Updated Apr 7, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 16: Paperwork for a Thing That Was Never Broken
Ryder
Carla called on a Thursday afternoon while he was between consults.
He took it in the back room because Jax was with a client and the shop was quiet — that specific mid-afternoon quiet, the machines off, just the low music from the front room speaker and the smell of stencil solution and the particular quality of autumn light through the frosted back window. He’d been prepping references for a next-day sleeve consult, his pencil moving in the margins of his sketchbook, not drawing anything specific, just moving, which was his version of thinking.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” A pause that was two beats too long, which was not like Carla, who was economical and direct and had been his co-parent and former friend and occasional frustration for four years without once wasting his time. “I want to talk about the custody schedule.”
He stopped drawing. “Is Luna okay?”
“Luna’s great. She’s great, Ryder, she’s doing the thing where she explains everything she knows about dinosaurs to strangers in grocery stores, which is either very charming or a social liability, I genuinely can’t tell yet.” A pause. “This is about Marcus.”
Marcus was Carla’s boyfriend. Three months, maybe four. Ryder had met him twice — once at a pickup that had run long, once at Luna’s pediatric appointment where Marcus had appeared, which had not been discussed in advance and which Ryder had absorbed without comment because he was trying very hard to be a person who gave people the benefit of the doubt before the evidence required otherwise.
“He’s been saying things,” Carla said. “About Luna spending time with Emma.”
Ryder was quiet.
“He thinks she’s getting too attached to someone who isn’t — his word was ‘established’ in our lives. He doesn’t know Emma, obviously, and he’s coming from a place of —” A pause. “I think he’s insecure. I think this is about him. But he’s been pushing me to formalize things.”
“The custody schedule has been fine for four years,” Ryder said. His voice came out level. He was proud of that.
“I know.”
“We’ve never needed to formalize anything because we’ve never needed to. You’ve always been — we’ve always communicated.”
“I know that, Ryder.” Her voice was careful, not defensive, which told him she’d thought about how to say this. “I’m not filing because I want to. I’m being pressured and I’m not handling the pressure well, and I thought you deserved to hear it from me directly rather than through a letter from a lawyer.”
He absorbed this. The back room smelled like stencil solution and the heating vent was making its clicking sound that he’d been meaning to have looked at for six months and now it was just part of the room’s ambient personality. Luna’s latest drawing was pinned on the board above his station — a horse with wings, named Sparkle, whom Luna had been illustrating obsessively for three weeks.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“I know.”
“He doesn’t get to decide what our co-parenting looks like.”
“No.” A pause. “But I have to deal with him. And he’s going to keep — it’s just easier, Ryder, if we have something on paper. Something that isn’t about trust, just about logistics, so there’s nothing for him to push against.”
“He’ll find something else to push against.”
“Probably.” She sounded tired. “But this one I can solve.”
He looked at the drawing of Sparkle the winged horse. Luna had given her purple eyes, which didn’t seem anatomically canonical but was definitely correct in spirit.
“Does it have to be a lawyer?” he said.
“A mediator, maybe. Something that gives us a document but isn’t adversarial.”
“Fine.” The word came out harder than he meant it.
“Ryder —”
“I know,” he said. “I know you’re not — I know this isn’t you. I’m just —” He let out a breath. “I’m working on not taking things that aren’t personal as personal.”
“You’re allowed to take this personally.”
“Not in a useful way.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “How’s Emma?”
It was a genuine question. Carla had an organized, non-possessive interest in his life, the way people have in the lives of people they’d been close to and no longer were but still cared about in the particular way of shared history. He appreciated it and was occasionally blindsided by the tenderness of it.
“She’s good,” he said. “She’s — she’s good, Carla.”
“Luna talks about her constantly.”
“I know.”
“That means something,” Carla said. “Luna doesn’t talk constantly about people she’s not deeply certain of.”
“No,” he agreed. “She doesn’t.”
They ended the call with the logistics of scheduling a mediator session, dates and availability, the practical machinery of a thing that should not need to be a thing. He sat in the back room for a while after the call ended, his phone on the table, his pencil still in his hand and nothing happening with it.
Jax appeared in the doorway. He read the room with his usual alarming accuracy and said, “What happened.”
“Carla’s boyfriend is pushing her to formalize the custody schedule.” He said it flatly. “They’re going to file.”
Jax was quiet for a moment. Then: “Is Carla okay with this?”
“She’s complying with it. She says she knows it’s just paperwork.”
“Is she wrong?”
“No.” He set down the pencil. “Probably not. We’ve been informal for four years and it’s been fine but fine doesn’t mean forever. We should have done it properly from the start, maybe.” He looked at his hands — his right hand, the botanical sleeve, the roses and ferns and leaves that had partly been inspired by a botanical reference he’d found years ago in a book at a library. Before Emma. The resonance of it sat strangely. “It just feels like someone building a wall where there wasn’t one.”
Jax came in and sat on the stool by the back counter. “Does it change anything?”
“Luna?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” Ryder said. “It shouldn’t. Formalizing doesn’t change what it is.” He pressed a hand to the back of his neck. “It’s just the principle of it. Someone who doesn’t know our family deciding he knows what it needs.”
Jax nodded. “Call Emma.”
“She’s teaching.”
“After.”
“I’ll see her tonight.” He looked back at Sparkle. “She was coming for dinner.”
“Good.” Jax stood, clapped a hand on his shoulder once and briefly, which was their version of a long conversation. “She’s steady, man. Let her be steady for you.”
She arrived at seven with containers from a Thai place near her apartment, because she’d texted and asked if he was cooking and he’d said no and she’d said I’ll handle it — the ease of this, of them, still sometimes caught him like a step he hadn’t expected on a staircase, the surprise of something that should by now be familiar but somehow kept arriving new.
He told her everything at the table — the call, Carla’s reasoning, Marcus, the mediator, the document that would exist now, the paperwork for a thing that had never been broken and did not need to be fixed.
Emma listened without interrupting, which was unusual in people, who generally needed to insert themselves into a silence. She had chopsticks in one hand and she was looking at him with that focused attention and letting him talk until the words ran out.
When they did, she said: “Are you angry at Carla?”
“No,” he said. And meant it. “I understand what she’s doing. I just — I hate that someone made her feel like she needed to do it.”
“That’s fair.”
“And I hate that it’s — that it’ll be a document now. That we’ll have to look at a calendar and say your Thursday and my Thursday and —”
“It doesn’t change who you are to Luna.”
“I know.” He looked at the table. “Knowing it and feeling it aren’t the same thing.”
She put down her chopsticks and reached across the table and put her hand over his. He turned his hand over, palm up, and held hers.
“You’re a good father,” she said. “I’ve watched you with her. You are not the kind of person a custody document can reduce.”
He looked at her hand in his — her pale, careful, unmarked hand, the faint ghost of chalk dust she never quite got off before she left school, the short practical nails, the small ring she wore on her right index finger that she’d mentioned once was her grandmother’s. He thought about the sparrow on his wrist, Jax’s linework still pink-edged and new under its healing wrap, and thought: I’m going to tell her.
But tonight he just held her hand and let the Thai food go warm and thought about Luna’s drawing on the board upstairs, the horse with wings called Sparkle, and how Luna had drawn wings on a horse not because horses have wings but because she wanted the horse to be able to go anywhere, which was exactly the kind of logic he’d been trying to hold onto since he was seventeen years old in a library reaching for whatever book might show him the way out of his own limitations.
He squeezed Emma’s hand.
She squeezed back.
He didn’t say anything. She didn’t make him.
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