“Daddy, is Jillian coming home with us?” piped up Emma, sitting across the table from us at the ice cream shop.

I froze, looking at Bruin with worry. How the hell were we supposed to handle a question like that?

But Bruin just smiled softly. “Not for now, Em.”

“But she’s really pretty,” the little girl added, pointing at me with her tiny pink spoon. Her pudgy face was smudged with chocolate. I couldn’t help but smile at her.

“You’re right. Jillian is very pretty.” Her father reached under the table to take my hand. I gave it a light squeeze.

“So? Why can’t we keep her?” asked Emma, dropping her spoon in the little cup of quickly-melting ice cream and folding her arms over her chest.

She gave Bruin a squinty, suspicious look. One thing was for sure, she had definitely inherited her father’s stubbornness and fiery personality. It was adorable.

“It doesn’t quite work that way, sweetheart.” He chuckled. “Are you going to finish your ice cream? Why are you avoiding all the sprinkles? You asked for them specifically.”

“They’re crunchy,” she said, shrugging.

“Well, yeah. They’re sprinkles,” Bruin commented, raising an eyebrow.

Emma wrinkled her tiny nose. “I don’t like crunchy.”

“You just like the colors, huh?” I said. Emma grinned and nodded.

“Rainbow!” she exclaimed, seemingly forgetting all about her line of inquiry. But then she made a shockingly solemn face for a three-year-old, and said, “Jillian, do you like me?”

I tilted my head to one side and nodded. “Of course I like you.”

“Then why won’t you come home with us?” she asked, her sweet baby voice so sad and innocent it nearly made tears come to my eyes. She really was the cutest.

Bruin sighed. “You have to be patient, Em. Jillian doesn’t live in California. She lives in Georgia. That’s where her home is.”

“Why?” she asked, frowning.

Bruin and I exchanged exasperated looks. Why seemed to be her favorite question. But then again, she was barely out of her terrible twos. “Her house is in Georgia. In Atlanta,” Bruin said simply. Emma did not look convinced in the slightest.

“Can’t she move her house here?” she inquired with a shrug, as though it were the most logical suggestion in the world. I giggled and she looked at me with a vaguely scandalized face.

“Well, it’s an apartment, actually,” I said. “I can’t fit my whole apartment in a suitcase and take it with me to California.”

“Why not? Is it a really big apartment?” she asked, endlessly persistent.

Bruin rolled his eyes. “Emma, that’s probably enough questions, honey.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” I said quickly. Emma grinned at me fondly.

“I like you,” she said. “You’re nice.”

“Well, thank you. I like you, too,” I told her.

This conversation, if you could really call it that, was going in circles. But I expected that was probably pretty par for the course with a toddler. Emma scooped out and ate a big bite of melty ice cream.

Bruin mouthed the word “sorry” at me but I just shrugged, smiling back. The truth was, I was really enjoying interacting with Emma. I had never spent very much time around kids. None of my friends had babies yet, and most of my clients were well into middle age, so their kids were usually grown up and out of the picture. Jeff rarely made time for dating, much less getting into a serious relationship that could involve a kid. I was the younger of the two of us, so I never had a little brother or sister, either. I had always expected to kind of hate hanging out with a little kid. I had no idea what to talk to them about, what kinds of things they were into. Half the time I couldn’t even properly guess how old a child was without being told explicitly.

But Emma was cool. At least, she was cool for a three-year-old. She really was like a very small, very chatty, girly version of Bruin in a lot of ways. She didn’t mince her words, saying exactly what was on her mind, even if it was awkward to say. She was upfront about what she wanted, even if it didn’t make sense to other people. Like the rainbow sprinkles. I was sure she knew perfectly well that they would be crunchy, but she wanted them for their aesthetic value. It was silly, but I kind of understood it. At my apartment, I had an old-fashioned vintage alarm clock in my bedroom. I never used it because I just used my phone as an alarm. But I kept it around because I liked the look of it.

Ugh, here I was, finding common ground with a literal toddler. Who was I anymore?

Meanwhile, Emma was singing some made-up song about ice cream. Bruin and I both laughed when she rhymed “spoon” with “moon” and that seemed to delight her. She grinned, her chocolatey little face radiant with joy. I could feel my heart swelling with fondness for her already. It was difficult not to adore her, she was so cute. And the fact that she was like a little Bruin clone certainly helped.

“You about ready to head out, Em?” he asked her. She looked into her bowl of melted ice cream with a serious expression, like she was doing some crazy calculations in her head. Bruin was biting his lip to stop from laughing.

Finally, she looked up at us both and nodded, setting her spoon down with a clink.

“I’m done,” she announced.

“Okay. Good. You’re one slow eater, you know that?” Bruin said, picking up her bowl and spoon and dropping them in the trash. He offered her his hand and she took it. Then she turned and reached for me. My heart skipped a beat. God, she was adorable.

I took her other hand and she laughed with joy. “Swing me!” she exclaimed.

Bruin and I lifted her up and swung her a few times once we walked out of the ice cream shop and into the parking lot. She giggled and kicked her feet, looking up at us with overflowing happiness. It was late afternoon, the sun just sort of beginning to decline toward the horizon. The sky was streaked with pink and purple, the world around us cast in that gorgeous golden glow that always happened this time of day. We piled into Bruin’s rented Mercedes, Bruin strapping Emma neatly and carefully into her car seat.

“Daddy, where’s my pony?” she asked as we started to pull out of the parking lot. I shot Bruin a dubious look. I knew he had serious money, but he didn’t really buy her a pony, did he?

“Relax,” he said quietly to me, smirking. “It’s a toy pony.”

