“I’m not asking you to choose,” she told me one night at the front door. “I’m asking if there’s room.”
“There isn’t,” I said. “Not the kind you deserve.”
She nodded like she had already known the answer. She left a sweater behind. I never gave it back.
I stayed with the triplets, not because they asked me to, but because someone had to.
Daniel appeared the way bad weather does.
One birthday card, with no return address.
One Christmas card, stamped from a place I had never visited.
When the girls were 12, he called.
“I want to reconnect, Noah. I’ve been thinking.”
“About them and being a dad.”
I held the phone so tightly my hand cramped.
“You want to be a dad, you get on a plane. You don’t think about it on my phone bill.”
My brother never got on a plane. Not once.
The cards stopped after that. Sometimes I wondered if the girls noticed. They never mentioned it.
—
Some nights, I lay awake and counted the numbers in my head, the way people do after being broke for too long. Not money. The other kind.
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