I hopped onto my motorcycle on the other side of the street from the old elementary school, kicking up the engine. Just behind the school, I still felt the burning eyes of old Remy—staring after me, wanting to wrap me up with another round of angry, volatile words. “Sexual tension,” or something very much like the cousin to that word, “love,” was so often obliterated between us by outrageous anger.

I’d known I was fucking up when I missed three hours of rehearsal. But I’d woken up with a sweeping wave of anxiety, a feeling that—over the past four months—I hadn’t taken a single moment to myself. I’d been a slave to my phone, diving for it every time it buzzed to see that Remy had a new doctor’s appointment, that Remy had a cold. That Remy needed me on set “just one more time for the week.”

I felt like a dog on a leash, yanked from one corner of San Francisco to the other. And every time I’d brought it up with Remy, she’d gotten all weepy-eyed, yet angry, insisting that I’d agreed to be in her movie. That she needed to be able to rely on me.

I suspected that the anger was linked to something much bigger. That she was starting to want me to stick around once our son was born. And truthfully, I’d flirted with the notion a few times. Imagining us raising our little baby together, me with the little guy while his momma got some sleep.

But those daydreams weren’t rooted in reality, and I knew that. My legs felt achy, all cooped up. As I barreled down the wide road toward the cabin, I resolved not to call Remy for a few days. Let her stew. Maybe let her know that this was to be the future—that I wouldn’t just be a phone call away. I’d given her the cash money. I’d held her hand when we’d heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time.

A fucking religious experience, that had been. Sure. Imagining that little baby—half of me, a son—swimming around in there, awaiting his future, had made me feel a wave of paternal instincts. Of nurturing. I’d even flirted with the idea of praying that night to try to make sure our baby would be healthy. Making a deal with God. Like that was something you could do.

But now, no. I had to eliminate all thought of a father-son relationship with this kid. How could I be a father when all I knew was freedom and my own hours? It wasn’t possible to change. An old dog never learned new tricks, right?

When I reached the cabin, I tore toward my large backpack leaned against the far wall of the bedroom. It’d been untouched for months, still lined with a crummy towel and sweatshirt from my last trip. I brought it across the bed and began to toss things into it, still unable to decide on a place to go. Southern California? Texas? Where had I last felt like myself? Where had I last felt free?

My phone began buzzed on the top of the bed, making the bag quake. I glanced at it, spotting my dad’s name. As “partner” of the tech firm, I hardly did a single thing for the company—showing up at random benefit concerts, standing in a suit at some of the bigger meetings, that sort of thing. My dad asked about Remy almost constantly, rooting me to this idea of marriage, of family.

And over the past few weeks, Dad had been asking after us, wanting us to come for dinner. “I haven’t seen Remy since she was only three months pregnant!” he’d said the previous time. “I want to get to know your future wife, Wesley. She’s a part of the family, and she’s about to deliver my grandbaby into the world!”

---

After ignoring his call, I was surprised to see it buzzing all over again. Normally, he took the hint—sensing that the “Wesley” he’d thought was in the past was still lurking somewhere beyond. Wanting to get the old man off my ass—maybe even tell him that the marriage was off, or some shit—I brought the phone to my ear.

“What is it?” I asked, my voice firm.

“Wesley. Hello,” my father said. His voice sounded oddly strained, like he was in the middle of some sort of anxiety attack—something he often had in those first few weeks after Hank had passed. We didn’t talk about those times. In fact, since Remy’s pregnancy, we’d hardly spoken about Hank at all. Mostly in the “remember when” context rather than bemoaning the fact that, at the core, I wasn’t Hank and never would be.

It was kind of fucking nice, to be honest. Not being constantly compared. Being appreciated. Although I knew it was bound up in a lie.

“Dad?” I asked, my heart feeling squeezed for a moment. If it was a panic attack, he knew to take his meds. They were right there in the top drawer of his desk, awaiting him. Helping to pull him back to the “shore” of reality.

“I think you should drive on over to the office,” Dad said. His words were articulate, without panic, yet strange.

“Did I miss a meeting?” I asked, my eyebrows high. I gazed out across the ocean, my other hand still holding onto the backpack. I was five minutes away from getting back on the bike and tearing across the state. I could be a hundred miles away in ninety minutes. I could be free. If it was a meeting, I was seconds away from telling Dad to stuff it. I couldn’t hack another business meeting.

---

“I don’t want to explain over the phone,” Dad continued. “But I think if you don’t come down here, we’re going to have a serious problem. She’s threatening to go to the news.”

“The news? She? Is it Remy?” I asked, my throat tight.

“Remy? No. Don’t tell her anything yet,” my father continued, sounding increasingly cryptic. “What do you mean, though?” he continued. “Why would Remy threaten to go to—”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I was mostly joking,” I stammered, realizing I’d almost given the game away. Jesus, what was I thinking? I stood in the center of the bedroom for a long moment, pondering.

