“Turn it off,” Charlotte whispered. I did. Then I looked at her directly. “I want Adeline to genuinely know you, Charlotte.” She started crying openly. “But you will never once tell her that I made her own father do this. And you will never make her responsible for exactly how much you personally miss him.”
“I genuinely don’t know who I am without him anymore,” Charlotte whispered. “Neither do I, Charlotte, honestly. This is considerably harder than anything I’ve ever actually had to do in my entire life.” I looked down at Adeline in my arms. “But she genuinely doesn’t need us to have it all figured out yet.”
Chapter 4: What Neither of Us Needed Anymore
Six months later, Charlotte sat on my own living-room rug while Adeline wrestled determinedly with a wooden block. Our relationship together wasn’t actually fixed, exactly. It was steadily healing instead.
Charlotte asked before visiting now, every single time. She asked before ever picking Adeline up too. And whenever she genuinely missed Miles, she simply said plainly that she missed Miles, without any pretense attached to it.
That particular afternoon, Adeline grabbed the wooden block so tightly her small knuckles went entirely white. Charlotte smiled at that. “Look at that genuine grip on her.” I laughed. “Just like Miles used to have.” Charlotte looked over at me. Then she looked back at Adeline again. For one second, I genuinely saw that old, familiar instinct flicker across her face — the constant need to find her own son everywhere she looked.
Then she shook her head firmly. “No,” she said quietly. She touched Adeline’s tiny hand gently. “That grip is genuinely hers alone.” Adeline squealed with delight and threw the block straight into Charlotte’s lap. Charlotte laughed at that. So did I.
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