night.
He pounded on the door.
Harry answered, disheveled, pulling the belt of his robe tight.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” he asked before realizing it was Nick. “Oh, it’s you. What do you want?”
“Emily.”
“Not sure she’ll see you. You couldn’t have come in the morning?”
“I want to see her now.”
“You might as well come in. I’ll go wake her.”
Nick waited in an expansive, beautifully appointed sunken living room.
It wasn’t his daughter who finally entered, but Marsha.
“Nick? What are you doing here?” She looked at a tiny gold watch on her left wrist. “At 2:30 in the morning?”
“I want to see Emily. I want her back.”
She nodded, but made no move to fetch his daughter. “Sit down.”
Gracefully, she sat across from him on a settee that had probably been made two hundred years ago. What did he know? Marsha had furnished their home.
“Did you know,” she said, “that she used to idolize you? From the moment she first started to notice the world around her, she honed in on you and couldn’t get enough of you. Unfortunately, you were never around.”
“I know, Marsha. You have no idea how much I regret that now.”
“When I married Harry, I left Emily with you because that’s where she wanted to be.” She leaned back in her chair. “Mort said you were trying to make time for her.”
“Yes, and it was working, but then...life got complicated.”
“You got some woman pregnant.”
“Not just some woman. The one I betrayed my brother with. I love her. It’s taken me this long to figure it out.”
“I’m happy for you.” She looked reserved.
“You can go ahead and gloat. She turned me down when I asked her to marry me.”
She smiled. “These days, things don’t seem to be coming to you as easily as they used to.”
“Marsha, you have no idea.” He cracked his knuckles. “I have another daughter. Pearl. Do you know what I realized when I held her for the first time?”
“What?”
“How much I love Emily. How much love there is in my heart. How much I have to give to this new baby, but even more so to Emily.”
“Dad?”
He turned at his daughter’s voice.
“Emily?” Before he barely registered how sleepy and grumpy she looked, he strode across the room and hauled her into his arms. “I missed you,” he breathed. “I missed you so goddamn much.”
“Nick, language. Please,” Marsha admonished.
“I can’t help myself, Marsha. I missed my baby.”
“Dad, I can’t breathe.”
He eased his grip. “I don’t want to let you go. Come home with me. I never want to be apart from you again. Never.”
“Really?” She sounded so hopeful, but her hope had been dashed so many times by him in the past. She became suspicious.
“Did Laura have her baby?”
“Yes. A little girl. Her first name is Pearl and her last is Jordan. She’s your baby sister.”
“Are you sure you still want me?”
“I want you more than ever. Do you know what I’ve learned?”
She shook her head.
“How much love I have inside of me. How much I love you and want you in my life. I want to share everything with you, including your baby sister.”
When she would have objected, he said, “I have boundless, infinite love to give. The more I love the more I want to love. I’m learning so much, Emily, and so much of it is from you. You started me on this journey way back in the spring. If not for you, I would still be sitting behind my desk doing nothing but earning more and more money, and letting you slip through my fingers.”
He rested his forehead on hers. “You saved my life. I want you back in it. I’m going to quit my job.”
He heard Marsha gasp behind him. He’d had a lot of time to think on his flights and the thought that popped into his head over and over was It’s time.
Instead of the panic, the hollowness leaving his job in Seattle should have brought on, he felt only peace and rightness. What would he replace it with? He didn’t know, nor did he care at this moment.
“I want you to come home with me,” he told his daughter. “I want us to buy a house in Accord and live there. Or we can build one that you like. We can design one together.”
His happiness, his optimism, knew no bounds. “I want you to meet Pearl, because she has shown me that I love you to pieces.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“I love you so much. I want to go home with you.”
He’d never been so happy. Or