Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99434 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 497(@200wpm)___ 398(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99434 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 497(@200wpm)___ 398(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Seeing my face, Max laughed. “Ella, are you saying Gray’s smart like your daddy because you want him to be your daddy?”
Ella smiled and slapped both her hands over her face, covering it like she was shy. She spread two fingers to expose one eye and looked up at me, nodding.
I swallowed a few times to fight back a rush of unexpected tears. “Come here, you.” Hooking an arm around her little waist, I lifted Ella up from the floor and onto my lap. I nudged her hands away from her face and smiled.
“I’m glad you want that, Ella. Because I am your daddy. I’m sorry I couldn’t be here when you were a baby, but I promise I’m always going to be around from now on.”
Ella stared at me, then looked to her mother for some sort of affirmation. Max nodded.
“Can I call you…”
She lifted her hand, extended her five fingers, and tapped her thumb to her forehead twice. It reminded me of a turkey. My signing ability was shit, but I’d stumbled across the word for daddy on my first night trying to learn it online. That one had stuck with me.
“I’d be honored if you’d call me…” I mimicked the sign and added the word with a crack in my voice. “Daddy.”
Her smile choked me up. But then her pointer finger went to her lip, and she seemed to be pondering something. I glanced up at Max, who shrugged, and we waited.
“Does that mean I’m going to live with you and not Mommy?”
I shook my head, but then realized someday soon that would be the case, and I didn’t want my first act as her official father to be a lie. I looked at Max and gave her the nonverbal cue for how do I answer this one?
Max took Ella’s hand. “You get to have two places to call home. One with Mommy, and one with Daddy. And that’s kinda cool because if one of us ever needs to…go away…you’ll always have a place to call home.”
Ella turned to me. “Are you going away again?”
“Nothing in the world could make me leave you now that I get to be your daddy.”
Ella smiled. “Okay.”
“And you know what else?” I said.
“What?”
“You know the room you slept in at my house?”
She nodded.
“That’s going to be your room from now on. So you always have a place to call home when we’re together. And, I’ll tell you what, you can pick out your own paint color, and we can buy some decorations for it so it feels like your room.”
Ella’s eyes widened. “Can I paint it my favorite color?”
“We can paint it whatever you want.”
She smiled. “My favorite color is rainbow, just like Layla’s.”
Chapter 36
* * *
Gray
The day went along like any other day with Ella after that. We stopped and picked up Freckles, who carried his old shoe with him the entire way to Central Park, and then the three of us spent the afternoon watching the model boats. While Ella searched for Stuart Little, I quietly obsessed over Layla’s date tonight and remembered what a nice afternoon we’d had last time we were all here together.
Ella and I even bought ice cream from the same cart guy and sat on the same bench where the three of us had eaten it last time. It must’ve made Ella think about Layla, too.
She licked her cone while chocolate ice cream dripped down her fingers on the other side. “Can Layla come to the park with us next time?”
I didn’t think I should explain that we’d broken up. Today was already info overload. “I don’t know, sweetheart.”
She licked some more. “Are you and Mommy married?”
I coughed as I swallowed my ice cream. “No, Mommy and I aren’t married anymore.”
“So, does that mean you can marry Layla?”
I wish. “It means I could get married again. So could your mom, technically.”
“What’s tech-lick-ly mean?”
“It means it could happen, but it’s not necessarily going to.”
She turned her hand, examined her fingers covered in melted ice cream, and dipped her head to lick them off.
“Like finding Stuart Little out there.”
I chuckled. “I suppose so, yes.”
“Why do people get married?”
Good question. I’ve been trying to figure out why I married your mother for years now.
“They get married because they love each other.”
“Do you love Layla?”
Shit.
Well, that was at least one question I could answer wholeheartedly. “Yeah, sweetheart, I love Layla.”
Ella was quiet for a long time after that. I glanced over a bunch of times while she licked her cone in silence, just knowing the wheels in her little head were spinning fast.
“What does love feel like?”
Jesus, she asked tough questions. “It feels like you would do anything in the world for that person to make them happy. It makes you happy and sort of warm inside.”
She giggled. “My ice cream is making me feel cold inside. But I love ice cream.”