Zach nods like a good little soldier and resists running across the marble floor. When we reach the elevator, his eyes light up with glee. “Can I press the button?”
Things I don’t understand about kids—the need to be the one to press the elevator buttons. “Were you helpful with your grandmother this weekend?”
“I set the table for dinner,” he says earnestly.
That’s good. “And were you polite with your grandfather?”
“I thanked him for the tree house,” he says.
Stroking my chin like I’m weighing his good deeds, I finally say, “You can press it then.”
“Sweet!” He stabs the penthouse button, and a minute later, we’re off and he’s rushing down the hall to my brother’s home. I should tell him to stop, but fuck it. I ran like a demon as a kid too. I don’t mind seeing his rocket-fueled feet.
He raps on the door three times, but Nick answers on the second one, holding a couple of pool noodles in each hand. “Look what I got,” he says, looking far too pleased.
Dammit. I wish I’d thought of noodles, but Nick’s been at this parenting thing a lot longer than I have.
“Noodles!” Zach shouts, a battle cry for fun. He asks if he can go change, and Nick points to the guest bathroom. Zach scurries off, and I shut the penthouse door behind us.
“Noodles are the way to a kid’s heart, I guess.” I make a mental note.
“Well, pools are too. Hell, your pool in Miami is still the way to my thirty-nine-year-old heart,” he says.
I do like that infinity pool in my second home. Could even see playing a pool guy scene there with my naughty piano player, pretending she owns the place, and I found her sunbathing with her top off, and she begged me to service her…
But I shake off those thoughts.
There’s a time and place for those, and it is not when I’m about to pull on swim trunks.
Since there’s no downtime with a busy seven-year-old, the three of us head to the indoor pool a few minutes later. Nick’s building has one and the price tag reflects it.
Works for me.
Zach jumps in first, all limbs and elbows as he splashes. I’m right behind him, making a bigger splash.
Things I’ve learned in the last few months of trial-by-fire parenting—you can’t walk into a pool with a kid. You must make an epic entrance.
He surfaces, laughing at the big waves, then turns to my brother on the ledge. “Do a cannonball, Uncle Nick!”
Like anyone needs to ask my brother twice. He heads to the deep end and complies, making a tsunami across the chlorinated water. Zach paddles to the edge, grabs his goggles, and yanks in one noodle.
“Takes after me,” Nick says, and he sounds as proud as I am, even though he’s got a kid of his own. But Nick was a swimmer in high school and college, and like me, he’s enjoying finding the similarities between us and this new addition to the Adams family. “It’s still wild to see you with a kid.”
“Yeah, it is to me too,” I say, with fondness for this new life, but some sadness, too, over how it happened.
Last summer, my wife of six years left me. We’d spent years in therapy, so the demise of our marriage was a surprise to no one, including me. The big surprise in life came a few months later.
I was running on the High Line with my buddy Tate when my phone rang with a Westchester County number. I answered it in case it was one of our portfolio clients for the venture firm, but the voice on the line was a stranger.
“This is Candace Irving. Any chance you were in Rome in September eight years ago?”
Startled, I stopped running. The surreal question belonged in the opening scene of a page-turning thriller. The kind where someone’s identity is stolen, his life hacked, his world upended.
I sat on a bench, my heart racing faster. Tate joined me while this woman I didn’t know shared more details, beginning with the fact that she was Nina Irving’s mother.
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I hadn’t known her last name. Nina was simply the captivating free spirit of a woman I met one night in Rome way back when. I was thirty-two, traveling for business. I met her in a piazza, and we spent one glorious night together. I knew very little about her except that she was an American working in Europe as a wedding and boudoir photographer, but she’d impulsively taken the weekend off to go to Rome with friends. By the end of the evening, she’d been in my hotel room.
In the morning, she was gone, catching her flight to Amsterdam where she had work for the week.
One hot night. Only first names. Nothing more.
Except, it wasn’t just that.
As I learned from Candace, Nina wound up pregnant. She tried to find me, but not very hard, they said. With only a first name, she had no success, though she knew I worked in venture capital and lived in New York. But the free spirit in her believed everything was meant to be, that she was destined to be a single mother. Her parents believed otherwise, and when Nina died of a brain aneurysm when Zach was five, they became his guardians and took on the mission of tracking me down, eventually finding a news article online about a deal my company had inked in Rome right around the time when I’d have met Nina.
“We want him to know his father,” Candace said simply.
The skeptical part of me figured they wanted his father’s money too. That since they knew who I was, they’d want a payoff.
But they never asked. They wanted Zach to know his father and to be raised by him in tandem with them. One paternity test later, and I was sharing custody with the retired bankers in Connecticut.
Life is weird. I’m forty and a new dad to a seven-year-old. This is everything I’d wanted during my marriage—and it came after.
Zach tosses me a noodle and issues an order. “Chase me on my seahorse. Both of you,” he says.
Well, then.
Nick and I comply, motoring after him until Nick’s fiancée strides into the pool area. Nick pops off and swims to the edge of the pool. He parks his elbows on it, a stupidly swoony look on his face—which is how he looks every time he sees Layla. “You off to the store?” he asks her.
“I have a quick sesh,” she says, then gives him a playful pout. She runs several makeup shops and does in-store makeup tutorials. “Then, it’s poker night.”
“Be sure to win big, sweetheart. Come home with the whole pot,” he says to her.
“I’ll take my girls for everything.”
Nick wags a finger. “And don’t let Jules beat you this time.”
She heaves a sigh. “Hey! It’s not my fault. She has the best poker face in the group.”
“No, you do, beautiful. You do.”
With his pep talk done, she stands and waves to me. “Have fun swimming,” she calls out.
“Good luck with the card sharking,” I say. “And taking your friends’ money.”
“I’ll do my best,” she says, then leaves. When I spin around, Nick’s back on a noodle, paddling toward Zach.
Ah, hell.
I can’t resist.
I catch up to him quickly, then mouth to Zach, watch this.
I drop my hand on Nick’s head and dunk my little brother—younger by a year. Zach cracks up, and the sound is wholly gratifying.
When Nick resurfaces, he narrows his eyes. “You’ll pay for that.”