Page 67 of Vegas with my Ex’s Best Friends

I don't know why that detail stops me.

Maybe because it’s just one example of all that I missed.

We talked for a long time tonight. More than I've said out loud to anyone in years that wasn't about a deal. She told me things she didn't owe me. I told her things I've never said. About the group home on Adams Street. About being twenty-one and so sure I was one mistake from being sent back that I got ahead of it. Torched everything first.

She didn't flinch.

She listened. Her face changed while I talked. She stopped being wary of her expression, and for a little while I could see exactly what she was thinking.

Then she said, “I'm having your baby. Maybe,” like she was still working out whether she was allowed to.

I meant what I told her. I'm staying.

The mistake I made at twenty-one was thinking that leaving would protect her. Turns out leaving just steals time.

Time missed not knowing about the coffee mug or seeing the wall of sketches. Not being in this room.

That's what the wreckage looks like. Not the moment you run. The life you lose while you're gone.

I'm not losing more of it.

I don't know how to be a father.

That's the fear I haven't said out loud yet. I will. I'm building up to it. Right now, with her asleep and the city still moving below like it never stops, I sit with the fact that my entire model for fatherhood is the absence of it.

I grew up in a series of houses where adults made decisions about me from behind closed doors. Some of them were good people. Most of them were trying. None of them were mine. I learned early that permanence was a story other people told about their lives, and I spent the next two decades turning that lesson into an asset—always ready to move, never over-invested, no roots I couldn't pull without bleeding.

That ends here.

I'm looking at the wall of sketches and trying to picture a version of myself I don't know yet. The one who stays. Who shows up on a Tuesday for no particular reason except that's where his family is. Who knows what a bedtime routine looks like because he's done it a hundred times. Who has a person in the world—small, completely unimpressed by the things I've built—who needs me to be something I have never been.

I want it.

That part still surprises me. Six months ago I would have said fatherhood was a future-tense concept. Something that happened to other people at the right time in the right life. I didn't have a right life. I had a sequence of deals and cities and thoroughly limited investments of myself.

And then somehow here I am.

I want to be the man that kid grows up knowing was there. Not the cautionary tale. Not the ghost. The one whose name they say without complicated feelings attached to it.

I'm staying because I love her—complicated and seven years overdue and completely true.

And I'm staying because of who I want to be.

She shifts in her sleep. I go still. She doesn't wake. Just adjusts, her cheek dropping toward her shoulder, and settles again. The light catches the line of her jaw.

At twenty-one she used to fall asleep exactly like this. On the couch in her apartment, textbook open, and then suddenly not. I'd take the book out of her hands and she'd never stir.

I thought about that a lot in the first years after I left. Not the big things. The specific ones. The way she slept. The cold coffee on her desk. The sound of her pencil when she was working through a problem.

She looks different now. Her face has settled. The kind of beautiful that comes from going through things, not from being untouched by them.

She's still—

I stop.

It doesn't matter what she still is. That's not what tonight is.

Tonight is me staying beside her.