I cracked one eye open. He was an inch from my face, blue eyes patient and unmoving. He nuzzled my cheek once, he claimed his tax, and he jumped off the bed.
I rolled onto my back. The digital clock on my nightstand said 6:29 a.m.
My alarm would’ve gone off in a minute.
I turned it off so it wouldn’t wake Bonnie. I sat up, and Pickles was already at the bedroom door looking back at me withthe patience of a king who has called for his horse and expects it immediately.
I followed him.
The kitchen was the part of the apartment I liked best, because it was tiny. I didn’t have to walk far to get coffee. I poured Pickles’s kibble into his bowl. I checked the litter box and dragged the scoop through it without looking. There’s a level of acceptance you reach about your life, and pulling cat shit out of sand while half-conscious is somewhere on the path to enlightenment. I started the coffee. I leaned on the counter and waited for it.
Pickles wound around my ankles. Then he abandoned me for his bowl, because that’s what he does. Love is conditional in this house, and the condition is kibble.
The fridge was covered in things, but the calendar mattered most. A date two weeks out was circled in ink—pediatric cardiology follow-up, Dr. Reyes. I’d been the one to mark it. Then I went over it again in marker. Then again in red. The appointment kept shifting—pushed once, rescheduled twice, changed to a different specialist, then moved back again—and by now the circle wasn’t really a circle anymore, just a red bruise on the paper from three months of worrying at.
Next to the calendar was a piece of construction paper.
Bonnie drew it in second grade. She'd writtenMY FAMILYacross the top in green marker. Underneath, from left to right, were me with curly hair and a coffee cup, Bonnie with a ponytail, Mrs. Park with what looked like a feather boa but was probably her good scarf, and Pickles, drawn at twice the size of any human in the picture.
There was no father in it.
I'd waited, the year she drew it, for the question. I'd practiced the answer. I'd practiced an age-appropriate version ofyour father was a coward who got on a plane when he found outabout you—practiced it in the bathroom mirror with the door closed, like a closing argument I'd never get to deliver. But Bonnie hadn't asked.
She still hadn't asked.
She was too smart not to have noticed. She knew the shape of every other family in her class—Mira’s two dads, Owen’s stepdad and mom, Jamie’s mom and grandmother. She saw everything. She had opinions about everyone else’s life. Just not her own.
She wasn’t okay with it. I knew she wasn’t okay with it. I knew the longer I let her not ask, the worse it was going to be when she finally did. I knew, in a sober, conscious, well-articulated way, that I needed to sit her down and say something true to her about her father.
And every time I came close to doing it, I poured a glass of wine instead.
I'm a good mother. I'd had to fight for the title, and I'd earned it. But I was a coward in this one specific direction, and I hadn't beaten it yet.
The coffee finished. I poured a cup and took it black. I stood at the counter and drank half of it before I let myself think about Mr. Cross. The moment I did, nothing else stayed in place.
The thud.
The shoe.
Backs forming a wall around something I couldn't see. The waiter sprinting past the bar with a glass of water. The woman in cream with both hands at her mouth. Cross going through the ring of backs without looking up at me once.
I'd left the auction in the chaos. The catering captain had told us to pack down and go home. I'd taken a cab back. I'd let myself in and kissed the top of Bonnie's sleeping head and lain awake for an hour with the streetlight through the blinds making lines on the ceiling.
His dad. It had to be. The older man with the silver-blonde wife. The man Cross had run for.
I hoped he was okay. I really did. Losing a parent is no small thing, and I'd know, because I lost both of mine the same night. There was a whole sea of extended family at the funeral, and not one of them put their hand up for the nineteen-year-old. They each had a reason. The reasons were all very reasonable. I hadn't talked to any of them since.
After that, I’d decided I could carry myself, alone, indefinitely, as long as I was willing to keep my weight low to the ground. I made it work for almost a year. I had a job, a studio, and two friends who loved me and one I was beginning to love back.
And then I got tired.
That was when the deadbeat asshole appeared. His timing was so good; it should've been a tell—like he'd had a notification on his phone, telling him,Sabrina Vela's load-bearing wall has hairline fractures. He was charming, beautiful, and handsome enough to be a warning. But I failed the test.
I drank the rest of the coffee and pulled out the bowl and the eggs and the milk. A stranger's wish for a stranger's father—short, real, gone before I'd cracked the first egg. I was a mother of an eight-year-old with a golden heart, a cat on a counter who shouldn't be on there, and I had a pancake to make.
"Pickles. Off."
He looked at me.
