It will be. And okay, I’ll be here, waiting.
Now that the conversation is underway, I feel its weight in a new way. I stand and walk toward one of the screening rooms. The seats are newly installed, the carpet freshly cleaned. The screen glows faintly in the dim light.
I sit down, halfway up the row, and sit in my thoughts. Gathering what I want to say to her.
I am in my office when I hear the front door open a couple of hours later. Getting up, I walk down the small hall into the foyer, and there she is. Violet. The most stunning girl to ever have walked the earth. She has her back to me, looking around at everything that has changed.
As she turns around, she gives me a soft smile. She’s kept her distance, which I expected.
“Hey,” she says.
“Thanks for coming on short notice. I just missed you and wanted to talk,” I say.
I start walking toward the screening room, and she follows behind. I sit down in the back row, and she sits, leaving a chair between us.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
I take a breath.
“I need to talk to you. Something happened a week ago.”
Her eyebrows pull together slightly.
“Okay.”
“My ex called me.”
Her posture stiffens a little at that. “Alright.”
“She told me something that I wasn’t expecting.” I exhale slowly. “She says I have a daughter.”
The words hang between us.
Violet doesn’t react right away. She just blinks once, processing.
“How old?” she asks quietly.
“Three.”
Her gaze drops to her hands for a moment.
“That’s…big.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“I’ve asked for a paternity test,” I continue. “I don’t want to assume anything until I know for sure.”
“That makes sense,” she adds, nodding her head.
“I should have told you sooner,” I say.
“Yeah, you probably should have.”
There was no anger in her voice. But there was honesty. I’ve hurt her.
“I wasn’t sure how much truth was in it,” I explain. “And I didn’t want to drop something like that on you until I had all the answers.”
“I understand that,” she says. Then she looks at me again. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt a little that you didn’t let me in.”
