Diana was patient for a long time. Longer than she should've been.
I missed things, too.
"I'm not asking you to choose," she told me one night at the front door. "I'm asking if there's room."
"There isn't," I said. "Not the kind you deserve."
She nodded as if she already knew. She left a sweater behind. I never returned it.
I stayed with the triplets, not because they asked me to, but because someone had to.
"I'm asking if there's room."
***
Daniel showed up the way the weather does.
A birthday card once, with no return address.
A Christmas card with a stamp from somewhere I'd never been.
When the girls were 12, he called.
"I want to reconnect, Noah. I've been thinking."
"Thinking about what, exactly?"
"About them and being a dad."
I held the phone so tightly that my hand cramped.
When the girls were 12, he called.
"You want to be a dad, you get on a plane. You don't think about it on my phone bill."
My brother didn't get on a plane. He never did.
The cards stopped after that. Sometimes I wondered if the girls noticed. They never said.
***
I'd lie awake some nights and run the numbers in my head, the way you do when you've been broke long enough. Not money. The other kind.
- Did I do enough?
- Did I say the right things at the right time?
- Did they know I loved them, or did they just know I was tired?
I wondered if the girls noticed.
There was a fear under all of it that I never said out loud. That somewhere in the back of their hearts, the triplets were still waiting for their real father.
That I was the man who'd been there, but not the man they wanted.
