PART 3
Eighteen years later, Nora and Callie were, without question, the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.
I worked two jobs for most of their childhood, skipped every vacation I might otherwise have taken, gave up every small luxury a single income might have afforded a man without two little girls depending on him. I’d do every single year of it over again without hesitation.
Last Friday, we celebrated their eighteenth birthday with the same dinner we’d had every year since they turned five — homemade lasagna, a store-bought cake they’d long ago decided beat anything I could bake myself, candles they insisted on blowing out together in one breath even now.
But something felt off that evening, some current running underneath the usual celebration that I couldn’t quite name.
After dinner, the two of them went upstairs together, which wasn’t unusual on its own, except for how long they stayed up there, twenty minutes stretching into thirty while I cleared the table alone, listening to the low murmur of their voices through the ceiling.
When they finally came back down, each of them was carrying one of the faded beach towels they’d been wrapped in the night I found them — towels I’d kept, all these years, folded carefully in a cedar chest at the foot of my bed, brought out only once a year on their birthday for the photo we always took together holding them.
They laid the towels carefully on the kitchen table, side by side.
