Chapter 7
Aurelio Salcedo, whatever else he was, understood one thing clearly: a man who will not sacrifice an alliance for a child is not a man whose word means anything. He did not respect my decision. He respected that I made it without hesitation, and those are different things, but in his world, the second one is the one that matters.
Brin and I moved slowly. We moved honestly, which for two people with our respective histories of decision-making was harder than moving slowly. I spent eight months proving, by showing up rather than announcing, that I understood the difference between wanting access to a child and being someone a child should have access to. There were nights Brin asked me to leave and I left. There were conversations she ended before I was finished and I let them end.
Daniel is fourteen months old now. He has my jaw and her eyes and an opinion about avocado that I find professionally unreasonable. He has a room in a building that is not connected to anything I would need to keep him away from, which required the most significant restructuring of my professional arrangements that I have ever undertaken, and which I did without treating it as a sacrifice, because a sacrifice implies you are giving up something you value more than what you are choosing, and that is not what happened.
Brin and I are not a simple story. We are two people who made each other's lives significantly harder than they needed to be, and who are, slowly, with full knowledge of that history, choosing something anyway.
The last time we sat together on the couch in the apartment above the club — we kept it, though the club's name changed and the arrangements changed and almost everything about the building changed — she said, without preamble, "I still don't entirely trust you."
"I know," I said.
"But I trust you more than I did three months ago."
"I know that too."
She looked at him asleep in the carrier on the coffee table, his face doing its involuntary expressions, his hands curled in the loose fists of someone dreaming about something uncomplicated.
May you like
"That'll have to be enough for now," she said.
It was enough. It was, in fact, considerably more than I had earned the right to expect, and I knew it, and the knowing of it was the most useful thing that had happened to me in fifteen years of being the kind of man whose name made other men lower their voices.
