Page 108 of Sexting My Ex’s Dad

So I do. “I’ll live wherever the two of you build your life,” I say. “Boston. Portland. The moon if your school has a campus there. I’m not precious about geography.”

That earns me a real laugh from Athena, warm and helpless and exactly the sound I wanted.

Ivy nods like I finally got to the point. “Good,” she says. “Then it’s settled.”

Athena rubs a hand over her mouth, still smiling. “You are six.”

“I’m clever,” Ivy replies.

That conversation opens the door to the real one.

Athena comes back the next afternoon with a legal pad, her laptop, and the kind of expression that means she has already made peace with hard work if the outcome is worth it. Ivy sits at the foot of my bed with a packet of crayons and intermittently contributes opinions no one asked for.

We talk through everything.

Housing first.

Athena doesn’t want to stay in the Airbnb forever, which is fair. I tell her my place is too far from where she’ll likely want Ivy’s school and too tied to old routines anyway. That surprises her.

“You’d leave it that easily?” she asks.

I glance at her over the top of the discharge packet Daniel insisted I read. “Athena, I nearly got beaten to death and all I could think when I woke up was your name. My attachment to a zip code is not the headline here.”

She gets teary but doesn’t show it.

School comes next.

The Boston branch of Ivy’s school network is real, and better, there’s room mid-term because one family relocated abruptly two weeks ago. Athena has already looked into the transfer policies, which does not surprise me at all. She’s got the intake forms half-filled before I finish reading the first page.

Ivy peers over the bedrail. “Do I have to wear a different uniform?”

Athena glances at the form. “Looks like same colors. Different logo.”

Ivy thinks about that. “Acceptable.”

I have to turn my face slightly so neither of them sees me smiling like an idiot.

Then there’s me.

I still have Hawthorne calling, emailing, circling politely around the question of when I’m coming back. The answer grows clearer each day I lie in that hospital bed watching Athena sort school paperwork and Ivy draw animals that all somehow resemble me.

One evening, after Ivy falls asleep in the recliner with her cheek against Athena’s arm and her shoes still on, Athena looks at me over our daughter’s head and says, “You don’t have to decide everything for us.”

I keep my voice low. “I know.”

“You sound like a man about to do it anyway.”

“That’s since I am.”

Her eyes narrow slightly, though there’s no heat in it. “Nathan.”

I lean forward as much as the bruising allows. “I’ve given enough years to work that would replace me in six weeks and miss me in twelve. I’m not sentimental about that anymore.”

Athena studies my face in that quiet, exacting way she does when she’s deciding whether I’m saying something dramatic or something true. “So what are you sentimental about.”

I look at her. At Ivy. At the paperwork spread across the tray table. At the half-finished drawing with three figures standing in front of a house.

“This,” I say.