Jayden greeted him with a look as they entered the kitchen, agood luck with thatlook Emerson knew well. Indeed, he understood his imminent future: Daisy would fall asleep on the drive back to the farm and then be wide awake at bedtime.
Still, he somehow couldn’t hold a grudge against that future right now, for the giggle that had just blessed his skin.
“All right, Daze.” He tipped forward; Daisy’s legs dangled before she hopped to the floor. “Go get your backpack, okay?”
“Ho-kay Da-dee.”
Emerson watched as she bounced toward her room, his eyes snagging on the open door to Jay’s office, just before the kitchen. He smiled at the stacks of papers, the colorful Post-Its and lists tacked to the cork board. The three—oh, four—mostly-finished mugs of coffee. Emerson had almost always been the one to clear them away whenever he couldn’t stand it anymore, a harried “sorry, sorry” from Jayden’s lips whenever he caught Emerson loading them into the sink.
He wondered, as he had before, whether Jay eventually collected them himself, now. If he set himself a reminder on his phone, as he was so adept at doing for most other tasks. Or if Yulia did it for him, when she visited on Sunday afternoons.
It should maybe feel strange, visiting the house Jayden moved into after leaving him. The Divorce House, as Emerson first thought of it. But now, Emerson only thought of it as Jay’s. And like everything about Jay, he couldn’t help but love it. Not just the coffee mugs left around his office, but the clean marble countertops of the kitchen, the subway tile backsplash and navy cabinets, the peachy-pink walls of Daisy’s room, her clutter draped around the floor and on top of the white dresser. The bones clean and modern, Jayden’s ideal, mixed with a bit of mess, his reality.
Emerson mostly felt grateful he still got to see it. Jay, settling into the life he wanted.
“How’s work going?” Emerson asked. He was already up to speed on how Jay’s week with Daisy had gone; they’d texted about it throughout the week, as they always did. “That big gig with Atlas Athletics?”
Jay glanced up from doling out Cheerios and yogurt chips into a purple cup. He averted his eyes just as quickly, biting his lip the tiniest fraction—you could barely make out theflash of teeth, would hardly notice if you hadn’t been in love for almost two decades—as he pushed the cup across the counter, toward the stool where Daisy normally sat.
“Oh, you know,” he said, a beat too late. “Fine. Probably.”
“Jay.” Emerson slid onto the stool next to Daisy’s. “I’m sure it’s going better than fine.”
“Yeah, well. What about you? How’s the farm?”
Emerson stole one of Daisy’s Cheerios before weaving his fingers together on the counter.
“There’s actually been a…development I wanted to tell you about.”
Jay had been glancing at his phone. Now, he carefully placed it face down.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, but.” Emerson attempted a smile. “You don’t have to look so worried. It’s a good thing. I think I’ve hired someone.”
Jay raised a brow, tilted his shoulders back. Crossed his arms over his chest. His assessing-but-uncertain stance. “Youthinkyou’ve hired someone?”
“Well.” Emerson consciously tried not to squeeze his hands closer together. “Not all the paperwork has been signed yet.” Emerson should probably make up paperwork. He’d learned that from Jay: even if it was half bullshit, even if you weren’t a lawyer and didn’t know what the hell you were doing, you should still always have paperwork. “But he’s set to start Monday.”
“And how did you find…him?”
Daisy released a squeal for unknown reasons from her room. She emerged a second later, racing down the hall to jump onto her stool. Emerson reached out on reflex, steadying her, smiling down. The tension in his fingers relaxed as she settled. She smiled back, her chubby cheeks rising to almostcover her eyes—brown, like Jay’s—before she stuck her fingers into the snack cup.
Her smile gave him the courage to turn back to Jay and say, “At a bar.”
Jayden laughed. Until he understood Emerson wasn’t joking, and he stopped.
“You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“You were at a bar?”
“A brewery, technically. I thought you’d be proud of me.”
“I mean, I am, but—” He raked a hand through his dark hair. Jayden had started taking testosterone shortly after Daisy’s birth, a plan that had been discussed since the first ultrasound. And while the changes had always been subtle in real time, they’d become easier for Emerson to notice with the distance between them this last year. Each pickup and dropoff, even now, there were tiny shifts, ways he’d settled even further into himself. This motion in particular—raking his hand through his hair in distress, the thick locks shorter now than they were when Emerson met him—felt quintessentially Jay, something he had always done, the flex of muscle in his forearm underneath dark fuzz, the re-flop of hair over his forehead fitting the frame of his face even more beautifully, now.
“Daisy, can you go watch TV in the playroom?”
