“Send him back,” Caleb replies, looking only at me.
She hesitates, as if she’s waiting to see me leave.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I tell him.
He nods, his mouth hitching a centimeter to the right.
I’m just passing Kayleigh’s desk when she speaks up from behind me. “He’s very busy. You need to stop wasting his time.”
My tongue prods my cheek. Kayleigh is terrible at her job, so I seriously doubt she’s saying this out of professional concern.
“He asked me to come down to his office, Kayleigh. And I’m not sure why you think his interactions with employees are your concern.”
“Fine, keep making a fool of yourself. A guy like Caleb is never going to be interested in someone like you.”
“Like I said, I was only here because he asked me to come to his office,” I repeat between my teeth. “But I’m very curious what you mean by ‘someone like you.’”
“Lots of things,” she says with a disdainful once-over. “Like, his wife has an MBA from Wharton. Where’s your master’s degree from?”
“Where’s your master’s degree from, Kayleigh?” I snap back as I walk away, pretending that there wasn’t another small plink in my chest when her target struck its goal.
I PLAY with the twins that afternoon on the beach, excited for Caleb to get home, excited to watch the kids’ faces light up as he walks down the hill. Harrison wasn’t wrong—Jeremy will definitely make my life harder if he discovers this—but I wish we could just jump six months into the future and arrive at the point where we don’t have to hide a thing.
It’s dusk when Caleb steps onto his back deck, still in work clothes…and freezes as his gaze lands on the twins. He gives me an awkward, unsmiling wave and turns to go back inside.
What the hell was that? He was clearly on his way down here until…what? He remembered I had twins?
If he hadn’t met them yet, indifference or uncertainty would make sense. But he’s spent lots of time with them…he’s seen nearly as much of them as he has me over these past months. So why is it only now that he’s acting like he wishes they weren’t around?
The twins and I go inside and move through the rest of our night with no sign of him. It’s only once I’m back downstairs in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher, that there’s a tap on the back door.
His smile is wide. He pulls me toward him and presses his lips to the top of my head. “At last,” he says, and he sounds like a man who is happy to see me.
I pull away. “What happened this afternoon? You kind of weirded out on us.”
His teeth sink into his lower lip. “I handled it poorly. I’m trying to make sure I don’t cross a line.”
I swallow. He said he would try…Did he not understand that me and the kids are a package deal? “Caleb, you’ve been sitting with us on the beach for months now. We’ve had dinner with you, we’ve gone on your boat—how would coming down to say hi be crossing a line?”
He scrubs a hand over his face. “I just don’t…I want to make sure I’m not something they start to count on.”
Ouch.
I step outside and sink into the chaise, arms wrapped around myself. “When we started this, you said you wanted to try. I assumed that included them.”
He sits beside me. “It did. It does. I don’t know what happened today. I saw them and I…” He shrugs. “Can I ease into it?”
I want this for myself. I want this for the twins. I want it for him too, because I think he’s still messed up by what happened to his daughter and Kate, and he just needs to realize it’s not always that hard, but maybe it can’t happen overnight. “Of course.”
It’s new. I don’t have to worry about what I’ll do this early, do I?
No. But I’ll have to worry about it eventually.
HE JOINS us the next evening at the beach, but it’s not the way it was before. He talks to the twins—he even briefly plays the ice cream game—but there’s something wary in his posture, as if he’s sure we’re about to ask him for too much.
I allude to teaching Henry to surf and he looks at me as if he’s hearing it for the first time when it was his idea.
It’s as if, in order to move our relationship forward a few paces, he had to move his relationship with them back to the start. And I suspect I know why.
“Your daughter,” I begin, as the twins run down to the water. “Did you ever see her?”