Page 20 of The Incredible Ordinary

“How old is your brother?”

Ah.

“Thirty-four.”

He hums and nods. “The early nineties were a busy time for your father, then.”

I let out a startled laugh.

“Insensitive?” he asks with a grimace.

“I welcome that.”

He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. His arm brushes against mine.

It feels nice. Somehow less alone, even if I don’t want to admit that the loneliness is there in the first place. I’m independent. It’s something I’ve always been proud of. That no matter what comes my way, I can handle it on my own. If I’mout of my depth, I swim. Independence is mything. It’s how I survive.

This is the first time in my life I’ve been lost like this, but for a moment, thanks to the feel of this relative stranger’s shoulder against mine, I almost feel calm. More like myself.

“He died suddenly?” Jordan asks. “Your father.”

“It was a heart attack. I hadn’t talked to him in years, so I don’t know if there were signs.” I blow out a breath. “Sorry for dumping all of this on you.” I rub my hand over my head. “This probably sounds pretty damn pathetic to you.”

“What do you mean?”

I wave my palm up and down him. “I don’t know if you know this, but you seem very much in control of your life.”

He hums thoughtfully. “I think as humans we’re all pretty much a mess. Just that it comes with spikes in messiness. You’re catching me at one of my better moments.”

I look down at my feet and shake my head before I glance at him again. “I don’t believe you.”

“I had a baby at fifteen,” he says dryly. “There have been a lot of messy moments between then and now. A plethora of parenting fails that you will never have to commit with Rory. Everything from locking your baby inside the house by accident and then having to break in through the side window while the paranoid lady from across the street calls the cops on you, to dropping a plate of pancakes on your kid’s head.”

I snort out a laugh.

Jordan grins at me. “The glamorous life of a single parent.”

On the field, the kids have divided into two teams.

“What happened to Theo’s mom?” I ask.

Jordan’s gaze locks somewhere on the distance.

“Life got in the way,” he says, but doesn’t explain what happened.

I’m curious, but I don’t want to drive him away. Speaking to him—or, more accurately, dumping all my problems on him—has been the most human I’ve felt in a long while.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I say. “It’s personal. I get it.”

He scrubs his fingers through his hair and squints thoughtfully. “Eh. Tit for tat, I suppose. It’s not a very interesting story. We met when we were in first grade, Kira and me. She was the most serious-looking girl I’d ever seen. Very determined and very opinionated. Forced to grow up very quickly because she had her little brother to take care of and their mom was about as flaky as they come. We hit it off. Best friends from the start, then middle school sweethearts. I don’t know if we even went on a single proper date. We just did everything together. She was my first everything. First kiss. First love. First… other things,” he says, corners of his lips tipping up slightly before he rolls his eyes. “I figured she was it for me. Then she got pregnant.” He stares into the distance, transported into some other moment in time. It takes him a minute to return. He sends me a mirthless grin. “It’s scary as shit. I imagine it’s scary as shit even if you plan to have a kid. If it happens at fifteen and without a plan…” He shakes his head and shrugs. “We were both kids, which in our case translated into idiots, so we hid the pregnancy from everybody and sort of pretended it wasn’t happening. Remy—that’s my dad, he eventually figured it out and sat us both down. By then it was already so late that we were out of all options other than having a kid, so Theo was born. Kira was ready to give him up for adoption, but… It was like love at first sight for me. I had no idea what I was doing, I just knew that this little bundle of blankets was my little boy, and I didn’t trust anybody else with him, and it was up to me to give him the best possible life. I’ve been trying ever since.”

He spreads his arms wider, hands clutching the edge of the railing. “I’d like to think we were on the same page in thebeginning. We tried to make it work. For a while. And then we ended. With a college acceptance email on a laptop screen.” He gives another one of those mirthless laughs. “I was supposed to see it. She got angry at me and said I was snooping. I wasn’t. She wantedme to see it. Because, like with everything by that point in time, Kira and I lived in two different realities.

“In hers, we were high school sweethearts. And how do those stories usually end? With college acceptance letters to schools on different sides of the country, or at the very least, in different states. And sure, we’d promise to ‘make it work,’ but in the end we’d do the long-distance thing until Christmas break if we were lucky, cry a bit—more for the nostalgia of all those firsts we’d shared than the relationship itself—and call it quits. And years down the line, we’d remember each other fondly from time to time.”

He glances at me with the kind of wistfulness in his eyes that only comes with experience. The kind life imprints on you.

“In mine… in mine we had a son. In mine we were connected for all eternity no matter what.” He presses his lips into a thin line for a second before he meets my gaze. “I don’t want to make it sound like leaving us was on her. She stayed for a while, and I was perfectly aware that this wasn’t what she had planned for herself. It’s just… I wanted Theo. He was mine. And anyway, Kira was always the more ambitious one. The smarter one. The realist. And I knew just as well as she did that she’d do great things provided she got a chance. She said we’d do long-distance. Never mind that you can’t be in a long-distance relationship with a three-year-old. I said we’d go with her, but… Well, the acceptance letter wasn’t an obstacle to cross for the three of us. She’d already made up her mind. She was just clueing me in on the plan.”