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“I am tired.”
“Sit. Talk to me.”
We sit. He doesn’t rush me. He asks about Nationals first, genuinely interested, and I tell him the short version — the win, the modified routine, nothing yet about why I wasn’t on the mat for it — and he listens with real attention before he lets the silence settle and waits for whatever I actually called him here for.
“Your mother wanted to come,” he says, into the quiet. “I told her this needed to just be us. She wasn’t happy about it, but she trusted me on it. I told her you needed your father right now, and whatever this was, it deserved my full attention without anyone else in the room.”
“Thank you.”
“Your sister, for what it’s worth, dropped out of school.” He says it plainly, a flicker of something disapproving crossing his face before he sets it aside. “Two weeks ago. She’s spending her days planning the wedding with your mother instead. I’m not thrilled about it — I raised her to finish what she starts, same as I raised you — but that’s a conversation for another day. It’s not why I’m here.” He looks at me steady, deliberate. “Today is about you. I want you to know that clearly before you say anything else. Whatever this is, I’m here for you specifically. Not managing two daughters at once, not trying to be equally available to both of you the way I’ve always tried to be. Just you. Right now. That’s the whole reason I’m sitting in this chair.”
Something in my chest loosens at that, small but real — the specific relief of being chosen instead of balanced.
I take a breath. “I’m pregnant, Daddy.”
His face doesn’t do the thing I braced for. No shock frozen in place, no scramble to find the right response. Just a quiet, absorbing stillness, the specific quality of a man who has spent thirty years learning to receive difficult information without letting his face do anything until he’s actually processed it.
“How far along?” he asks. Gentle.
“Ten weeks. I’m due November fourteenth.” I hold his eyes. “It’s twins. Identical, like me and Maddison.”
That gets a real reaction — his eyebrows lift, something startled and warm moving across his face at once. “Twins.”
“I know.”
“Well.” He sits back, absorbing it, and then leans forward again, his hand finding mine on the table, warm and certain. “Okay. Twins. We’ll figure that part out too.”
After a moment, “Whose?” he asks, not accusatory. Just necessary.
“Theo’s.”
He nods, slow, like he’s not surprised, which somehow doesn’t surprise me either — my father has always read people faster than he lets on.
“How did he take it?”
I tell him the truth. All of it — the six weeks I carried it alone, the decision to wait until after Nationals, finding out about the twins, driving straight to Raven House and telling him plain, the specific devastating quiet that followed instead of anger. I tell him about the six-weeks question, about Theo naming the parallel to his own father, about the wall coming down between us in a way I’ve never seen before.
“He said he needs more time,” I finish. My voice catches. “That’s the last thing he told me. Four days ago. I don’t know where we stand, Daddy. I don’t know if he wants this — wants me — anymore. I did something that hurt him in exactly the place he’s most wounded, and I don’t know if that’s a thing you come back from.”
My dad is quiet for a long moment. Then he leans forward, covers my hand with both of his, and holds it there, steady.
“I met that young man in Charleston,” he says. “I sat with him on the back porch and I watched him tell me things about my own family I hadn’t let myself hear from anyone else. He told me you deserved to be chosen, and that nobody had ever done it. He wasn’t intimidated by this house or by me or by anything else in that moment. He said it because it was true and he thought it needed saying.” He squeezes my hand. “That is not a young man who disappears when something gets hard, Margo. He might need time. That’s fair — you handed him something enormous without warning, and he’s allowed to need time to catch up to it. But needing time isn’t the same as leaving. I don’t think that boy has it in him to leave. Not really. Not after everything I saw in him.”
“You don’t know that for certain.”
“No,” he admits. “I don’t. Nobody knows anything for certain. But I know what I saw, and what I saw was a young man who’s spent his whole life determined not to become his father. That kind of determination doesn’t evaporate the first time something gets difficult. If anything, I’d bet it gets sharper.” He holds my eyes. “We’ll figure it out. Whatever happens with him, whatever he decides once he’s had his time — you are not facing any of this alone. Not the babies, not school, not any of it. I’m here. That’s not conditional on anything.”
I feel my eyes burn, the tears arriving fast and unguarded, and I don’t try to manage them the way I’ve managed everything else for six weeks. I just let them come, sitting across from my father in a coffee shop two blocks from home, and he doesn’t look away or grow uncomfortable — he just holds my hand and lets me cry.
We talk logistics after, once I’ve composed myself, because that’s how my father shows love best — not just holding space for the feeling, but building the actual scaffolding underneath it.
“You’ll defer your studies,” he says. Not a question, but not a command either — the specific tone of a man laying out an option he’s confident I’ll agree with. “A year. Maybe less, depending how things go. Law school will still be there. It’s not going anywhere.”
“I was going to do my internship in Boston this summer.”
“Do it.” He says it immediately, no hesitation. “You’re due in November, a summer internship is entirely manageable. You’ll need to be sensible about it, listen to your doctor, but there’s no reason growing this family means abandoning the rest of your life. We’re not doing that. Not for you.”
“What about after? The fall?”
