Chapter 1 - The Girl Who Kept Asking When Daddy Was Coming Home
My 4-Year-Old Daughter Pointed At My Boss's Head And Swore Her Dead Daddy Was Hiding There — The Reason Why Left Me Shaking On His Pool Deck
My daughter had said a lot of heartbreaking things in the year since her father died. This one stopped my heart mid-beat.
I was standing at the edge of Warren's pool, my wine glass sweating in my hand, staring at the back of his ear while Ella's voice looped in my head like a skipping record.
"Mommy, Daddy's there."
I couldn't shake it loose. I couldn't even breathe right.
Let me back up.
My name is Nora. I'm thirty-seven. A year ago, cancer took my husband, Danny, and left me alone with our daughter, Ella, who was three then and is four now. Most nights she still curls into my side and asks, "When is Daddy coming home?" I still don't have a good answer.
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Warren was Danny's oldest friend. Our families had known each other for about ten years, but the two of them went back much further than that — roommates in college, then two decades of backyard cookouts, fishing trips, and jokes nobody else understood.
He was also, for better or worse, my boss at Hale & Barrett. Warren Hale. His name was on the door.
After the funeral, Warren just kept turning up. Groceries on my porch. A new washer when mine died and I couldn't afford to think about it. Some evenings I'd wake up on the couch, wrung out from a day of pretending to be fine, and find him cross-legged on the rug building Lego castles with Ella so I could sleep another twenty minutes.
I was grateful. Deeply, embarrassingly grateful.
"You know he doesn't have to do any of that," my coworker Kayla said the morning before the pool party. She'd cornered me in the office kitchen with two mugs of coffee and a look on her face.
"He's being kind, Kayla."
"Nora, listen to me." She dropped her voice. "You're a widow. A young one. On his payroll. And he's at your house three nights a week fixing your sink and reading bedtime stories. Nobody's being nasty about it. But people are counting."
"Then let them count."
"I'm not worried about them. I'm worried about what it does to your name here. To how people see you."
I told her she was overthinking it and went back to my desk. But her words stuck to me like a burr in a sweater, and I couldn't pick them off.
That afternoon Warren invited the whole firm to his house for a pool party. He told me to bring Ella, because he knew I had no sitter.
"She'll love the pool," he said. "And she loves my kitchen anyway. Every time you two come over she tries to walk off with Danny's old travel mug."
I laughed, because it was true. Warren had kept Danny's beat-up mug from their college road trip and used it every single morning. Ella would toddle straight to his counter and reach for it like it was a piece of her dad she could hold.
May you like
"That mug's hers whenever she wants it," he added, quieter.
I remember thinking, God, we're lucky to have him. And right behind that thought came another one I didn't like: are we, though?