“Pony, pony!” Emma chanted, kicking her legs.

“Miss Whinny is back at the house, Em,” he told her.

“Aww,” she whined, poking out her bottom lip.

“You’ll be reunited with her soon, okay? Just be patient a little longer,” he said.

“Daddy?” she chirped.

“Yes, princess?” he answered. The car pulled out into dense traffic.

“What does patient mean?” she asked.

“You want to take this one?” Bruin asked me in an undertone. I blushed. I had no idea how to explain something like patience to a child. Or even really to an adult, for that matter.

“Uhh,” I began awkwardly, wracking my brain for an example. “It’s like… when you have to wait for something for a long time.”

“Yeah?” Emma prompted me to continue.

“So, you’re waiting and waiting and it feels like you’ve been waiting forever, right?” I added, glancing at Emma in the rearview mirror. She looked very contemplative for someone who could hardly even read yet. She nodded.

“I hate waiting,” she said solemnly.

“I know. Me, too. It’s hard to wait when you want something really bad,” I said.

“Or when you’re really bored,” Emma burst out.

“Yeah. That works, too,” I said, laughing. “It’s hard to wait. But sometimes you have to.”

“Why?” the little girl asked again, for the umpteenth time today. Bruin sighed, but I just smiled and turned to look at her. She wasn’t joking around. She really wanted to understand.

“Because life is long,” I said softly. “And sometimes there are times when it feels really long. And you might want to skip the boring stuff or the scary stuff or the sad stuff, but instead you have to wait. And just know in your heart that things are going to change once the bad stuff ends. But until then, you have to smile and be happy anyway. And that’s called being patient.”

Emma stared at me, and I could almost see the little cogs turning in her head as she genuinely considered the meaning of my words. Then she perked up and said, “You’re smart.”

I laughed. “Thank you. I think you’re pretty smart yourself.”

Emma looked positively elated at the compliment. “I can count to ten,” she bragged.

“Wow! That’s really impressive,” I told her.

“She can spell her name, too,” Bruin added, with a twinge of pride.

“E-M-M-A,” she announced, clapping with every letter.

“Good job,” I said, smiling so hard my cheeks almost hurt.

“How do you spell Jillian?” she asked. I spelled it for her and she was so amazed, she then asked me to spell Bruin, patient, ice cream, and rainbow. I spelled them all for her and she seemed truly fascinated by my ability.

“I wanna learn to spell,” she said, a hint of envy in her tone.

Bruin looked at me happily. “Fostering a desire to learn. You’re a real natural with little kids, you know?” he said with a smirk. I rolled my eyes.

“Have you heard how many times she’s asked ‘why?’ I’m pretty sure the desire to learn is already more than present,” I laughed.

“Daddy, I don’t wanna go home yet,” Emma said suddenly. Bruin frowned.

“Why not, honey?” he asked.

She pouted. “Because then Jillian will go away.”

My heart was breaking. Bruin glanced at me sadly. “Well, she has a job to do. And like I said, she doesn’t live here. She lives in Georgia.”

“How far away is Georgia?” she pressed on.

“It’s on the other side of the country. What’s the name of our country, honey?” he asked, clearly hoping to distract her with trivia.

“A-mer-i-ca,” she said, emphasizing every syllable.

“Good job!” he said.

“I don’t like Georgia,” Emma declared.

“You’ve never even been there,” Bruin said. I had a feeling what she was about to say.

“I want Jillian to stay,” she said firmly.

Just then, my phone went off. There was a business meeting happening tomorrow evening back in Atlanta. I was expected to attend. Bruin caught me looking at my phone.

“Duty calls?” he asked quietly. I nodded.

“Unfortunately,” I replied. “I need to be on a flight tonight, Bruin.”

“I understand,” he said. “I need to take Emma home. It’ll be her bedtime in a couple hours. Can I call you a car to take you back to San Diego?”

“Yeah. That would be great.”

“Jillian, don’t go,” Emma said, her big blue eyes blurry with tears. It pained me to see her so sad, but I reminded myself that she wasn’t my child. I wasn’t abandoning her. I had a job to do. A life to live on the other side of the continent.

So I gave her a reassuring smile and said, “Emma, you remember what patient means?”

She nodded sadly, sniffling.

“You’ll see me again, okay? But for now, you have to be patient.”

* * *

Later that night I was on a red-eye flight back to Atlanta. It was with a heavy heart that I boarded the plane, feeling somehow like I was walking out on something very important. But what was the problem? Sure, I’d had a wonderful time in California. I’d made a huge sale. I’d had amazing sex. And I got to meet the most adorable little girl on the planet. And now I had to go back to my job. The job I loved, that gave me an amazing lifestyle.

What was I so sad about?

When the plane landed, I called a cab to take me home. I was exhausted, my mind racing in a million directions as I tried to work through my feelings. There was so much going on right now, it was hard to make heads or tails of it. I was so caught up in my thoughts that it took me awhile to remember to check my phone.

When I did, I found that I had several missed calls. From a number I didn’t recognize.

I frowned, confused. I dialed the number for my voicemail box and listened to the one solitary message left there. It was a familiar male voice, but it wasn’t Jeff or Bruin.

“Jillian? Hey. It’s me. I know it’s been forever since we last spoke, but I needed to call you. It’s important. I’m in town this week for work and I need to see you. There’s something I want to talk to you about, and it’s urgent. Can you meet me? This is Danny. Danny Fields.”

“No new messages,” said the phone recording. I hung up and dropped the phone in my lap as the cab pulled up in front of my building.

Holy shit. My ex-boyfriend was in town. And it was urgent.