“Just, ah, call me up when you get in,” I repeated. I figured I’d work everything out with her over the phone.

She nodded again. “Okay.”

As she drove off with our daughter, I walked through the lobby of the hotel feeling lonely. I felt like I should have been with them. Why the hell was I by myself at a hotel?

Because they don’t know you like that, I told myself. You have to earn their trust and act like you want to be part of their lives.

I was pretty much telling myself how it had to be. Becoming a hit-and-run dad would always make me feel disconnected. Or could I actually get used to that?

I rode the elevator up to my floor, and when I walked into my room, I pounced on the comfortable, king-size bed like I had done a thousand times when I traveled for work. Then I looked up at the ceiling and wondered what Michelle’s bedroom looked like. What did her house look like? What did Briana’s room look like? I wanted to be a part of that, or at least see it while I was out there. Hell, I just wanted to feel included…in everything. Was that even fair for me to think? I was still a stranger.

I sat up and pondered everything until Michelle called me on the hotel phone after eleven.

“So, how do you feel about the day?” I asked her.

“It went good, real good.”

“How do you feel right now?”

“Thankful.”

Michelle gave you so little of herself that you always wondered how sincere she was. She was giving me one-word answers and everything. That was the part of her that I remember disliking. She needed more life in her.

I said, “That’s all you felt about it? You’re thankful? I mean, I felt all kinds of things.”

She said, “Well, it’s not as if you planned or wanted to be here. So, I’m still a little…tentative. I mean, a week ago you didn’t even know about Briana.”

She had a point. “Well, I know about her now,” I told her. “And why haven’t you been involved with a new man since then? I mean, I’m sorry to tell you, but four years sounds hard for me to believe.”

It was time for grown-up talk. I figured I needed to be as frank with Michelle as possible. We had a lot of serious ground to cover.

“Well, I was pregnant for the first year; breast-feeding for most of the second; getting myself back into shape during the third; and contemplating on the fourth,” she told me.

That sounded reasonable enough. But of course, I needed to know more.

“Contemplating what?” I asked her.

“Calling her father.”

That answer stopped me in my tracks. It sounded like she still had feelings for me. I found that amazing.

“And you’re just…I mean…who took care of Briana while you went back to work?”

She had thrown off my whole train of thought with her straight answers. So I just started making it up as we went along.