Chapter 3

Day 17.

I was sitting in the break room, poring over engine schematics, when a photo slid out of my locker and landed face up on the floor.

Mira. At the beach, building a sandcastle, dark hair a wild halo around her face. Her eyes were serious, careful, taking in the world like she was already deciding what to trust. But the grin was mine, wide and a little reckless, the same grin I used to wear on a podium.

I must have stared at it for five minutes before I noticed Verane in the doorway.

"Drew gave it to you," she said. Not a question.

"She's beautiful."

"She's smart. Stubborn. Wants to be an engineer, just like her mother." Verane sat down across from me, close enough that I could see the tiredness she usually kept hidden behind steel. "She's also started asking why other kids have a daddy and she doesn't."

I folded the photo carefully and slid it into my wallet, next to nothing, because I had never carried a picture of anyone before her.

"I'm here now. I'm staying."

"Words, Ransford. That's all I've ever gotten from you."

"Then watch me instead of listening to me."

I had been watching myself too. Seventeen days sober, the longest I'd gone since the day she walked out. I woke at five, worked ten hour shifts, read engineering manuals until my eyes gave out around midnight. I had fixed nineteen engines by then, caught two failures before they became disasters, and earned something from the crew that was not quite respect yet but was no longer contempt either.

It still was not enough. Not close.

"The hearing is in thirteen days," Verane said. "My lawyer says the case is strong. Stable income, clean record, a child who has never once gone without. You have seventeen days of sobriety and a job on probation."

"Tell me what I need."

"Stability. A real position, not a trial one. Proof you're committed to something other than yourself for longer than a month." She stood, brushing dust off her coveralls that was not really there. "And you need to meet her. Before the hearing. Not after."

My heart stopped somewhere in my chest. "You're letting me see her?"

"I'm letting you try." Her voice caught, just slightly, on the word try. "Saturday. My place. Don't be late. Don't smell like anything you shouldn't. And don't expect her to call you anything at all. She doesn't know you. To her, you're a stranger who happens to share her eyes."

"I'll be there."

"You'd better be. I'm not doing this twice."

Saturday came with the weight of a final lap.

I stood outside her house, a small craftsman with a garden that someone had clearly put real work into, and practiced breathing until it stopped feeling like a foreign skill. I'd worn my cleanest jeans, a button down shirt, and I was holding a stuffed rabbit that was probably too big and definitely too expensive, because I did not know what else a father was supposed to bring to a first meeting.

The door opened before I could knock.

Verane looked softer than I'd seen her in years. Jeans, a faded shirt, hair pulled back loose instead of scraped tight the way she wore it at the shop. For a second she looked like the woman I married and not the woman running a company built on my worst mistakes.

"She's in the back," Verane said. "Go slow. She's shy with people she doesn't know."

I walked through a house that was warm and lived in, full of toys and books and a life I had missed every single day of, and stepped out into the backyard.

Mira sat in a sandbox, pouring sand carefully from one cup into another, her small face set with concentration. She looked up when my shadow crossed her, eyes wide and unreadable in a way that reminded me too much of her mother.

"Hi," I said, my voice barely making it out of my throat. "I'm Ransford."

She studied me the way you study something you're not sure is safe yet.

"Mommy says you're my daddy."

I lowered myself onto the grass, level with her, my knees suddenly unreliable.

"That's right. I am."

"Where were you?"

Four words. The whole weight of two years in four words.

"I was lost," I said, because it was the truest thing I had. "But I found my way back. To you. And to Mommy."

She thought about that with the seriousness only a two year old can manage.

"Are you gonna stay?"

"I'm going to try. Very hard."

"Okay." She turned back to her sandcastle like the matter was settled for now. "You can help if you want. I need a moat."

I laughed, surprised by the sound of it coming out of me. I picked up a small plastic shovel and got to work beside her.

"Moats are important. Keep the dragons out."

"We don't got dragons." She patted the wall of sand flat with total authority. "We got Mommy. She's scarier."

I looked up and found Verane in the doorway, watching us, her eyes wet but her mouth curved into something close to a smile. It was the first time in two years she had looked at me like I might not be the worst thing that ever happened to her.

I smiled back before I could stop myself.

Thirteen days left. For the first time since the letter arrived, I let myself believe I might actually win.

We stayed in that sandbox until the sun started to dip, Mira narrating an increasingly elaborate plan involving the moat, a bridge, and a sea monster she insisted lived under the porch. I did not want to leave. I think Verane knew that, because when I finally stood to go, she walked me to the door herself instead of letting the moment end in the backyard.

"She liked you," Verane said, arms crossed against the evening air. "That surprises me more than I want to admit."

"Does it change anything?"

"It changes what I'm afraid of." She looked away first. "I used to be afraid you'd never show up. Now I'm afraid of what happens to her if you show up and then disappear again."

"I'm not going to disappear."

"You said that the last time too. Right before Monaco."

The name landed like a slap, exactly the way she meant it to.

Before I could answer, her phone buzzed in her pocket. She glanced at it, and whatever color was left in her face drained out fast.

"What is it?"

She turned the screen toward me without a word.

It was an email from her lawyer, the subject line alone enough to stop my heart a second time that day: New witness has come forward regarding Monaco incident. We need to discuss before Monday.