[7 Years Later]
Four small hands drumming on my arm and shoulder pull me out of a deep sleep. The uncoordinated pattering that only seven-year-olds can manage, like they're both playing different songs on the same instrument.
"Daddy wake up." Autumn says.
"Come on, Daddy, it's Mama's birthday." Scott Jr. presses his case from the other side, bouncing slightly on the mattress. "We have to go see Mama."
I open my eyes. Two faces inches from mine, identical in their urgency, different in every other way. I grab them both before either one can see it coming, pulling them in against my chest in a tangle of small elbows and morning-warm pajamas. Autumn squeals. Scott Jr. makes a half laugh, half protest, like being hugged is deeply undignified but he'll allow it this once.
"Look at you two," I say into the top of Autumn's head. "Up all on your own. Both of you."
"We set an alarm with," Scott Jr. announces proudly, pulling back to give me the full weight of this information.
"On the tablet," Autumn adds.
"Resourceful." I mean it.
I sit up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. I check the clock. Six forty-two. Seven years and I still haven't fully adjusted to waking up before the sun has figured out what it's doing.
"Alright." I stand, running a hand through my hair. "Daddy needs a quick shower. Go find your outside clothes and put them on. Real ones, not the sweatpants."
"The ones with the dinosaurs are real," Scott Jr. says.
"They are not."
He opens his mouth.
"Go," I say, pointing toward the hallway, and they scramble off the bed in a controlled avalanche of limbs.
I'm almost to the bathroom door when Autumn reappears in the doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed in a posture I recognize immediately and from a very specific source.
"Can we get McDonald's?"
I pause, one hand on the doorframe.
"I'm not so sure your mom's gonna love that idea, honey."
Autumn considers this with the gravity of a small judge weighing evidence. "She might."
I look at her standing there in that doorway, arms crossed, chin slightly raised.
"Alright," I say. "You've convinced me."
The smile that breaks across her face is immediate and total, like a light switching on. She's gone before I can say anything else, feet thundering down the hallway, already announcing the McDonald's victory to her brother in the other room.
I stand there for a second longer than I need to, then turn and get in the shower.
Twenty minutes later I come out my room dressed to find them both in the living room. Autumn is ready. Both shoes on, jacket zipped to the collar, standing with her hands clasped in front of her like she's been waiting since Tuesday. Scott Jr. is sitting on the carpet in one light-up Iron Man shoe, the other foot in a sock, looking at nothing in particular.
"Buddy." I nod toward his foot. "Where's the other shoe?"
"I lost it."
"You lost it."
"Yeah."
I look at him. He looks back at me, very calm about this.
"Did you look for it?"
He pauses for about a half second too long. "Yeah."
"No he didn't," Autumn says, not even glancing up from inspecting her own zipper pull.
Scott Jr. turns to give her a look of profound betrayal.
"Alright," I say. "Come on. Let's find it."
We check the obvious places first. Under the couch cushions behind the TV stand. Under his bed, which requires me getting on my hands and knees on the carpet while he stands behind me offering very little useful information about where he last remembers having it.
"Was it on your foot?" I ask from under the bed frame.
"Probably."
Autumn finds it four minutes later in the toy chest, buried under a pile of Legos and wrestling action figures.
"It's in here," she announces, holding it up.
Scott stares at it with awe. "How did it get in there?"
"It's fine," I tell him, waving off whatever investigation he's about to launch. I crouch down in front of him and work the shoe onto his foot, pressing the velcro tabs flat. The lights along the sole flash red and yellow twice when his heel hits the floor.
Both of them standing there in my living room in the early light. Autumn with her jacket zipped. Scott Jr. admiring his own shoe like it's done something personally impressive. Two faces I know better than my own.
Summer's cheekbones on both. Her eyes, that particular shade of blue that doesn't look real in photographs. Her chin, her nose, the way they both tip their heads slightly to the left when they're thinking.
And then somewhere underneath all that, so much of me too.
I breathe out slow through my nose.
"Come on," I say, pushing myself up off my knee. "Let's go see your mother."
*****
I know this cemetery better than I know most living rooms.
The gravel path curves left past the older headstones, the ones so weathered you can barely read the names anymore, and then opens up into the newer section where the grass is still green and the stones still have their edges. I've driven this route enough times that my hands do it without me.
I get them out of their seats carefully, one at a time, unhooking and lifting while they squirm with the particular energy of kids who have been sitting still for twenty minutes and have opinions about it. The second their feet hit the gravel, they're gone. Just like every time. A blur of light-up sneakers and little jackets moving fast toward the one headstone they know by sight.
I grab the McDonald's bag, the drinks carrier, and the blanket from the back seat. It takes me two trips worth of juggling to get it sorted. By the time I turn around, both of them are already crouched in front of the stone, talking.
I walk slow.
