an unexpected swell of grief rising in my throat.
The walls, which had seemed so blank and impersonal when I’d first moved in, now bore the ghosts of construction-paper hearts, glitter glue, and the sticky fingerprints of two creative-affectionate kindergartners. I’d only been there a short time, but they loved crafts and made me multiple pictures a day, and I was physically unable to throw away any of their artwork. While I lived here, I displayed it on the wall, now I took it down, and it was in my bag. I’d found a rainbow-loom friendship bracelet in the pocket of my coat and a crooked little sign taped to the inside of my closet door that read, “BILLEES CLOSSET” with a heart and unicorn border. Even the typos made me want to cry.
But I’d made up my mind. I was leaving tomorrow.
Andi had bounced back after her fever broke. She’d insisted on going back to school that morning and, from all accounts, had done well back in the classroom. Joey was her usual outgoing, talkative self and had made two new “best friends” while Andi was out sick.
Adam was recovering, too. Besides the sexathon, he’d stopped wincing every time he sat down, and he’d started working on the house again. This morning he’d cleared out half the garage, reorganized the pantry, and pulled the vacuum out of retirement, like some kind of domestic superhero.
For weeks, we’d played house and acted like a makeshift family. I’d expected to feel like an outsider, but the opposite had happened: I’d gotten attached. Dangerously attached. And now my room was packed, my exit strategy set, and I was even more daunted by the idea of leaving than I’d ever been by the prospect of staying.
My mind wandered: What would happen to the girls when I was gone? Would Adam remember to move the laundry before it mildewed? Or make their lunches? Of course he would. He was a damn Navy SEAL before this. He was the most competent person I knew. Would he remember to eat dinner, or would he just subsist on raw protein shakes and beef jerky? That one I wasn’t so sure about. The truth was, I knew Adam and the girls would be fine without me, what I really wondered was, would he even notice that I was missing?
A sharp creak of the hallway floorboard snapped me out of my internal spiral. I turned and saw Adam standing in the doorframe, silhouetted by the soft glow of the hall light. He was wearing a gray navy t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, hair still damp from the shower. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he looked, for all the world, like a man who’d just finished along, hard shift at work, except the job was raising two daughters while convalescing, and the shift never ended.
“So,” I said, packing as much nonchalance as I could muster into that single syllable, “you made it up the stairs.”
“I made it up the stairs,” he echoed, with a half-smile.
There was a long silence, neither of us sure who’d go first.
“You’re leaving,” he said finally, voice neutral.
“I’m leaving.”
“Tomorrow?”
I nodded.
He looked down at my bags, then at me. “We need to tell the girls.”
