“I wasn’t asking you to be ready,” she said. “I was asking myself to be.”
Daniel did not sleep that night. He drove through London until the city thinned into something quieter, his phone lighting up repeatedly with messages from Charlotte, his fiancée, asking where he was, whether he was safe, whether something was wrong. He did not know how to answer her. Something was wrong, but it was also, in a way he could not yet articulate, profoundly right.
Daniel’s life until that moment had been defined by order. Charlotte fit into it seamlessly. She was intelligent, composed, admired by his parents and trusted by his colleagues. Their engagement was the natural outcome of a relationship that had progressed according to expectation rather than urgency. Love, Daniel had believed, was something steady and reasonable, a mutual decision rather than a consuming force.
Fatherhood was neither steady nor reasonable.