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I wasn’t looking for a replacement for him. I just got tired of an empty side of the bed.
So over the last two years, I tried again. Slowly. Carefully. I never let a man meet my girls until I trusted him.
And every single time, within weeks of that meeting, he was gone.
Xavier was first. Almost two years ago. A firefighter. Funny, patient, the kind of calm that made a house feel safer just by standing in it.
He met the twins over takeout on a Sunday. Skylar talked his ear off about her cheer squad’s regional placement. Aubrey, arms crossed at first, eventually asked him three sharp questions about whether he’d ever actually run into a burning building, decided he was “fine, I guess,” which from Aubrey is basically a standing ovation.
Three weeks later, Xavier texted me. Said he “wasn’t in a place to take on that kind of responsibility right now.”
He didn’t answer after that.
Reginald came fourteen months ago. Steady. Worked logistics with my brother-in-law. He lasted a little longer — a full month past meeting the girls — before he called, voice careful, like he’d practiced it.
“It’s not you,” he said. “Timing’s just wrong.”
Chris, eight months ago. Same words. Almost exactly.
Then Terrell, ten weeks before the day I finally stopped pretending this was bad luck. Terrell did construction work. Big laugh. Skylar decided within an hour that he was “basically a superhero” for fixing the wobbly leg on our kitchen table without being asked. Even Aubrey laughed at one of his jokes, which I noted, because Aubrey does not laugh for free.
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Two and a half weeks later, Terrell ended it over the phone. Apologizing so much it started to feel like he was the one who’d been wronged.
Four men. Four almost identical exits.
“Maybe you’re just picking men who can’t handle instant family,” my sister Yolanda said, the night I cried on the phone after Terrell.
“They liked the girls, Yo. I watched them. This isn’t the girls.”
“Then what is it?”
I didn’t have an answer yet.
I want to be clear about something.
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My daughters were never the problem.
Aubrey is sharp, a little guarded, the way kids get after watching a father disappear in slow motion over a decade. But she was never rude to a man I dated. Skylar is warmer, quicker to trust, quicker to hope. Neither one of them ever did anything a grown man should run from.
The one constant, in every single relationship, was Patrice Odom.
Ms. Patrice had been part of our lives for thirteen years — since the twins were toddlers, back when I was working double shifts and needed somebody I could trust completely. She wasn’t hired help anymore, not really. She was “Nana Pat.” She’d been at every dance recital I missed, every fever at 2 a.m. when I couldn’t leave the hospital floor. I trusted her with my daughters’ lives.
It never once occurred to me to wonder about her.
Aubrey said something once, back when Chris was still around. I brushed it off completely.
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“Why does Nana Pat always pull them into the kitchen alone?” she asked, not looking up from her phone.
“Pull who alone, baby?”
“The boyfriends. Every time. Kitchen, or the porch. Just the two of them.”
“She’s probably just being protective,” I said. “Making sure she likes whoever’s around you two.”
Aubrey shrugged. Went back to her phone.
I didn’t think about it again for months.
After Terrell, I sat on Yolanda’s back porch with a glass of wine I never finished.
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“I don’t think it’s bad luck anymore,” I said. “Four men. Same story. Same timing. Something’s happening that I can’t see.”
“So find out,” Yolanda said, like it was obvious. “Get somebody you trust — somebody not actually trying to date you — to come around like he is. Let him be in the room when you’re not. See what he notices.”
