Chapter 7 - Learning to Show UpOne dramatic choice could not repair everything.
The following morning, Simone handed me a parenting schedule prepared by her attorney. "Supervised visits first."
"I'm their father."
"Biology isn't a résumé, Julian. To them, you're still someone they barely know."
I signed it.
During our first visit, Wesley made me crawl through a plastic tunnel at a children's museum while wearing a yellow construction helmet. Another visitor recognized me, and by evening, photographs of the famously composed Julian Ashford squeezed inside a toy sewer pipe were circulating online.
My public relations team panicked. I framed one of the photographs.
At our second visit, Josephine barely acknowledged me for forty minutes before handing me Oliver while she went down a slide. Simone whispered, "She almost never lets anyone hold him." I protected that stuffed rabbit as carefully as I had ever protected anything.
At the fifth visit, Wesley called me Daddy. At the eighth, Josephine fell asleep against my chest. I stayed almost perfectly still for nearly two hours because I didn't want the moment to end sooner than necessary.
Ashford Dynamics survived. The share price declined, recovered, and dropped again when the investigations became public. Desmond left following an internal misconduct agreement, Bertram Locke cooperated with investigators, and my father issued statements arguing that complicated events had been presented without proper context.
The records told their own story.
My mother eventually ended her marriage. At seventy, she purchased a modest home outside Santa Fe with a vegetable garden and no security gate. Wesley planted carrots there. Josephine planted three stones and confidently announced that they would grow. My mother assured her that perhaps they would.
Ridgemont remained independent. Six months later, Simone invited me to attend its annual conference. I sat in the third row — not as an executive or investor, but simply as Wesley and Josephine's father.
During Marguerite's presentation, a photograph of the twins inside neighboring incubators appeared on the screen. The next image showed an old photograph of Vivian. Marguerite described an early monitoring system that had generated a warning that wasn't fully acted upon. Then she explained that technology alone could never protect children; it could only provide important information early enough for people to respond.
May you like
Simone sat beside me. I started reaching toward her hand, then stopped myself. She noticed and gently placed her hand inside mine.
It was the first time she had chosen to touch me in more than three years.
