She’s four aisles away, and I’m standing in the checkout line with a cart full of groceries and her kid on my hip, and I’m thinking about last night. About telling her I had a cut made for her. About the look on her face when she realized what that meant.
Leo is pulling at my beard. He does this now. Grabs a fistful and tugs, and when I look down at him, he laughs like it’s the funniest goddamn thing in the world. The kid is strong. Two years old and already built like a brawler.
“Quit it.” I untangle his fingers. He grabs a different fistful.
The woman in front of me turns around. Mid-fifties, reading glasses on a chain, cart full of canned goods. She looks at Leo. Looks at me. Does that ping-pong thing people do when they’re about to say what you didn’t ask for.
“Oh my goodness.” She presses her hand to her chest. “He is your spitting image. Same eyes and everything.”
Ice. Straight down my spine.
“Those blue eyes.” She’s smiling, oblivious. “And that jaw. He’s going to be trouble when he grows up. Just like his daddy, I bet.”
I don’t answer. She laughs at her own joke and turns back around to face her groceries.
Leo is pulling at my collar now. He’s moved on from the beard, bored with it, fingers exploring the edge of my cut. He twists the leather between his thumb and forefinger. His eyes are wide and fixed on mine.
Same blue. Not Violet’s shade. Hers run darker, almost gray in certain light. This is my blue. The pale, clear, ice-chip blue that stares at me when I shave in the morning.
My hand catches his. The left one. He’s been grabbing with it all morning. Reaching for cereal boxes, slapping the cart handle, and smacking my chest when I wouldn’t let him hold the bread.
A birthmark is on the back of his hand, and I never noticed it until just now. Between the knuckle of his index finger and his thumb. Small, dark, shaped like a thumbprint pressed into wet clay.
I know that birthmark.
I have that birthmark.
Same hand. Same place. Same fucking shape.
And I’m not looking at Violet’s kid anymore. I’m looking at mine.
Leo grins and pats my cheek. “Daddy,” he says.
He’s been calling me that for a few days.
Violet corrects him every time.“That’s Duke, Leo. Say Duke.”
And every time, Leo looks at her, looks at me, and says Daddy again, because kids don’t give a fuck about what you want them to say. They say what’s true.
The checkout line moves. I put the groceries on the belt one-handed, Leo balanced on my hip, and my brain is doing math it should have done when I first saw Violet with a kid.
Violet left three years and one month ago. I know the exact date.
Leo is exactly two years and five months old. Violet told me his birthday over dinner last week.
Nine months of pregnancy. Plus twenty-nine months of life. Thirty-eight months since conception. She got pregnant three years and two months ago.
Found out six weeks later. And ran.
She was carrying my kid when she disappeared without a fucking word.
Every night I spent staring at the ceiling. Every morning I rode past her empty building. Every woman I fucked, trying to forget her. My son was out there, growing up without me. Learning to walk without me. Learning to talk without me.
She knew. She knew the whole time. And she let me believe Leo is some other man’s kid.
Violet comes up the aisle with a carton of eggs. She’s half-jogging, that little rushed walk she does when she thinks she’s kept me waiting. Her hair is falling out of whatever she tied it up with this morning.
My emotions are all over the fucking place.