“I promise I’ll get you that coffee in a minute,” he says, tugging me toward the stairs. “I want you to meet Abi first.”
The pride on his face makes my ovaries explode, and I know in that moment that any bitterness or resentment I thought I felt toward his life in L.A. doesn’t apply to his daughter. I know it doesn’t matter that Scarlett lied. It doesn’t matter that Abi shares none of his DNA, because she is his. In every way that counts, she’s his daughter.
I follow him up the polished wood stairs. I love how warm this house feels. It’s not a marble showplace where everything is intended to dazzle and flaunt his wealth. It’s his home—where his daughter will run and play and hang out with her friends. This is where she’ll grow up and know that no matter what drama happens in the world beyond, she’s always safe and loved when she’s inside these walls. This will be his safe place too. The start of his new life.
At the top of the stairs, he turns to the right and knocks twice on the wooden door before pushing it open. “Abi?”
“I’m in my bathroom,” she calls.
He gestures into the room, and I follow him inside. His daughter’s space is decked out with white furniture and a mermaid bedspread topped off with sequin pillows. There’s still a pile of boxes stacked against the wall and a few others sitting open in random spots on the floor, but the room already hints at the personality of its new occupant. Mermaids, sequins, teal and turquoise everything. The two tall, coordinating bookshelves are empty, but I smile at them. Looks like Easton has a reader on his hands.
I follow him into the attached bathroom and spot Abi’s long red ponytail. She’s sitting at the small white vanity with an oval mirror and a high-end spa’s worth of cosmetics and polishes in front of her.
“I’m organizing my nail polish by color,” she says. “That way I won’t buy more of a shade before the last one is gone.”
Easton shakes his head, a crooked smile on his face as he watches his daughter. “Only you would have so many nail polishes that you need to organize them like that. Are you going to do the same with your lip glosses?”
“Obviously.” She grins as she positions a bottle of polish carefully into a drawer. “It’s not my fault that Mommy likes to buy me pretty stuff.”
“As long as it’s only for play, it’s fine with me. But no makeup at school.”
She rolls her eyes. “Mom lets me wear it whenever I want.”
He shrugs, unfazed by this tiny bit of defiance. “Mom has her rules, and I have mine.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She finally lifts her head, and her smile falls away when she spots me.
“I wanted you to meet my friend Shay,” her dad says, pointing the same warm smile at me he gave her.
“Hi,” I say.
“I’ve heard about you,” she says.
That is unexpected. “You have?”
“Yeah. You’re daddy’s friend. The girl who is prettiest and smartest and who writes books.”
My breath catches, and I look at Easton, who just shrugs and gives me a lopsided grin.
She sighs. “I tried to write one when I was seven, but I didn’t finish. Maybe I’ll finish a book when I’m ten.”
“You did more than most people do just by starting,” I say. To be fair, I feel a little hypocritical giving advice on this subject. I’m good at writing books, then tucking them away to never be seen again. If I wanted to get serious about being a novelist, I’d need to get good at revisiting those drafts, facing their weaknesses and reworking them until they were better. And then I’d have to be willing to let someone else judge them and find them lacking or not. Instead, I’m sitting on an opportunity to query a dream agent and writing something new instead of fixing the old stuff. “I bet you could if you decided you wanted to. You just have to put in the work.”
“That’s what Daddy says too. But I’m not in a rush.”
“You don’t need to be. You can just enjoy being a kid right now.”
“Daddy says that too.” She stands, and I realize just how little she is. I wonder if that’s genetic or from being sick. A pang spears through my chest imagining how it must have been for Easton when she was in the hospital.
Maybe it’s just because she reminds me of Lilly, but I love her already.
“Shay hasn’t seen the house,” Easton says. “I thought maybe you’d like to give the tour.”
Her eyes go wide. “I would love to!”
After the best tour I can imagine—complete with “this is where I can do my tumbling” and “this is the dining room, but all we ever used our old dining room table for was puzzles, so I don’t think this will be any different”—Abi retreated to her room to finish organizing, and Easton led me back to the kitchen and poured me a cup of the coffee he promised.