“Right. So … enough about me.” She gave a weak laugh. “How are things with you?”
It didn’t feel right to share his news with her now. All the energy had been sucked out of him. He couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she was pregnant … and what she’d done in order to get that way.
“Everything’s fine,” he said.
“Good. Julian?”
“What?”
“I miss you.”
“Yeah,” he said, though he didn’t know what he missed. “Me, too.”
Four
“Hey, buddy,” said Daisy, perching on the edge of Charlie’s sandbox. “Guess what?”
Her son smiled up at her, green eyes twinkling in a way that never failed to catch her heart. “What?”
“You’re going to have a sleepover with your dad.”
“Okay.”
“Does that sound like fun?”
“Yep.” He went back to the trench he was digging in the sand.
The afternoon light filtered through the new leaves, glinting in his fiery red hair. “Silly question,” she said, pushing a toy truck along one of the roads he had paved. “You and your dad always have fun together, right?”
“Yep.” He filled a dump truck with sand. The backyard sandbox was elaborate, a gift from his O’Donnell grandparents for his third birthday. Charlie loved it. His grandpa O’Donnell claimed this was because shipping and transport—the O’Donnell family business—was in his blood, same as his red hair and green eyes.
He looked so much like Logan that Daisy sometimes wondered what part of her their son carried in him. Looking at Charlie felt like peering through a strange lens that took her back across time, to Logan as a child. Before she knew it, Charlie would be starting kindergarten; he’d be the same age Logan had been when Daisy had first met him. That was freaky to contemplate.
Logan’s mother, Marian, loved showing Daisy pictures of Logan at Charlie’s age. “It’s uncanny,” she would say. “They could be twins. Logan was always such a happy child,” Mrs. O’Donnell often added.
A happy child who had nearly ruined his life by the age of eighteen. Daisy suspected Logan had grown up under enormous pressure from his parents. He was the only boy of four kids, and his family was very traditional. Much had been expected of him. He was supposed to excel at academics and sports in school, and he had done so. He and Daisy had attended the same rigorous Manhattan prep school, where she’d watched him swagger through the halls with a twinkle in his eye. He came from a privileged background, and he’d been groomed to carry on the tradition—an Ivy League college, or at the very least, Boston College, his dad’s alma mater, followed by a position in the family’s international shipping firm.
Daisy looped her arms around her knees and watched Charlie, who was lost in a world of play. Why did parents saddle their kids with expectations, instead of letting the kid become whoever he wanted to be? Didn’t they know it made kids want to do the opposite?
It was a sports injury that precipitated Logan’s descent into drug addiction. A soccer championship was on the line, and Logan had suffered a knee injury. He discovered if he swallowed enough painkillers, he could keep playing.
Hide your pain and keep on playing. It was the O’Donnell family way.
Daisy pushed her son’s toy truck over a plastic bridge and silently vowed never to pressure him about anything. Ever. She wondered if her own parents had made that same vow about her. Didn’t every generation promise to be better parents than their own parents had been? How come it never worked out that way?
“Good, it’s all settled, then,” she said to Charlie. “A sleepover with your dad.”
“Because you’re working?” Charlie asked, scooping out a hole with a yellow plastic shovel.
That was the only reason she ever left him. To work. This time was different.
She paused her truck at the end of the bridge and took a breath. “This is not for work. I’m going to see Julian.”
Charlie didn’t stop digging and he didn’t look up. “Daddy-boy,” he said quietly.
“Okay?” she asked.
No response.
“Julian’s got something important to do called a commissioning ceremony.” It was the moment Julian would actually be given his officer’s commission, and she couldn’t imagine missing it. “It’s a really big deal to be an officer in the air force,” she added, wondering how much of this Charlie was absorbing. She stuck a plastic gas station by the side of the sandbox road and pushed her truck into the bay to fuel up. “They’re going to tell everybody where he has to go for his job. He could be sent anywhere in the world, from Tierra del Fuego to the North Pole.”
“Where Santa lives,” Charlie said, his face lighting up.
“You never know.”
She shook off a wave of melancholy, thinking about how hard it was going to be, seeing him go off somewhere to start his life as an officer. She was determined not to show her sadness. This weekend was about celebrating Julian’s incredible achievement, not about lamenting the chance they’d never had.
“Tell you what,” she said to Charlie. “Let’s go grab some lunch and you can pick out three toys to take to your dad’s.”
“Four toys,” he said, always pushing for more.
She was pretty sure he didn’t know what four was, but that wasn’t the point. You didn’t bargain with a little kid. “Three,” she said. “And they have to fit in your Clifford bag.”
Charlie was sound asleep in his car seat when Daisy drove up to Logan’s place. She spotted him up on the roof of the house he’d bought last fall, pounding at something. The house was old and graceful, from the 1920s, on a tree-lined street prized for its vintage architecture and quiet ambiance. The neighborhood was a haven for the upwardly mobile, close to schools and the country club. It didn’t appeal to Daisy in particular—her taste ran to funky lakeside cottages—but Logan had embraced home ownership with his usual tenacity.
Like all older homes, the house had issues. He insisted on doing many of the renovations himself, even though he could probably afford any contractor he wanted. It was as if he had something to prove. Born to a wealthy family, he’d never had to do home repairs. With his new place, he embraced the challenge. It was a steep-roofed two-story house surrounded by overgrown rhododendrons and hydrangea bushes, with a big hickory tree in the front. He must have heard her drive up because he paused in his work and lifted his arm to wave.
He lost his balance and wheeled his arms, and his feet came out from under him. Gathering speed, he skidded down the steep slope of the roof. It was like something out of a nightmare. Daisy opened her mouth in a voiceless scream and clamped both hands over her mouth. A part of her understood that this would be a really bad time for Charlie to awaken—in time to see his daddy fall to his death.
Logan grabbed for a purchase, hooking onto the eaves. The old metal tore away. He tumbled to the edge and dropped like a sack of mail, crashing down on an old rhododendron bush.
Daisy leapt out of the car and rushed over to him. He lay by the broken bush, motionless. His eyes were closed, his face chalk-white.
A sense of unreality fell over her. No. These things didn’t happen. They weren’t supposed to happen. He looked dead. He was dead. Just like that.
She couldn’t catch her breath. She sank to her knees beside him. “Logan,