The stone comes into view as I round the last row. Summer Adams. Thirty-two years old. The dates underneath are close together in a way that still catches me sometimes.
She did exactly what she said she would. Standing in that hospital room, wrapped in bandages, hand on her stomach, she told me. And I walked out truly believing she wouldn't.
I spread the blanket out a few feet from the stone, close enough that the kids don't have to choose between eating and talking to her. Autumn is explaining something with her hands, very animated, probably the McDonald's situation because she tends to lead with victories. Scott Jr. is sitting cross-legged in the grass already, picking at a dandelion that's come up through the gravel border, listening to his sister with a patient expression.
I set the bag down and start unpacking. Nuggets. Fries. Two apple juices. A coffee for me that's already going lukewarm because that's what happens when you stop for breakfast with seven-year-olds.
"Daddy, I told Mama about the shoe," Scott Jr. announces without looking up from his dandelion.
"Yeah?" I smile and nod, pulling the ketchup packets from the bottom of the bag. Before I can even get them sorted, Scott Jr. snatches one, tears the corner off with his teeth, and squeezes the whole thing directly onto the top of Summer's headstone in one long, deliberate stripe.
"Hey. Hey." I reach out but I'm half a second too late. The ketchup sits there, red and vivid against the gray granite. "Scott. Buddy. Not on your mother's stone."
He looks up at me with complete sincerity. "But what if she's hungry?"
I stare at him. He stares back.
"Then I'd say you just gave her a lot of ketchup," I tell him.
He considers this and seems satisfied with the outcome.
Autumn is already leaning forward with a french fry extended toward the headstone like she's about to dip it.
"No. No no no." I intercept the fry. "Absolutely not."
She looks genuinely disappointed.
I laugh in spite of myself. I get them both situated on the blanket, nuggets distributed, apple juice straws poked through. Autumn starts telling Summer about the substitute teacher they had last Thursday who couldn't pronounce anyone's name right. Scott Jr. corrects small details of her story with the quiet precision of someone who wants to get the last word in.
I wrap both hands around my lukewarm coffee and just listen for a minute.
Seven years.
I don't regret walking out of that hospital room. I've turned that decision over in my head enough times. If I'd stayed, Summer would have kept pulling until there was nothing left of either of us. I wasn't strong enough to fix her. I'm not sure anyone was. And I wasn't going to let her finish what she'd started with the orange juice and the pills.
I look at the two of them on the blanket, Autumn gesturing with a nugget, Scott Jr. nodding along, both of them talking to a piece of granite like it's the most natural thing in the world.
My eyes sting a little. I don't fight it.
When Summer died, I didn't find out right away.
The lawyer was doing his job, which meant the wall he'd built around my contact information was doing its job too. Whatever messages she tried to send in those last weeks, they never got through. I learned about it the way you learn about things that happen to people you're legally separating from, through paperwork. A death certificate forwarded to Larkin's office. A phone call from him on a Tuesday afternoon while I was eating a sandwich at my desk.
I sat in my car for about forty minutes after that call and didn't go back inside.
Ten months between that hospital room and the end. Long enough to carry the pregnancy to term, apparently. Long enough to have two of them, which I didn't know until I got the certified letter from the county six weeks later informing me that Summer Adams had died by suicide and had named me the father of her surviving children on their birth certificates. Twins. A boy and a girl.
My first thought, and I'm not proud of it, was that I didn't believe they were mine.
I sat at my kitchen table with that letter and I thought about every single thing I knew about the last year of Summer's life with me, about Taevion, about the backpack, about all the things I'd never know, and I thought, she could be lying even now. Even from wherever she is, she could be doing this to me.
The will was what changed it.
Larkin called me two days later to tell me Summer had left a specific provision in her estate documents. Not money, she didn't have much. Just one instruction, written out in her handwriting according to the notary who'd witnessed it. She wanted me to get a DNA test. She'd apparently insisted on it.
I stared at that provision for a long time.
Then Jonah called.
I hadn't spoken to him since god only knows how long.
He told me to walk away. That the children were staying with him. That if I pursued any kind of custody, he would make sure I understood what a mistake that was. He didn't specify. He didn't need to. This was the same man who'd had Taevion shot in a public park and filed it as a government incident.
I went and got the DNA test anyway. The results came back on a Wednesday. I was standing in the parking lot of a CVS when Larkin read them to me over the phone because I couldn't wait until I got home.
Both of them. Mine. One hundred percent.
I had to sit down on the curb.
I think about that moment sometimes and I feel sick that I doubted them. Before they were even real to me, before I'd seen a single photograph or held either one of them, I'd already decided Summer was probably lying. I'd already written them off as collateral damage from whatever game she was playing.
They were mine the whole time. And I sat with the letter and assumed the worst.
