Page 1 of Sexting My Ex’s Dad

PROLOGUE: ATHENA

I ran from the best man I ever touched, and the worst part is that I’d do it again. That probably says something terrible about me, but survival has never been a graceful skill.

“Mommy, it’s melting!”

I look up from my sketchbook and immediately understand the crisis. Ivy’s strawberry ice cream has entered its collapse phase, the scoop leaning sideways while gravity does what gravity does best. Pink rivulets slide down the cone and onto her fingers, which are already sticky enough to qualify as biological glue.

“Hold still,” I say, grabbing a napkin from my tote next to me on the park bench. “Emergency intervention.”

She doesn’t hold still.

She twists, giggles, and takes a huge bite that smears ice cream across her cheek.

I sigh, wipe the pink streak off her face, and attempt to salvage the situation before the cone becomes a full structural failure.

“You’re supposed to eat it,” I tell her, my tone slightly dry.

“I am eating it.”

I raise a brow at her. “You’re wearing it.”

She meets me gaze for gaze, the gray of her irises catching flecks of the sun. “That’s also eating it.”

Her logic is aggressive and difficult to refute.

I laugh despite myself and toss the ruined napkin into the small paper bag beside me. The bench is warm under my legs, the late summer sun filtering through the maple trees that line the little park near our apartment.

Portland in the summer has this lazy kind of charm. The briny air somehow carries the mineral undertone of sunscreen. Gulls cry somewhere overhead, and a handful of families spread blankets across the grass while their kids terrorize the playground.

Ivy swings her legs against the wooden bench and leans closer to my sketchbook. “What are you drawing?”

“A rabbit,” I say.

It’s not a particularly impressive rabbit yet. Right now it’s a rough oval with ears that are slightly too big and feet that look suspiciously like potatoes.

“Make him happy,” she instructs, scrunching her face into a tight little frown.

“I always make them happy.”

“Sometimes you make them worried first!”

Can’t argue with that logic, but I try anyway. “That’s called storytelling.”

I add a curved smile to the rabbit’s face and shade one ear while Ivy studies the page like a tiny art critic.

Drawing has always been the one habit I never managed to break.

It followed me through college lectures, through the exhausting blur of grad school, through long overnight shifts at the hospital when the pediatric ward finally went quiet and the hallways stretched out empty.

Back then it was a coping mechanism. Now it’s also a side career.

Two of my small children’s books are floating around the regional publishing world, and if the current editor emails me back sometime I might even have a third.

“Mommy?”

“Hmm?”

Ivy tilts her head while examining the rabbit. “He needs a daddy.”