“You’re welcome.”
Lucas shoved his hands into his pockets. “I still don’t know what to call you.”
Daniel let out a slow breath. “You don’t have to call me anything you’re not ready to.”
Lucas nodded.
Then he said, almost grudgingly, “Goodnight, Daniel.”
It should not have felt like mercy.
It did.
After the children were asleep, Daniel stood near the doorway preparing to leave. Valentina walked him outside. The street was cold and still.
For a moment neither spoke.
Then she said, “They’re getting used to you.”
He looked at her carefully. “Is that a warning?”
“Yes.”
He accepted that. “Fair.”
She wrapped her arms around herself against the cold. “If you disappear now, it will ruin them in a new way. Different from before. Worse, maybe, because now they’ve seen what your staying feels like.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“You used to say things like that.”
“I know.”
She studied him beneath the porch light. “What changed?”
Daniel looked down the quiet street, at the little houses, at the weak glow behind thin curtains, at the place he once thought represented failure.
“I spent half my life trying to become someone important,” he said. “Then I came back here and realized importance is cheap. Presence isn’t.”
Valentina’s face softened in a way he had not seen since they were young, though it held none of that old innocence now. This softness had survived things.
“Lucas got accepted yesterday,” she said quietly.
He blinked. “To which one?”
She smiled despite herself. “Three so far. More letters coming.”
He laughed once, stunned by joy.
“He wanted me to wait until after dinner to tell you,” she admitted. “He said he didn’t want your head getting any bigger before Christmas.”
Daniel covered his eyes with one hand, overwhelmed.
When he looked up, Valentina was watching him with something complicated in her expression. Not love. Not yet, maybe not ever again. But not pure anger either.
“Come tomorrow,” she said.