What the hell? I dropped the backpack on the bed, my eyebrows stitching together. Tearing toward the door, I hurried to my bike. “All right. I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” I told the old man, deciding to be true to my word, this time.

When I stopped out front at the tech company—that eyesore glass building just outside of the city—I saw nothing unusual about the place. My father’s sports car was parked in the front, its windows gleaming and its red paint sporting a fresh coat. Bolting through the door, I found myself face to face with Monica, the bright-eyed wonder of a secretary, whose face folded up upon seeing me.

“Monica? What’s going on?” I asked her, my voice low. I was conscious of the tech nerds around us, eyeing me curiously. I liked to think that they assumed I had total control over their jobs. I had the metaphorical scissors and could snip and snap wherever I liked, just because I was an Adams.

“You should come with me,” Monica said, her throat tight. Whirling from her desk, she cut across the lobby and toward the elevator, stabbing the button with her manicured fingers. Once inside the sterile elevator, I glanced at her. She shifted her weight from leg to leg, clearly anxious.

“Do you want to give me some kind of hint of what’s going on?” I finally asked her, sounding arrogant, almost wild. I was still high from my fight with Remy. I was ready to attack anything, anyone.

Finally, Monica’s eyes flickered toward mine. Just before the elevator doors burst open, she whispered, “Do you remember someone named Connie? Connie Murphy?”

The name banged around my skull for a long moment. I gaped at her, feeling like I was staring into a long well of memories. “Connie Murphy?” I asked. The name tasted flavorful against my tongue. Like something I’d said many times before. “Jesus. Wait. I think I—”

“Well, she’s here to try to ruin your life, as well as your father’s,” Monica said, interrupting. “Your father always said you were wild. That he didn’t know what the hell you were up to while he and Hank were keeping the company going back here.”

Monica’s judgment smacked across my cheeks. She’d ordinarily been nothing but a vibrant airhead, delivering coffees and doughnuts. But now she glared at me, the person slicing a dagger through her boss, my Pop’s, career. Monica’s entire life was inextricably tied to the company and to my dad. Now, she was the barking dog. And I was the deliveryman.

We walked down the hallway toward my father’s office in silence, my heart churning with anger and fear. Connie Murphy. The name illuminated an image of a blonde-haired beauty way back in Alabama? New Hampshire? A laugh rang out through my memories, a pleasant one, if a bit ditzy.

As we approached the doorway to my father’s office, I heard that familiar laugh once more. It echoed through the halls, against the glass, and it made my stomach clench with apprehension. Her voice—almost like a Southern California Valley girl’s—squeezed out from a too-tight throat.

“And that’s when I told Wes, I told him—hell, he couldn’t outswim an alligator. Not if he was the strongest guy I’d ever met. And back then, I mean, his muscles. They were huge, sir. He could lift me over his head and carry me like a kid. But anyway, we were down there at the bayou, basically a swamp, and he suddenly leaped into the air and let out a wild scream and dove into the water. The waves went all over the place, making our little boat quake back and forth. He didn’t come up from beneath the black water for like, oh, two minutes! He did it just to freak me out, you know. I was sure I was going to find some alligator gnawing at his head. But then, suddenly, he burst back up and swam back onto the boat. Sure enough, just about ten yards away was one of those alligator monsters I’d warned him about. We laughed and carried on about it for days after that. Till he skipped town all over again.”

Connie. Connie Murphy. Of course.

I stared down at her from the doorway. A slim, leggy blonde woman leaned back in my father’s expensive antique chair, her blonde hair curling down her back. She was tanned, a bit too skinny, with her shoulder bones jolting out from her skin. She wore what she probably assumed was a “nice” dress, with glitter making lines up and down the front. And as she told this story of our day at the bayou, she used her hands to illustrate my dive into the water and smacked her hands together to show the alligator’s massive jaws.

All the while, the old man seemed almost captivated by her. She was certainly one of the less-refined people my father had been around in the previous fifteen years. If I remembered correctly, she’d grown up in poverty just outside of Orlando. I’d met her as a twenty-three or twenty-four-year-old kid on one of my trips south. The air had been muggy, making my hair, which I’d worn long at the time, curl wildly down my back. I hadn’t bothered with a shirt most days, and my muscles had cut into the humid air, glistening with sweat. I met her at a bar just a few miles away from the old Disney World. As she poured my pint, she pointed to her Mickey Mouse shirt, stretched across her large tits, and said, “Don’t tell me you’re making your way to Disney World, are you?”

I said of course not. That I was always on the road to somewhere else. And that I’d never give my cash to such a big, asshole corporation. She’d liked that. Said that most men who trudged in and out of the shit dive bar had just unlatched from their families for a few hours for a pint or six. “Before they have to return to their screeching wife and their howling kids,” she’d sighed, batting her eyelashes at me.

