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“We’ll cross that when we get there. One thing at a time.” He pulls out his phone, and opens a note he’s clearly already been drafting. “I want to look at apartments. Something close to campus, two bedrooms at minimum, room enough for a nursery and room enough to grow into. I’ll handle the deposit and the first year’s rent if you need it. This isn’t charity, Margo. This is what a father does.”

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to rescue me.”

“I don’t feel that way at all.” He looks up from his phone, direct. “I feel like a father whose daughter is about to do something extraordinarily brave, and I intend to make it as possible as I can for her to do it well. That’s different from rescue. That’s just love with logistics attached.”

I hesitate before I ask the next thing, but it’s been sitting in my chest since he said the word twins, and I need to know. “Is this how it was with Maddison? When she told you and Mom?”

Something shifts across his face — careful, controlled, the specific stillness he gets when he’s deciding how honest to be. “No,” he says, finally. “It wasn’t like this.”

“What was it like?”

“Quieter.” He turns his coffee cup slowly on the table, not quite meeting my eyes. “Your mother handled most of it. Excitement about the wedding, mostly — the baby became part of that conversation, not really its own conversation. I asked if she was happy. I asked if Michael was going to do right by her. I told her I loved her, and that was mostly it.” He looks up. “I didn’t ask what she needed. I don’t think it occurred to me that there was more to ask, because Maddison has never once needed me to ask. She tells you what she wants and expects you to help her get it. There’s nothing wrong with that, exactly. It’s just never required the same kind of attention.”

“And me?”

“You’ve spent your whole life not telling anyone what you needed.” His voice goes rougher than I’ve heard it in years. “I let that happen for two decades, Margo. I told myself it meant you were fine, because you never gave me a reason to think otherwise. I understand now that not telling and being fine were never the same thing. I understand that a little too late, but I understand it now, and I am not making that mistake again. Not with this.”

“What about Maddison, though. Doesn’t she need —”

“Maddison is Michael’s now.” He says it plainly, without cruelty, just fact. “That’s not me washing my hands of her — I love your sister, and I always will, and I’ll be there if she ever actually asks me to be. But she chose him, and he’s the one who needs to be doing what I’m doing for you right now. That’s not my job to do twice over while he does nothing.” He holds my eyes. “You don’t have that. You have a young man who’s still deciding what kind of father he’s going to be, and until he decides, you have me. All the way. No half-measures, no equal division of attention between two daughters who need very different things from me right now. Just you.”

I feel my eyes burn again, the specific ache of hearing, out loud, finally, the thing I’ve wanted my whole life without ever letting myself say I wanted it.

“Thank you,” I manage.

“Don’t thank me.” He reaches across the table, covers my hand again. “I should have been doing this for you years ago. I’m doing it now because I finally understand what it costs you when I don’t.”

I laugh, wet and surprised, and he smiles — the specific rare, full smile that transforms his whole face.

“There’s one more thing,” he says. “You turned twenty-one. Your trust fund activates now — the one your grandfather set up, the one you’ve never had access to. That’s yours outright, no strings, no requirements attached to it. I want you to know it’s there. Not because I think you’ll need to lean on it heavily, but because I want you to know you have resources of your own, independent of me, independent of anyone. You are not a woman without options right now, whatever this feels like. You have more than you think.”

I sit with that for a long moment — the specific, unfamiliar feeling of actual ground under my feet, built by a father who spent years being neutral and has finally, completely, chosen to stand only on my side.

“Thank you,” I tell him. “For coming. For all of it.”

“You never have to thank me for this.” He squeezes my hand one more time. “This is just what showing up looks like. I should have done it more, over the years. I’m doing it now.”

My birthday falls two nights later, quiet and small, exactly the way I wanted it.

Wren and June help me set up the Sailmaker kitchen — a cake from the bakery on Fifth, nothing elaborate, candles already counted out for twenty-one. Priya, Kara, and Delaney arrive together around six, the three of them now fully in on everything after Nationals, the specific circle of trust widening in a way that would have terrified me two months ago and now just feels like relief. There’s something particular about the way they walked into the Sailmaker tonight, too — not tiptoeing around what they know, not treating me like something fragile, just showing up exactly the way friends show up, with a bottle of sparkling cider since I can’t drink and a card Delaney clearly made herself, hand-lettered and slightly crooked in the most endearing way.

“You look happy,” Priya says, settling at the kitchen table with a plate June’s already handed her. “Considering everything.”

“I am happy,” I say, and I mean it, mostly. “Complicated happy. But happy.”

Dinner is easy — Kara telling an elaborate story about a stunt gone wrong at a summer camp she coached years ago, complete with sound effects and a reenactment that has June nearly falling out of her chair laughing. Delaney and June bond over a shared love of true crime podcasts, trading recommendations with the specific intensity of people who’ve just discovered a kindred obsession. Wren is quiet but present, the way she always is, occasionally offering a dry one-liner that lands harder for how rarely she speaks. The specific comfortable noise of a table full of people who genuinely like each other fills the whole kitchen, warm and easy in a way I haven’t felt in weeks.

I sit in the middle of it with my hand occasionally drifting to my stomach, still unchanged, still not visibly anything yet, and I let myself feel, for one evening, like a woman having a normal birthday with normal friends. Twenty-one years old. Pregnant with twins. Estranged from the father of my children, or at least uncertain of where we stand. And somehow, in the middle of all of it, genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy for the length of one dinner.

June brings out the cake around seven-thirty, candles lit, the whole table breaking into a slightly off-key rendition of the birthday song that Kara insists on harmonizing badly through. I close my eyes to make a wish and find, for once, that I don’t know exactly what to wish for — there are too many things I want at once, too tangled together to separate into one clean request. I blow out the candles anyway. Everyone cheers.

We’re halfway through the cake when someone knocks at the door.

“I’ll get it,” June says, already halfway out of her chair.

“No — I’ve got it.” I’m not sure why I say it. Some instinct, maybe, the specific pull of a person who’s learned to read the weight of a knock before she opens the door to it.

I cross the kitchen. I open the door.