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DAVID
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“DADDY, DADDY, DADDY! Uncle Brian told us you were coming!” Adam comes running up to me, and I swoop him up in the air, causing him to laugh and squeal.
“And how did Uncle Brian know I’d be here?”
“’Cause Mommy had planned it.” Brian comes in laughing with Kevin right behind him with a sleeping Clara in his arms.
She wakes up, rubbing her eyes, and looks at me. “Daddy?”
“Hey, sweet pea.” I smile and reach for her. She climbs into my arms and rests her head on my shoulder.
“I missed you, Daddy,” she says, and with that simple phrase, I know this is where I am meant to be.
“I missed you too, sweet pea. I missed you too.” I kiss the top of her head and hold her just a bit tighter.
The afternoon is filled with me singing songs for the kids, TV, and cuddles. Right here, I truly feel like a father, and I know I have to fight for this life. It isn’t going to be easy, and we have a short timeline to figure it out. A little less than four more years. But we will figure it out because, in my eyes, there is no other way.
After I help put the kids to bed that night, I sit down with Brian.
“Okay, what do you need?” he asks as he opens his laptop.
“First, I need to know how to set up my will. I want to make sure my son gets everything, and Anna can’t touch any of it. I want to have my dad set up to run it for the time being. I also want to make sure my parents are taken care of for the rest of their lives.”
“Let’s see what the almighty Google can show us first.”
I shake my head as the word Google shows across his screen.
“It’s a search engine. Think of it as the library reference section, but for everything that's on the internet.”
What Brian can pull up in a few minutes blows my mind. There is a copy of my will word for word, showing my father as the trustee until my son turns twenty-five. Once my son turns eighteen, he is to work alongside my father, learning how to manage it all. At the age of twenty-one, he gets half, and at the age of twenty-five, he takes over full management. There is even a section stating at no time is Anna to receive any part of my estate and no increase of her living expenses per the prenup.
Brian prints it off, minus the part with the signatures on it. I should be able to take it to my lawyer and say this is what I want, and he can fix it up pretty for me.
“What else do you need?” He eyes me like he knows what I’m going to say.
“Two more things, but I want you to think about them, and we can work them out before I leave.”
“Hit me with it.”
“First, I want to make sure Ivy and the kids are taken care of, and I have an idea on how to do so. I just need you to use your fancy computer for the details.”
“And the other?”
“Okay, I have an idea as to the how surrounding my death on my end, but again, I need your fancy research.”
I head back to our room and hear Ivy taking a shower. I think about joining her, but something in the corner catches my eye. It’s a footlocker like the one I had in the Army. I head over and take a look at it. There is a scratch along the side just like mine has. What are the odds?
I open it up, and sure enough, in the top corner in tiny print. D. Miller. Shock hits me that she has my footlocker. Does she know? My mind races. I know mine is in the storage in the basement back home, and I haven’t pulled it out in years. I smile. This is what I needed.
I’m so distracted I miss being able to get in the shower with Ivy, so I just get ready and wait for her in bed.
She walks out of the bathroom with wet hair, wearing the sexiest little sleep shorts and a tank top, and crawls into bed with me.
“Hey, beautiful.” I kiss her forehead. “Where did you get that footlocker in the corner?”
I watch the dreamy smile on her face. “It was my grandpa’s. I saw it in their house growing up. My grandma always stored blankets in it. They would tell me it was a special chest, and it would be mine one day. It’s like having a piece of them so close to me.”
I nod and hold her close as she drifts off to sleep, and my plans slowly fall into place.
***
OVER THE NEXT WEEK, I spend my days getting to be daddy, playing with the kids, and singing songs on demand. I love every minute of it. I spend my nights researching with Brian. There is so much we still have to plan, but we are making great progress.
Sunday comes, and I wake up to Ivy already in the kitchen and amazing smells filling the house.
“Why are you up so early, beautiful?”
“It’s football Sunday; we make a day out of it, watching as many games as we can while filling up on tailgate food. It’s so much fun.”
“I’m betting it’s a lot different now than the football I know.”
She smiles. “Let’s find out.”
After just an hour into the first game, I’m amazed at the camera angles and the graphics they can make on the screen. It makes following the game so much easier. These newscasters can pull stats up in a heartbeat, and the instant replay is remarkable.
This is the life I want, and I’m so close to getting it that I can’t think of that possibility that stands in the way that this is all just a pipe dream.
