I moved into an apartment on Ferrin Avenue in September. Two bedrooms, because I needed one of them.
People ask why I didn’t stay through the case at least, for Ava’s sake, and the answer is that I asked Ava. In August, in the car, straight out, whether she wanted me in that house.
She said, “I want you where you’re not pretending.”
Sixteen years old.
I still drive Ava to volleyball.
She came back to the club team in January. Daniel takes Tuesdays and Thursdays and I take Saturdays, and she is in my passenger seat every Saturday morning at seven fifteen with a bagel, and we mostly talk about absolutely nothing, and that is the entire point.
She asked me once, in the car, why I hadn’t just told her father in November.
I told her the truth. That I had been trying so hard not to be one more adult who took a decision away from her that I became an adult who left her holding it, and that those two things feel identical from the inside and are not the same, and that if she remembers one thing from any of this it should be that.
