Chapter 1 — The Only Father I Had

My grandfather, Bruno, was the only father I ever had, after my parents died in a car crash on an icy highway when I was four years old.

So when I got pregnant at twenty-seven, and the man I loved disappeared the exact same night I told him, it was Bruno — seventy-one years old, hands still scarred from forty years of felling timber — who held me together.

He had never met Ezra.

I had kept putting off the introduction, telling myself there would be time once things between Ezra and me grew more serious, and then Ezra vanished without so much as a text, and part of me was almost relieved the two of them had never met, because it spared me the humiliation of explaining how a man I loved could run so fast from a positive test.

“You bring that baby into this world, Nell,” Bruno had said, on his porch that night, squeezing my hand in both of his.

“We’ll figure out the rest together, you and me.” And he meant every word of it.

He built the crib himself, in his workshop, out of oak, sanding it by hand.

He drove me to every prenatal appointment, all the way across the county, and never once complained.

And when the ultrasound technician told us we were having a girl, my grandfather — a man I had seen cry exactly twice in my life — wept openly, right there in the dim little room, with joy.

I need to say something about the leaving, because it shaped everything that came after, and because I spent those months trying and failing to make sense of it.

Ezra had not been a careless man.

That was what I could not reconcile.

A careless man leaving is a story that tells itself: he never loved you, he was always going to run, you were a fool to trust him.

I could have survived that story; it is at least simple.

But Ezra had not been careless.

He had been present in a way I had never known from anyone — he remembered the small things, he showed up early, he looked at me across a room like I was the answer to a question he’d been asking his whole life.

For two years he had been, by every measure I knew how to take, a man in love.