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I hadn’t planned on having that kind of conversation with him. Minutes ago, we were talking about ghosts and cussing, and now I was trying to explain parts of a life he was still too young to fully understand.

But I was glad it happened.

I had spent most of my life making sure people knew exactly who Caspian Black was. Sitting there with my son, I realized one of the best things I could ever do for him was make sure he never felt like he had to become the kind of man I had been just to make a name for himself.

“Good.” I held my fist out to him. “And about them bad words? Daddy gotta work on that.”

He bumped his little fist against mine. “Yeah, because you say a lot of them.”

“Aight, damn. You made your point.”

His eyebrows shot up.

I caught myself. “See? This shit harder than it looks.”

“Daddy!”

“Fuck.” I sighed. “We gon’ start tomorrow.”

“You promise?”

Kaidence held out his pinky.

I lifted mine toward his, but the second our fingers met, his slipped halfway through mine before a faint little spark of energy pushed them apart.

He snatched his hand back and stared at his pinky. “Eww. Daddy, that felt like when my foot go to sleep, but in my finger.”

I laughed. “That’s probably as close as we gon’ get.”

He stuck his pinky toward me again anyway. “Do it again! It still counts!”

I lined mine up with his as carefully as I could, letting that strange little pull between us hold for a second.

“I promise.”

Keeping that promise was probably going to be harder than anything else we’d talked about that day. But I meant it… I’d try.

My attention then shifted to the paper sitting on his desk.

“What you working on, though?”

“A picture.”

“Let me see.”

He picked it up and held it toward me.

I leaned over his shoulder and studied the four figures drawn across the page. One was tall and dressed entirely in black, another had long hair and a pink dress, a smaller person stood between them, and a little girl with a giant pink bow stood off to the side.

I pointed at the tall figure. “Who that?”

“You.”

I smiled. “That’s me?”

“Yup.”

“Why my head so big?”