Chapter Sixteen: The Apartment
The park that Saturday was different from every park before it.
Not in any visible way that another person would have noticed.
But Chloe held Sebastian’s hand and called him “Dad” for the first time while they were walking.
“Dad, look at the dog.”
Sebastian stopped walking for a full second before he recovered.
Liam, at the climbing structure, shouted, “Dad, watch this,” before he’d consciously registered what he was saying.
Sebastian watched.
When Liam reached the top, he looked down with an expression of such unguarded pride that Sebastian had to look away for a moment. At something neutral.
Noah, by the duck pond, sat beside Sebastian in their usual silence.
After a while, he said, “The boss duck has a name now. I named him.”
“What did you name him?”
Noah considered the seriousness of the disclosure.
“Gerald,” he said.
Sebastian looked at the duck.
“Gerald is a good name.”
“I thought so.”
Noah paused.
“You can call him Gerald too. If you want.”
Sebastian looked at his son.
“Thank you, Noah.”
“You’re welcome.”
Noah leaned against Sebastian’s arm.
The days organized themselves around a new architecture.
Sebastian’s apartment — the penthouse on the fifty-third floor, with its curated silence and its view and its complete absence of syrup bottles and orange cats and wooden blocks — began to feel less like home and more like a hotel.
He started finding reasons to be elsewhere.
He came for dinners that extended past bedtime. Past the three-story negotiation. Past the final drink of water and the last-minute declaration that someone needed to use the bathroom.
He helped Elena fold laundry on Tuesday nights.
He learned that Chloe needed three songs before she would sleep. That the third one had to be the same every time — a specific song Elena had made up years ago. Sebastian asked her to teach it to him. Learned it badly. Sang it worse.
Chloe accepted it without complaint.
He learned that Noah’s nightmares, when they came, required nothing more than a hand on his back and quiet. That the worst thing you could do was speak or turn on the light. That if you just stayed and breathed slowly, Noah’s breathing would eventually match yours and he would go back to sleep.
He learned this because he was there one Thursday night when it happened.
Elena was already in the doorway, looking exhausted.
He said quietly, “I’ve got it.”
She looked at him for one long second. Then stepped back.
He sat with Noah in the dark for forty minutes.
When he came out, Elena was still awake. Sitting on the couch with a cup of tea.
She looked at him with an expression he had no name for.
“He’s okay,” Sebastian said.
“I know. He always is. It just takes a while.”
“Does it happen often?”
“Less than it used to.”
She wrapped both hands around her mug.
“He started sleeping better about two months ago.”
Two months ago was when Sebastian had started coming for dinners.
Neither of them said this out loud.
Sebastian sat on the other end of the couch.
It was eleven-thirty on a Thursday night. He had a seven o’clock board call in the morning.
He did not move to leave.
“I want to ask you something,” Elena said. “And I want you to answer honestly. Not helpfully. Honestly.”
“Okay.”
“Is this sustainable for you? The schedule. The dinners. The nights.”
“Your company is running fine,” she said. “Sebastian —”
“It is. Marcus has redesigned the structure around my availability. The executive team is more capable than I’ve given them credit for — because I never gave them the chance to be. The company does not need me there fourteen hours a day. It needs me for the things only I can do. And those are four — maybe five — hours of actual irreplaceable work.”
He paused.
“Everything else was just occupation. I was occupying myself. I didn’t have anywhere else to be.”
Elena was quiet for a moment.
“And now you do.”
“And now I do.”
She looked at him with that measuring look. The one that had not entirely gone away and might not entirely go away for a long time.
He accepted that. He accepted the measurement. He had earned it. Or rather, earned the necessity of it — through years of absence that preceded even the divorce.
He would stand in the doorway of her trust for as long as it took for the door to open further.
