Page 82 of Rebooked For Us
The video ended. I tapped the next one before I could talk myself out of it.
Skye, further along now, belly out, sitting on a different couch in better light.
Cane, I met a real life Mrs. Juniper today. Guess what her daughter’s name is. Oh, we’re having a girl. Her daughter’s name is Cadence. I’m stealing it. It’s kind of like your name but not. Close enough. I want her to have as much of you as possible. I still miss you, but I gotta take care of our little one. She’s rambunctious already. Our day will come. I’ll keep recording for when it does. And if you’re watching this, the time is now. Do we have flying cars yet?
I leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
I kept going because I couldn’t stop.
This wasn’t a highlight reel. It was somewhere she’d been going to talk to me the whole time, the way other people wrote in a journal or prayed before bed.
I reached over and turned the volume down a notch, buying myself a second before Cadence could catch her daddy sitting here leaking like a faucet over videos.
The next one I came to was the day Cadence was born, her propping the phone up and talking to me through contractions. I smiled at her being tough as nails. My heart dropped once the video cut off mid-sentence. She must have stopped recording once things got real. I tapped the next one fast as hell.
“What an experience,” she said with tears in her eyes and a smile on her face.
Skye was in a hospital bed, skin glistening with sweat, hair matted to her forehead, exhausted but so fucking beautiful. A tiny pink hat came into view before my baby girl's face took up the screen.
“She’s beautiful, Ducane. Look at her.” She placed her on her chest and wrapped her arms around her. “Hey, you.” Her voice came out wrecked and soft at the same time. “You are sospecial. Do you know that? You don’t even know it yet, but you already changed my whole life, and you’re not even a day old.”
A nurse, off camera. “And what are we naming her, Mama?”
Skye held her back and looked right into the camera, right at me, for a long second before she answered.
“Cadence Noelle... Simmons.”
She hadn’t just kept a record. She’d been keeping me.
Kareem’s voice came back to me, loud as the day he said it in that front seat. ‘She did it scared, not cold. Don’t let the fear she had cost you the family you got waiting on you now.’
That was it. That was the whole thing right there. I’d spent the last few weeks with one foot in and one foot out, acting like I still had a decision to make. Truth was, I’d been holding back to punish her a little, or because that's what my father would’ve done, and some old, tired part of me still thought that made a man strong instead of just scared.
There wasn’t a decision to make. Not really.
I’d spent so much time trying to separate the hurt from the love that I forgot they’d always belonged to the same story.
I wanted my wife.
I wanted my daughter.
I wanted the life we’d almost had.
Cadence yawned, gave up on the Legos, and rested her head on my arm.
“You can watch the rest,” she mumbled, already drifting off. “Mommy won’t care.”
She got quiet for a second.
“Love you, Daddy.”
Before I could answer, she was asleep.
I kissed the top of her head and hit play.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
I wasn’t burning my life down to get back at my father, and I wasn’t leaving these two. Whatever it took, I was keeping them.
