When Laura got pregnant at twenty-two, Chase was just starting his rookie season. He didn’t just leave; he evaporated. He sent a lawyer to pay for an abortion. When Laura refused, the lawyer vanished too. Chase changed his number. He blocked her. He pretended she—and the baby growing inside her—never existed.
Laura raised Grace on a librarian’s salary and grit. She never asked him for a dime because she didn’t want his toxicity near her daughter.
“He chose his path,” Laura told me one night, sitting on my back porch while fireflies danced in the yard. “He wanted the fame. He didn’t want the baggage. Grace isn’t baggage, Arthur. She’s the prize. And he was too stupid to see it.”
I stepped into the space he left vacant. It wasn’t a chore; it was a privilege. I built Grace a slightly lopsided treehouse in the backyard, smashing my thumb three times in the process. I taught her to ride her bike without training wheels in the church parking lot. I learned to braid hair, watching YouTube tutorials until my big, clumsy cobbler fingers could weave a passable French braid.
She started calling me her “forever dad” when she was six. It was the best title I’d ever held.
I planned to propose to Laura. I had the ring ready, hidden in a box of shoe polish in the shop safe. A vintage sapphire, because she said diamonds were boring.
Then the coughing started.
It wasn’t a cold. It was Stage 4 lung cancer, a genetic fluke in a woman who had never smoked a day in her life.
The decline was terrifyingly fast. In six months, the vibrant woman who danced in my kitchen was confined to a hospital bed in our living room.
The night she died, the house was quiet. Grace was sleeping at a neighbor’s. I held Laura’s hand, which felt like paper bones.
