Annie said. “Do you think he’d be worried if he found you weren’t where you were supposed to be?”
“I guess.” Paisley tilted her head slightly toward Annie. “But everyone else does it and no one freaks out. I mean, Dad One gets a call and the next day he’s gone, or Bonus goes out sometimes for month-long sailing trips and no one says a word. But if I want just a quiet night to myself, or to go to the beach and just think, my dads think I’m depressed or that something’s wrong.”
Annie considered what Paisley had said, put two and two together, that Dad One was Emmitt and Bonus was her uncle. “What’s Gray’s nickname?”
“Dad Two.”
“Do they know you call them that?”
She scoffed. “No. I don’t do it to be mean. I do it because when I’m really upset, calling them Dad One or whatever takes some of the sting out of it.”
“Makes sense,” Annie said, looking back out at the pool. “My dad calls me Flapjack.”
“Are you like a pancake freak?”
“I like them, but I’m really a pastry for breakfast kind of girl.” Annie shook the empty bag, and Paisley gave a tiny laugh, not much more than a little breath pushing through her nose, but Annie could tell she was starting to relax.
“Then why did he call you that?”
“When I was six, my parents tried to enroll me in school, but they discovered one of the papers from my adoption had never been filed, so the adoption had never been finalized. My parents had to go through the whole adoption process again, prove they were good parents, that they had no criminal background, a ton of red tape kind of stuff. Then they had to go in front of a judge and petition to adopt the daughter they’d raised since birth,” Annie said. “So for about two months my parents were terrified that they’d somehow lose me.”
“They were your parents—how could someone just decide to take you away?” Paisley asked in a protective tone that was all Emmitt.
“My parents argued the same thing. But in the end, it all worked out. The judge finalized the adoption, and I remember my dad saying that his love for me was so big he adopted me twice,” Annie said, surprised that after all these years she still got emotional telling her adoption story. “On the way home we stopped at a diner to celebrate, and my dad asked what I wanted, and I said flapjacks, which made him laugh. He ordered flapjacks for the whole table, and somehow the name stuck.”
“Does he still call you that?” Paisley asked.
“All the time,” Annie said, and Paisley looked as if she’d just discovered where babies came from. “I know, it’s silly, and when I was your age it embarrassed me, and once I told him to stop. Later that night he came into my room and said he called me Flapjack because it was a name between us, it wasn’t on any official papers or court transcripts, it couldn’t get misfiled or lost, and no matter what, it could never be taken away from us. The next day I told him I was okay with the name, but he could only use it at home.”
Annie learned that day that her nickname represented an important part of her story. It was the day her parents stood up in front of a judge and fought to keep their family together. As she got older, she began to realize that her parents weren’t just fighting for their family, they were fighting against society’s views of what constitutes a family.
A piece of paper didn’t make them family. It was their love.
“He uses it everywhere, by the way,” Annie said. “But now I like it. And your dad—I mean Dad One—has a nickname for you. Sweet P, right? So it’s only fair if he gets one too.”
“I wasn’t very sweet tonight,” Paisley said with a shiver.
Annie scooted a little closer and shared more of the blanket. To someone looking on, they would appear to be a couple of friends chatting over doughnuts. But this was so much more.
“You don’t always have to be sweet.” Annie nudged Paisley with her shoulder. “You’re figuring out who you are—that’s hard.”
“Does it get easier?” Paisley asked, and tears lined her lashes.
“I don’t know if easier is the word,” Annie said gently. “The older you get, the better you’ll become at figuring out who you are outside of other people’s expectations and making