Page 144 of ClickBack

I put the phone beside me. “There are things about her father I need to tell her before she starts this next part of her life.”

“Byron?”

“No. Her biological father.”

Jarrett reaches for the remote and turns the television off. “Does she know about him?”

“She knows Byron isn’t her biological father. She’s always known that. But I let a few answers stand in for a whole person.”

“What answers?”

“That we were young. That we weren’t together when she was born. When she got older, she took that to mean he left us. I let her.”

He looks at me carefully. “That isn’t what happened?”

“No. And I need her to hear it from me before I tell anyone else.”

“All right.”

There is curiosity in his face. He has enough pieces now to know they do not fit. He lets me keep the rest without making me feel that I have failed some test of how much I trust him.

“He was nineteen,” I say. “He had a car and I still had to ask permission to go anywhere. There were people who couldn’t know we were seeing each other. I thought that was something we would eventually get past.”

“Whose people?”

“Some of his. Some of mine.” I pull my feet onto the sofa. “I waited for his calls. I lied about where I was going. I was excited to see him. For years, I couldn’t admit that part without feeling like I’d proved everybody right.”

“For wanting to see your boyfriend?”

“For thinking that was what he was.”

Jarrett looks away toward the dark television. When he looks back, his expression has changed.

“I don’t like that he let you carry all that.”

“It was more complicated than that.”

“Maybe. You can tell me the complicated part when you’re ready. I still don’t like it.”

I am grateful he says it without asking me to dislike the boy I remember. There were happy afternoons. There were conversations I used to go over in bed, trying to remember his exact words. Losing those would not make the rest easier to explain.

“Byron came along later,” I say. “Rae remembers him being there. Fevers, school concerts, teaching her to ride a bike. She calls him Daddy because he earned it.”

Jarrett listens while I tell him about changing her name after we married. We talked about adoption once, but I thought we already knew what our family was. I didn’t want to turn every good thing Byron did into proof of something. I can see now how often I did exactly that.

“When Rae got pregnant, he said he wasn’t surprised. Said I shouldn’t be shocked that I’d raised a teenage mother when I’d been one.”

Jarrett sits forward. “He said that about his daughter?”

“To me. We were arguing.”

“I don’t give a damn what y’all were arguing about.”

The anger in his voice makes me stop smoothing the cushion beside my leg.

“He apologized,” I say.

“Good. He should’ve.”