I’d been lonely. Achingly so, probably. At that time, I hadn’t spoken to Remy in years, yet she’d been a constant figure in my imagination. Telling me, mid-dreams, that I should return to California and find her. That things weren’t working out just the way she’d planned. They certainly weren’t for me, either.

“Well, there’s the old devil now,” Connie said now, turning her bright face toward me. She rose from the antique chair and stepped her high heels closer to me, swinging her hips. Behind her, my father also rose. His eyes were difficult to read. Every second felt singed with confusion. Connie raised her hand to mine, and I shook it. I was conscious of how much bigger I was than her, perhaps wider, stronger than I’d been as a twenty-four-year-old man.

“Connie,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

Connie whirled her head back toward my father, drawing out an alligator smile. “Well, I was just telling your daddy about that. Seems he’s pretty fascinated about all your years on the road. Didn’t know what the hell you were up to out there. Says that he was just back here working away at his tech company. Damn, Wes. You told me that your dad and brother were successful. But I didn’t make the connection that you were one of them Adamses until I saw you on the news a few weeks ago. Said you’d become partner at the ‘richest tech firm’ in the entire country. And I knew I had to come find you immediately.”

I stepped a bit closer. My eyes moved from Connie to my father and back again, hunting for the connection. That’s when I spotted the little blonde ponytail, bobbing in the corner. A young girl, no more than five or six, squatted over a large coloring book, holding onto a bright green crayon. She drew careful lines through a large cartoon animal, humming to herself.

“You brought your daughter?” I asked, incredulous.

Connie’s eyes burned into me, and I felt the air shift, as both she and my father waited for me to make the connection. I staggered back against the wall, feeling the weight of the world fall to my chest. Adrenaline boiled through me.

“Holy hell,” I whispered. “She’s—she’s mine?”

Connie swung her head through the air, giving a slight cackle. “You look just as shocked as I was when I found out. Of course, that was six years ago now. I’ve had to grow up since then. Become someone’s mother. While you sped off across the country, never to be seen or heard from again.”

I reaching for the door and pulled it closed—separating Monica from the conversation. I heard her stubborn footfalls as she stomped away, back to man the desk downstairs. I sank into the chair along the wall and watched this girl in the corner, who continued to draw on, unaware. My daughter? Really?

“What’s her name?” I murmured, hardly able to recognize my own voice.

“Maria,” Connie said. “Maria Murphy. Maria Murphy Adams, that is.”

I drew my hands over my eyes. All this time, while I’d been a selfish asshole, tearing myself from one side of the country to the next, I’d had this daughter waiting in Florida for me. Growing. Learning how to walk and run. Deciding on a favorite color. Telling people that—hell. She didn’t have a dad. She’d never known him.

“I tried to track you down,” Connie said. “Only, you didn’t leave any sort of message when you left that last morning. That was typical you, all my friends said it. But I still thought maybe one day you’d be back.”

My father interjected, then. I’d almost forgotten he was there, waiting in the wings to leapfrog into my life. “You know, Connie, Wesley’s about to be married. He’s having a kid properly, with a girl he’s loved since high school.”

Connie’s eyes flickered. I couldn’t comprehend if it was anger or just an intake of information. Regardless, I drew back, waiting. Tension filled the room. What had Connie expected, coming all the way here to find me? Surely money. It was always about money. But questions continued to spin in the back of my mind.

I stepped toward my daughter, Maria. Crouching down beside her, I watched as she traced the outline of a cartoon pony with a purple crayon.

“That’s really pretty,” I told her, my voice softer, more welcoming than I’d ever heard it.

“Thanks,” Maria said back, her voice high-pitched and angelic. “Horses are my favorite animal. After that, I like pigs, but Mom says they’re ugly.”

I turned my head toward Connie, my head swimming. “Do you mind if I—if we—go somewhere else? Just to talk?”

I didn’t want this conversation to exist under the watchful owl eyes of my father. Connie nodded, a layer of understanding shadowing her face.

---

“I think that would be nice,” she said. “And I think Maria’s hungry, anyway. Let’s hit the road.”

After bidding goodbye to my father, who just gave me a stern wave, muttering, “We’ll talk later,” I walked into the foyer with this strange, sudden, pop-up family. Connie and Maria, Maria and Connie.

As I held open the door for them, watching Maria’s ponytail bouncing playfully, I felt a surge of fear. Suddenly, skipping town was a thought far, far from my mind.

Rather, I churned with a new question. What the hell was I going to tell Remy about all of this? How would she react to the fact that I’d had a kid all this time—one I’d abandoned, without knowing it? And now that Remy thought I was kicking her to the curb, something I’d been very aware I was doing minutes before, what was I supposed to do next?