Chapter 32 Where I Come From

Chapter 32 Where I Come From
It started the way most best conversations always did between us — sideways, without planning, in the middle of something just ordinary.

We were in Chase's kitchen on a Sunday afternoon. Karen had taken Micah to a birthday party two streets away and the house had that particular quiet that only existed when Micah was not in it — noticeable, slightly wrong, like a song missing one of its instruments. Chase was making tea because it was something does when he wanted to do something with his hands and I was sitting on the counter watching him and we had been talking about nothing for twenty minutes in the comfortable way we had built over months of exactly this.

Then he asked, completely casually, "Do you ever talk to your dad?"

The question landed softly. But then he had no way of knowing what it carried. I looked at my hands in my lap. "No," I said.

"He's not around?"

"He was never around." I kept my voice even. "He died the day I was born."

Chase turned from the counter. He looked at me with the full attention he always gave things that mattered and I watched him absorb it — the weight of it, the specific shape of a loss that had been present my entire life without me ever having experienced the thing I was losing.

"Zara," he said quietly.

"It's okay," I said immediately. The reflex. The practiced deflection. "I never knew him so it's not like—"

"It's not okay," he said firmly. 

"Don't do that." I looked at him.

"Then don't shrink it," he said. "Don't make it smaller so I'm more comfortable with it."

I pressed my lips together.

He left the tea and came to stand in front of me where I was sitting on the counter so we were at eye level. He didn't say anything. Just waiting with that specific Chase patience that I had come to understand meant he had all the time in the world and was not going anywhere.

"My mom was in labor for nineteen hours," I said finally. "That's what she told me when I was old enough to ask. Nineteen hours and at the end of it I was here and he wasn't." I looked at the kitchen window. "Complications. That's the word she always used. Complications." I exhaled slowly. "His name was Adaeze. Well — that was his family name. He was Nigerian. My grandmother on his side traced the family back to a village in Enugu state." I paused. "That's where my middle name comes from. Adaeze. It means daughter of the king in Igbo."

Chase was completely still.

"I used to think about that a lot when I was younger," I said. "Daughter of the king. And I'd look at myself in the mirror and think — this is what a king's daughter looks like. This body, this skin, this face." I stopped. "And then someone would say something at school and the thought would just — disappear. And I would forget it again until the next time I needed it."

"What did he look like?" Chase asked. His voice was very quiet.

"I have one photo. My mom kept it in a box under her bed for years. I found it when I was twelve and she let me keep it." I looked at my hands. "He was tall. Dark skin, darker than me. He had this smile that looked like it was always about to happen, like he was always a second away from finding something funny." I paused. "I look like him around the eyes apparently. My mom told me that once and then didn't mention it again for a long time."

"She loved him," Chase said.

"She never really stopped," I said. "I think that's part of why birthdays were always — quiet. Between us. She never said it but I think every November fourteenth she was carrying two things at the same time. Me arriving and him leaving. And I always understood that even when I was little. Before I had words for it." I looked at Chase directly. "That's why I never got angry at her for forgetting. Because I always knew the day was complicated for her in a way it could never be for me."

Chase looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached out and put both hands on my face. "Listen to me," he said.

I held his gaze.

"Your arrival was not a cost," he said. "It was not a transaction where something had to be lost for you to exist. You did not take anything from anyone by being born." His voice was steady and certain and left no room for the versions of this story I had been telling myself in quiet moments since I was old enough to understand what the word complications meant. "You are here. You are completely and exactly here. And the man in that photo with the smile that was always about to happen — I think he would look at who you are and feel nothing but proud."

My eyes filled completely.

I didn't fight it this time.

"Chase—"

"Daughter of the king," he said quietly. "Don't forget that."

The tears came over and he pulled me into him and I let him, my arms around his waist and my face against his shoulder, and he held on the way he held on when it mattered — completely, without reservation, like he was trying to transfer some of the certainty he had about me directly through the contact.

I stayed there for a while.

Let the kitchen be quiet around us.

Let the feeling of being held by someone who had just heard the heaviest thing and not moved an inch settle into me properly.

When I pulled back I wiped my face with the back of my hand and he watched me do it with that expression — open and full and entirely his.

"I've never told anyone that," I said. "About the complications. About what I used to think looking in the mirror."

"I know," he said.

"How do you know?"

"Because you said it like something that had been kept somewhere for a long time." He brushed a remaining tear from my cheek with his thumb. "Thank you for telling me."

I looked at him.

This boy who always said thank you for the things most people would just receive without acknowledging. Who understood that being trusted with something was not a small thing.

"The Nigerian heritage," he said after a moment. "Enugu state. Have you ever looked into it more?"

"A little. My grandmother on his side — I've never met her. She's still alive apparently. In Lagos now." I paused. "My mom has her contact information somewhere. She's mentioned it a few times but we've never—" I stopped. "It never felt like the right time."

"Maybe it's getting closer to the right time," Chase said simply.

I thought about that.

About a woman in Lagos who had a son with a smile that was always about to happen and who had grandchildren she had never met.

About roots that went deeper than Westbridge and university hallways and cruel notes on lockers.

About who Zara Owens was before the world started having opinions about her.

"Maybe," I said.

We went for a walk an hour later.

Not planned — Chase just said come on and held the door open and I put my jacket on and we went. That was one of the things about us that I had quietly come to love. The absence of elaborate planning. The ease of just — going.

The neighborhood was quiet Sunday afternoon. Leaves on the pavement from a week ago that nobody had swept yet. A cat sitting on a wall watching us pass with the sovereign indifference that belonged specifically to cats. Two children on bikes at the end of the road doing something that looked dangerous and completely intentional.

We walked with our hands together and said things when they occurred to us and didn't say things when they didn't and the cold was the comfortable kind.

"Adaeze," Chase said after a while. Trying the word out. "Daughter of the king."

"Don't make it weird," I said.

"I'm not making it weird. I'm saying it." He looked at me sideways. "It suits you."

"You've never heard it before today."

"Doesn't matter. It suits you." He said it with the complete certainty he brought to the things he had decided were true. "Strong. Specific. Not like anything else."

I looked at the pavement.

"You are so—" I stopped.

"What."

"Relentless," I said. "You are completely relentless."

"About you specifically," he said without any embarrassment whatsoever.

I stopped walking.

He stopped too and turned to face me and we were standing on the pavement in the Sunday afternoon cold with the cat still watching from the wall and the children on bikes in the distance and the light doing the thing it did in late November where everything looked like it was being seen for the last time before winter arrived properly.

He looked at me, I looked back and then I reached up and kissed him.

Not because he had said the right thing — although he had. Not because I was grateful — although I was but because I wanted to. Because standing on this pavement in this light with this specific person felt like something worth marking. Worth choosing deliberately.

He kissed me back with both hands in my hair and the cold air around us and the cat judging us silently from the wall and none of it mattered except the warmth of it, the specific warmth of being kissed by someone who knew the heaviest thing about you and had not moved an inch.

When we pulled back he rested his forehead against mine.

"Daughter of the king," he said again. Quietly just for me.

I pressed my hand flat against his chest and felt his heartbeat under my palm.

"Thank you," I said. "For not making it so little."

"Never," he said. "Not once."

We stood there a moment longer in the cold. Then we walked home with our hands together.

And the cat watched us go.