Then by some miracle Jonah got arrested. Nothing to do with ICE, ironically. Something separate. He was embezzling funds from some charity, and then apparently killed someone while trying to cover it up.
Which made the custody process surprisingly easy. Barely one hearing, and I was on my way out with my two kids.
"Hey." A voice behind me says.
I turn around.
Jenna is standing at the edge of the gravel path with a coffee cup in her hand, pink hair loose around her shoulders, glasses already sliding down her nose. She's wearing a cardigan that's about four sizes too big for her and mismatched socks visible above her sneakers because she never fully outgrew that particular habit.
"What are you doing here?" I ask.
She shrugs, pushing her glasses up with one finger. "Figured the brats would want to come early today." She glances past me toward the blanket. "Summer's birthday and all."
Before I can say anything else, there's a sound behind me like a small stampede.
"AUNTY JENNA."
Both of them hit her at roughly the same time. Jenna makes a genuine oof sound, coffee tilting dangerously as she grabs them both with her free arm, laughing. Autumn is already talking.
"Hey, hey, hey." Jenna crouches down, balancing her cup carefully. "One at a time or you guys are going to knock me over."
"We had McDonald's," Autumn announces.
"I can see that." Jenna taps the corner of Autumn's mouth where a smear of ketchup apparently survived the napkin situation. "Did you save any for me?"
"Daddy ate all the fries," Scott Jr. says, which is categorically false.
"Lies," I say.
"All of them," he repeats, with the unshakable conviction of someone who has decided the narrative.
Jenna looks up at me over the tops of their heads, that crooked little smile doing its thing. I feel the familiar warmth of it and then pack it away like always.
It's complicated between us, is the short version.
The longer version is that Jenna Joy tried to drug me, confessed to it on the same morning she kissed me while I was half asleep on her couch, and then after a not seeing her for a year, she became one of the most consistent people in my kids' lives. I've been her sponsor since Summer died. We talk almost every day. She shows up to things.
She told me she wanted to ruin my life, and she meant it at the time, and somehow we've ended up here.
I don't have romantic feelings for her. That's what I tell myself, and most days I believe it.
What I know for certain is that I'm not doing anything about it either way. Not until the twins are grown up.
Jenna straightens up, holds up one finger like she's just remembered something, and says "hold on" to no one in particular. Then she turns and walks back toward the parking lot.
The kids watch her go with the focused attention of people expecting something good.
She reappears about forty-five seconds later carrying a rectangular cake box, the kind with the clear plastic window on the lid that you grab off the shelf at the grocery store. She's got it balanced in both hands, coffee cup somehow migrated to the crook of her elbow, and she's picking her way back across the gravel with the careful steps of someone who absolutely cannot drop what they're carrying.
"Okay," she says, setting it down on the blanket with a small ceremonial thud. "Who wants birthday cake?"
Both of them raise their hands. Autumn raises her second hand in response.
Jenna pries the lid back. It's a chocolate-frosted sheet cake with blue lettering that says Happy Birthday in a font that's doing its best. There's a pink flower in each corner. It's exactly the kind of cake you buy when you remembered on the way over.
I look at it. I look at her. She pushes her glasses up her nose and doesn't quite meet my eye.
"Aunty Jenna," Autumn says, in the specific tone she uses when she's about to ask for something she's already decided she's getting. "Can we give Mama some?"
Jenna doesn't hesitate. "Of course you can."
I close my eyes for exactly one second.
When I open them, both kids are already looking at me with pleading eyes. There is already ketchup on Summer's stone. The frosted cake is sitting open on a blanket in a cemetery on a morning, and the two people I love most in the world are waiting for me to say something that isn't no.
I look at the stone. I look at the cake.
Summer liked chocolate cake…
"You know what," I say. "Sure."
Autumn makes a triumphant sound.
Scott Jr. goes first.
He tears off a corner piece pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, and presses it flat against the granite right next to the ketchup stripe. He holds it there for a second, like he's waiting for something to happen.
"Happy birthday, Mama," he says, matter of fact.
Then he sits back down cross-legged and picks up his dandelion again like that's all settled.
Autumn takes a considerably larger piece. She cups it in both hands, walks right up to the stone, and holds it out at arm's length the way you'd offer something to a person standing in front of you.
"This is the chocolate kind," she tells the stone, very seriously. "Daddy told us once you like it that way. Daddy does too but he probably won't eat any because he's being weird about it."
"I'm not being weird about it," I say.
"You made a face."
"I didn't make a face."
Jenna is very carefully looking at the cake box.
Autumn sets her piece of cake on the flat top of the stone, right next to her brother's, smoothing it down gently with two fingers. Then she steps back and tilts her head and looks at the whole arrangement.
She seems satisfied.
I look at the kids again.
Both of them. Safe and happy.
"She can probably taste it," Scott Jr. says, still looking at the stone with the quiet certainty he brings to most things.
"Yeah"