Page 50 of From Maybe to Baby

*Jonas, we need to get ahead of this story. The 'eligible single dad' angle is huge right now. Fans are loving the mystery woman angle. Call me ASAP.

I’m looking at my daughter, covered in ice cream but wearing her biggest smile, at my phone, promising drama I'm not ready for, and at the beautiful woman in my suite, and I realize I’m having a pretty good vacation.

After the icecream mess is cleaned up—two sets of sheets, one unicorn, and half our room towels—I find Alexa back out on the balcony. She's made herself comfortable in one of the loungers, feet tucked under her like she belongs there.

Like this isn't just work anymore. Like she might be on vacation. Enjoying herself.

"Crisis averted?" she asks, making room as I join her.

"Mostly. Though that mattress will never be the same."

"The hazards of parenthood?"

"One of many." I settle next to her, careful to maintain some distance, though that seems to matter less and less. "The ice cream ambush is new. Usually it's just Legos in unexpected places or finding chicken nuggets in my hockey bag."

"The silent killers of parental feet everywhere?"

"Speaking from experience?"

"Ha, no." she says. “How’d you meet your wife?”

“Genny made that part easy. We met at a children's charity event—I was there as the team's representative and she was coordinating the whole thing."

"Love at first sight?"

"Love at first disaster, more like. I knocked over an entire display of signed memorabilia trying to impress her. Premium items too—signed jerseys, collector's pucks, the works."

"Smooth."

"Oh, it gets better. I tried to catch a falling trophy, and ended up taking out a cardboard cutout of myself in the process. She looked at the mess, looked at me, and said 'Good thing you're better at hockey than walking.' Then she made me clean up my mess while giving me detailed stats about childhood literacy rates."

Alexa laughs—that full, deep laugh that’s beginning to turn my insides.

"She sounds cool."

"Yeah. She was. She had everything planned out—our wedding, our kids, our future. She even had a binder for our first family vacation, color-coded by activity type.'" I swallow hard. "We never made it to that one. Well, we did, but it was without her. And it sucked."

Alexa's hand finds mine in the dark. She doesn't say "I'm sorry" or offer platitudes. Just sits with me in the quiet.

"It was so fast," I find myself saying. "One minute we were planning Disney World, debating whether Lukas was old enough for Space Mountain, and the next... the doctors said she probably never felt pain. That it was quick. Like that's supposed to make it better."

"Does it?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes I think about her last morning—she was teaching Lukas a new song, something about dinosaurs, as usual. She was so alive. And then she wasn’t.”

Alexa squeezes my hand. "Do the kids remember her?"

"They were so young. Lukas sometimes says he remembers her laugh, but I think he just remembers me talking about it. And Jace..." I trail off, thinking of my daughter's earliercomment about Alexa's smile. "She knows Genny through stories. Through photos. Through the way people talk about her. Sometimes she'll do something, make this particular face when she's concentrating, and it's pure Genny."

"That's remembering," Alexa says.

Before I can respond, my phone lights up with a video request from Gloria.

"Speaking of remembering... can I grab this call from my mother-in-law?"

Alexa nods and I answer the call, my mother-in-law's face filling the screen.

"Hello Jonas... oh I see you have a friend visiting?"

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