The Love We Missed novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Uncle Kee

Tricia turned around to the stove very fast.

Ciaran stood in the kitchen doorway in his rumpled shirt and didn't move.

I sat down across from my daughter.

"No, baby," I said. "You have a daddy."

"Daddy doesn't live with us."

"No. But he's still your daddy."

Nellie licked syrup off her thumb and looked at Ciaran with her professional squint.

"Then what's Uncle Kee?"

"I'm Uncle Kee," Ciaran said.

"But you were at Mama's sleepover."

Tricia dropped the spatula.

"Okay," she said to the stove. "Okay. I'm going to go stand outside in the snow for a while."

She didn't go.

I looked at Ciaran.

He looked back at me, and I could see him not saying anything because it wasn't his to say.

"Uncle Kee is Mama's," I told her. "Like a boyfriend. Do you know what a boyfriend is?"

"Like Lolo was Daddy's."

"Sort of like that."

She thought about it very seriously.

"Is he nicer than Lolo?"

"Much nicer," Tricia said, from the stove.

"Okay," Nellie said, and went back to her pancakes.

That was it, for her.

It wasn't it for me.

That night, after she was asleep, I called Patrick.

He answered on the first ring.

He sounded tired and clear.

"She asked if Ciaran's her daddy now," I said.

He was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped.

"What did you tell her?"

"The truth. That she has one." I looked at the ceiling. "But it should come from you too. Wednesday dinner. Here."

"Will he be there?"

"Yes."

Another long quiet.

"Okay," he said.

On Wednesday, two days before Christmas, Patrick came to Tricia's at six.

He came in jeans and a sweater, with a wrapped box under his arm and no watch.

He'd quit drinking the week after the lawn.

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