And, most importantly: no lying.
So he’d told her the truth, as gently as he could, and then he’d taken his emotions to the shower and cried them out under a fall of water so hot it was almost painful.
Not as painful as the truth, though.
That this was precisely what Adam had been trying to avoid: bringing another adult into Gus’ life that she admired—no, loved—and that person abandoning her. He cursed himself for bringing this pain into Gus’ life.
But when the water started to lose heat, so did his temper, and he wept a gentler kind of tears—these for himself. Because the truth was that he’d fallen in love with a kind, brilliant, sweet, gorgeous, weird man whom he’d thought might love him too. Might love Gus. Might want to make a family with them.
And he’d been wrong.
So wrong.
The worst kind of wrong. The kind that sucker punched the breath from your lungs and left only emptiness in its place.
* * *
Adam had to work the next day and River had been going to hang out with Gus, but Gus was feeling tender and begged to come to work with him instead. She promised that she wouldn’t be any trouble and that she’d read in the back, so Adam texted Charlie and got his okay.
It was three days till Christmas.
Gus had cheered a little at the rare opportunity to hang out in Matheson’s, but as they pulled out of the driveway, both their eyes went to Wes’ house.
The paper, which had come down window by window over the last weeks, almost without Adam’s notice, was back, and the whole place had an air of remoteness about it once more.
Adam realized that once he got to know Wes he’d stopped thinking of his house as creepy or sad. It was just the place where Wes did his experiments and had his brilliant ideas. The home of Wes’ unusual menagerie that Gus loved.
That Wes hadn’t cared about keeping up the landscaping or the exterior paint made sense—he just had other things he cared about.
Unfortunately, Adam wasn’t one of them anymore.
The pain hit again and Adam cringed in the driver’s seat.
Gus fell silent and fidgeted with the fringe on her scarf.
As they turned onto the main road, snow falling softly, the snowy mountains in the distance glowing against the blue sky, Gus said, “It’s the lights.”
“What’s the lights, sweetie?”
“The lights made Wes go away.”
Something more delicate than pain clawed at Adam’s guts and he pulled the car over to the side of the road and faced his daughter.
“Baby, no.”
“I wanted the most lights to have fun without Papa, and that’s what made Wes help us, and then when we got a lot, it made him leave.”
Her lip was trembling, and Adam realized that this was what she’d been holding on to since he told her: guilt.
“Listen to me, Gus. Wes didn’t leave because of the lights, or anything else because of you. Wes thinks you’re great. In fact, we got to know Wes because he thought you were so cool and smart and interesting.”
Slash because you broke into his house, Adam added to himself, knowing someday they’d laugh about that. About the time Adam dated the neighbor for a few months because Gus pulled a B&E.
Gus sniffed miserably.
“I think they’re magic,” she said, like she hadn’t heard him at all.
“I didn’t think you believed in magic,” Adam said gently.
She shook her head and when she looked back up at him it was with his sister’s eyes. Eyes far too old for an eight-year-old.
“Maybe you don’t have to believe in things for them to be real,” she said in a haunted voice. “Just like sometimes you can believe things really a lot, and they never become real.”
This was the saddest thing he’d ever heard Gus say.
“Is there something you believed in a lot that didn’t become real?” he forced himself to say, dreading her answer.
But Gus just looked at him with those ancient eyes and said, “Never mind, Dad.”
She’d never called him Dad before.
* * *
True to her word, Gus read in Charlie’s office the whole morning. At lunchtime, Charlie showed up with a stack of pizzas for everyone in the store. The waft of hot cheese lured Gus out, and they enjoyed a pleasant hour eating and chatting.
As the pizza boxes were cleared away, Gus turned big eyes on Charlie and said, “Can I please have a job?”
For a moment, Charlie’s eyes got as big as Gus’ and Adam could see him working out how to let her down easy by citing child labor laws.
“I think she means a job to do for the afternoon,” Adam murmured.
“Oh.” Charlie looked relieved. “Sure thing. Let me introduce you to the different sizes of nails.”
Gus’ eyes lit up and she followed Charlie eagerly.
“Thanks, Charlie,” Adam said when he returned, Gus happily sorting the bins of nails and humming along with Christmas carols on the radio. “Um. Wes broke up with me. Us. Me.”