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There was a pause before Kaidence asked, “How soon?”

Another silence followed, and I frowned. Whoever he was speaking to wasn’t someone I could hear.

“Can I tell Mommy now?”

I leaned a little closer.

“But she’s gonna be happy!” he added.

My stomach tightened because I knew that tone. Kaidence wasn’t pretending or making up both sides of a conversation. In his mind, somebody was answering him.

“But I wanna tell her now.”

There was another pause before he giggled.

“Okay, Daddy.”

My entire body went still.

Daddy.

For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.

He was talking to Caspian again, or at least he believed he was.

I thought about what Kaidence had told me after his first day at school, how his daddy had shown up on the playground and scared those boys who had been bothering him. I thought about every other strange thing he had said since we returned, every casual reference he made to Caspian as though his father had simply walked back into his life while the rest of us remained blind.

I wanted to walk inside and demand answers. I wanted to ask what the hell he meant when he said we were going to be a family soon, but I didn’t want to frighten him or make him think he had done something wrong. Whatever was happening, Kaidence didn’t seem scared by it.

So I took a breath and knocked lightly.

“Hey, baby.”

When I opened the door, Kaidence looked up from his bed with a Spider-Man action figure in his hand and enough toys scattered around him to make it look like a small toy store had exploded.

“Hey, Mommy!”

I smiled and walked inside. “How was your day?”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Mm-hmm.”

His attention shifted toward the space beside his bed for the briefest second before returning to me.

I pretended not to notice.

“You ready for bed?”

“Almost.”

“Almost?”

He held up the action figure. “I was just playing.”

“I see that.”