Chapter 5

SOPHIA

The classroom smells like syrup and construction paper, little chairs arranged in a circle, a table of fathers and grandmothers and one grandfather balancing a mug of coffee too big for the tiny cup holders built into his chair. Malik sits beside me in the dinosaur shirt he picked out himself, and every few minutes he twists around to check the door.

“He said he’d try,” Malik tells the boy next to him, matter-of-fact, the way he explains things he’s already decided to believe.

Miss Renee starts the story circle at nine-fifteen. Malik keeps his eyes on the door through the whole book, distracted enough that he misses his turn to answer her question about the caterpillar, and when she gently redirects him, he apologizes like it’s his fault for not paying attention.

By nine-forty, the other fathers are down on the rug with their kids, building block towers, and Malik has stopped checking the door. He doesn’t say anything about it. He just leans into my side a little more than usual and asks if he can hold my hand instead.

Ten o’clock. The bell for morning transition rings, parents start gathering coats and backpacks, and the door never opens for him.

“That’s okay,” Malik says, before I can say anything at all, before I’ve even figured out what I would say. “He was probably busy building something important.”

I hold his hand a little tighter and tell him he did such a good job at story time, and I don’t trust myself to say anything else on the walk to the car.

That evening, I text Tarik once. Special Person morning was today. He kept asking where you were. I don’t know what to tell him anymore.

I watch the message sit there, delivered, unread, and I don’t wait up to see if that changes.

Malik falls asleep before eight, worn out in that particular way disappointment wears a child down faster than anything else does. I sit at the kitchen table afterward with my phone in front of me, and when it finally buzzes—one line, nothing more—I almost don’t want to look.

I’m sorry. Something came up. I’ll make it up to him.

I set the phone face down and don’t answer.

Something’s different about Tarik lately, and I can’t decide if I trust it. He’s been humming in the mornings—actually humming, something tuneless and half-under-his-breath while he knots his tie, the kind of small unconscious sound I haven’t heard out of him in years. Some nights he comes home before nine, not early exactly, but early for him. Once he sat on the edge of Malik’s bed for a few minutes before lights out, not saying much, just there.

I want to let myself hope. God, I want to.

But there’s something underneath the lightness that doesn’t add up. He checks his phone differently now—not the usual scan-and-dismiss he’s done for years, but something quicker, almost furtive, like he’s checking for a specific name and doesn’t want me to notice which one. When I ask how work’s going, he talks more than he used to, animated in a way that used to be reserved for investors and closings, except now it’s about ventilation systems and floor plans for some hospital wing I don’t fully understand. He never once mentions who he’s working on it with.

I tell myself it doesn’t matter who. I tell myself a project that makes him talk like that, makes him come home early, makes him sit on our son’s bed—maybe that’s worth not asking too many questions about.

Thanksgiving is coming. He’s promised he’ll be there.

I let myself believe, for the first time in longer than I can remember, that this might be the year something actually changes.

I don’t know yet what I’m about to learn about where that change has really been going.

TARIK

Over the few days, I find reasons to be at the Whitmore site more than the project actually requires. A materials question that could’ve been an email. A walkthrough I could’ve sent an associate to handle. Elena never asks why I keep showing up. She just hands me a hard hat and picks up wherever we left off, like there was never a six-year gap in the middle of it.

Ivy comes with her most days—daycare’s unpredictable, and there’s no one else to hand her off to. She’s decided, somewhere along the way, that I’m worth climbing on. She drags a stack of foam blocks over to whatever table Elena and I are working at and builds towers next to my elbow, narrating each one like it’s the most important structure in the city.

“Is this one tall enough, Tarik?” She holds up something crooked and mostly collapsed, dead serious.

“Needs a wider base,” I tell her, crouching down. “See how it’s top-heavy? Buildings fall down when the top’s bigger than what’s holding it up.”

She rebuilds it, slower this time, tongue between her teeth in concentration, and something about the image lands somewhere I don’t examine too closely, because I already know where it would take me if I let it.

One afternoon she falls asleep on my jacket in the corner of the trailer, thumb near her mouth, and Elena covers her with a folded blueprint like a blanket because there’s nothing else within reach. I stand there looking at her a beat too long.

“She’s got your kid’s coloring,” Elena says without looking up from her drawings. “Dark curls like that.”

“Malik’s hair is darker,” I say, too fast, and Elena glances up at me like she’s clocked something she wasn’t expecting to.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” I go back to the plans. “Where were we on the second floor layout?”

“You’re good with her,” Elena says one afternoon, watching from across the table.

“She’s easy to be good with,” I say, which isn’t really an answer, and Elena doesn’t push it.

One morning, my phone rings before I’ve even finished getting dressed. Elena.

“I’m so sorry to ask,” she says, and she does sound sorry, “but my sitter bailed and I’ve got the donor walkthrough at ten. Any chance you could take Ivy for an hour? I know it’s a holiday, I know it’s a huge ask—”

“It’s fine,” I say, already reaching for my keys. “I’ve got time this morning.”

I tell myself an hour won’t cost me anything. I’d promised Sophia last night I’d be there by four, and I meant it. I tell myself I’ll still make it.

An hour turns into the walkthrough running long, which turns into Ivy needing lunch, which turns into Elena insisting I stay to eat since I’d already fed her daughter and it’s the least she can do. I sit at her kitchen table eating turkey sandwiches off paper plates with a three-year-old narrating a cartoon on mute beside me, and it feels, for an hour I don’t let myself think too hard about, like something I used to want badly enough to marry someone for.

My phone buzzes somewhere in my coat pocket, across the room. I don’t get up for it.

SOPHIA

I don’t say anything to him about Special Person morning. Not that night, not the next day, not the day after that. I’ve run out of ways to say you weren’t there that don’t just sound like something he’s already heard a hundred times, and I’m tired of watching my own words land somewhere he doesn’t let them stay.

Malik doesn’t bring it up either, which is somehow worse. He just stopped mentioning school events to his father entirely, the way you stop reaching for a door handle you’ve learned is locked.

I sit with my mother on the porch one evening while Malik naps, and I finally say the thing I’ve been circling for weeks.

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to stay,” I tell her, quiet, like saying it too loud might make it more true than I’m ready for. “I keep waiting for something to be different, and it never is. Or it is, for a day, and then it isn’t again.”

My mother doesn’t answer right away. “What would staying even look like right now, baby? Are you staying for him, or are you staying because leaving feels like too big a thing to survive?”

I don’t have an answer for that. I’m not sure I want to find one yet.