Stephen dropped the box.
It was wrapped in silver paper with a purple ribbon. He’d spent twenty minutes in a toy store picking out what was inside. He’d texted me a picture of the wrapping job from his car, very proud of himself. Look at these corners. Professional quality.
Now it hit the hallway floor with a soft thud and rolled against the baseboard.
He didn’t pick it up.
He was staring at my four-year-old daughter.
Lucy had come running around the corner from the living room, the way she always did when the doorbell rang. She’d skidded to a stop on the hardwood in her socks, right beside my leg. She was wearing the blue sundress she’d picked out herself, and two braids that had taken me half an hour to get right.
She looked up at him and smiled her shy little smile.
And Stephen, the calmest, steadiest man I’d ever dated, went white as a sheet.
“Oh no,” he whispered. “I know her.”
For a second, I thought I’d heard him wrong.
“What do you mean, you know her?”
He didn’t answer.
His eyes were fixed on Lucy. Not on me. On her. He was looking at her the way you’d look at a ghost.
Lucy pressed herself closer to my leg. She grabbed a fistful of my jeans.
“Mommy,” she whispered, “did I do something wrong?”
“No, sweetheart.” I bent down and hugged her. My heart was pounding. “No. You didn’t do anything wrong. Why don’t you go check on your crayons? I’ll be there in one minute.”
She looked up at Stephen one more time. Then she let go of my jeans and wandered slowly back into the living room, glancing over her shoulder twice.
I stood up.
“Stephen,” I said. “You’re scaring me.”
I need to back up and tell you how we got to that hallway.
Because if you’d told me an hour earlier that this night would go wrong, I’d have laughed at you. I’d been planning it for a month. I’d been nervous about it for a year.
My name is Claire. I’m thirty-two years old.
I have a four-year-old daughter named Lucy. She’s the best thing I’ve ever done. She has a laugh like a hiccup and she sleeps with her feet on my face and she’s convinced that the moon follows our car because it likes us.
I’ve been divorced from her father, Mark, for two years.
It wasn’t a dramatic divorce. Nobody threw dishes. Nobody cheated, not during the marriage anyway. We just got tired. We’d been trying to hold something together that kept slipping through our fingers, and one day we both looked at each other across the kitchen table and knew it was done.
Mark’s a good dad. I’ll say that about him forever. He has Lucy every other weekend and every Wednesday night, and he’s never missed one. Not once. He lives in an apartment fifteen minutes away with a blanket fort permanently set up in the living room.
But after the divorce, I made myself a rule.
No men around Lucy. Not unless it was serious. Not unless I was sure.
I’d seen it happen to other kids. A friend of mine from work had a parade of boyfriends through her house after her divorce, and her son would get attached to every single one, and then they’d disappear. He started asking every new man who came to the door, “Are you going to stay?”
I wasn’t going to do that to Lucy.
So I dated a little. Not much. Coffee here. Dinner there. A man from my gym who talked about protein powder for two hours. A dentist who cried about his ex-wife in the middle of our appetizers.
None of them ever got near my daughter. 