Your mother actually cried." He paused. A lot of it is real, Vanessa. More than either of us planned for. Another silence longer.
That's what worries me, she said. He didn't answer because he understood and because the answer he had would require more honesty than the dark and the pillow barrier and the 48-hour arrangement could reasonably contain. He lay on his back and listened to the ocean and told himself the same thing he told himself every morning. One night he thought, then the next one it didn't work quite as well as it usually did. Morning arrived with the particular clarity of coastal light sharp and clean through the curtain edges.
The kind of light that makes everything look more honest than you left it. Malcolm was awake before it fully arrived. He usually was. Four years of early mornings had calibrated him that way. His body still running on a schedule set by the needs of a small person who required breakfast before 7.
He lay still for a moment before moving, which was how he discovered two things. First, the pillow barrier had migrated. One pillow had been absorbed into his side during the night and was now tucked against his back, blameless. Second, Vanessa was still asleep. He had not seen her asleep before.
Obviously, this was not a thought that required examination. He was not going to examine it. He simply registered that she slept on her side facing the window with her hand tucked under her cheek and that the expression on her face in sleep was the most unguarded he'd ever seen her. The CEO was completely gone. What was left was just a person who was tired in the way that people are tired when they stop managing everything for 8 hours.
He got up quietly, took his phone to the small sitting area, and called Lily. She answered on the second ring, already fully awake, and immediately deep into a report about the botanical garden, the bees. They'd seen a disagreement she and her grandmother had about whether the big fountain counted as nature or human-made nature, and the outcome of what she described as a very important pancake situation involving blueberries and the specific ratio her grandmother had used. Malcolm listened to all of it with his elbows on his knees and his heart in his chest, doing that particular thing it did when Lily talked that warm ache of love and responsibility that had been running constantly for 7 years like a second circulatory system. Are you having fun?
She asked eventually. I'm working, he said. That's not the same as having fun. I know. Grandma says you're allowed to have fun at work sometimes.
Grandma has a lot of opinions about my life. Because she loves you, Lily said with the definitiveness of someone who had long ago resolved this debate. Dad. Yeah. Is the work person nice?
He paused. She is. He said, "Good." The word landed clean and simple and entirely without complication, the way only a seven-year-old could land it. I made you a cocoon drawing.
I'll show you when you get home. Can't wait, he said. I love you, Bug. Love you too, Daddy. He put the phone down and sat in the quiet of the morning and felt the weekend pressing in around him from all sides.