Sweet Romance18 min read
He Called Me by My Old Name
ButterPicks15 views
“Mom, why do you like ice cream so much?” Pax asked, holding his small chair like it was an important throne.
“I like cold things in hot weather,” I said, blowing the spoon like it was a trumpet.
Pax frowned. “I don’t like sweet things.”
“You almost had me,” I teased, wiping my mouth with a napkin. “You know, some kids eat ice cream and jump around. You sit here like you’re thinking about taxes.”
He shrank his shoulders and pretended to be offended. He was five and already polite the way I’d always wanted him to be.
A woman’s voice cut across our booth. “Leilani? Is that really you?”
Pax looked to me, then to the woman. I froze with a half-bitten burger half in my hand.
“Holly?” I said, pushing the napkin into my lap. I kept my smile steady while my heart stumbled.
Holly Aguilar walked over in loud red heels and louder makeup, scanning us like we were a painting she had to appraise. “You, here? I thought you were always at fancy places.”
“I dine at KFC sometimes,” I said. “Variety is good.”
Pax watched the woman with that old patience of his. He put a tiny hand on the hand in the next chair before either of us could move, and the woman’s eyes softened. She blinked, then had a bright, quick smile.
“This little guy— is he… your nephew?” Holly guessed, and I could see the gears turning behind her eyes.
“He’s my son,” I said. Pax squeezed my hand, giving me the exact proof I needed.
“Oh!” Holly managed. “Leilani, when did you get married? When did—”
“We have to go, Pax has fencing,” I said, fast. “Nice to see you.”
We left her staring after us. Pax whispered, “Mom, that woman said you had a mansion and Michelin dinners.”
“You heard wrong, buddy.” I shifted in the driver’s seat. Our old Santana coughed into traffic like an old man clearing his throat.
At the fencing hall I buckled Pax in his child seat, then checked my phone. A university group chat had exploded with one simple picture Holly had posted: a back shot of us walking in the mall.
Holly: Guess who?
Someone: That’s definitely Leilani.
Holly: No one told me she had a baby!
Someone: When did she marry?
Holly: She was at the KFC today with her son. Has she been hiding a husband?
Someone: Should we all go ask now?
I scrolled, then closed it. Gossip had always amused other people; I had to work.
After class I sat at a window with my tablet and drew. Freelance illustration had kept us fed these last years. I logged into the chat out of habit and saw a new message. A number I didn’t know called while Pax was searching for xiaolongbao on my phone.
“Hello?” Pax answered, sweet and careful.
“Is this Leilani’s phone?” A cool voice asked.
“It’s my mom’s,” Pax said.
“Put her on,” said the voice. There was a pause, then an older sister’s voice I hadn’t heard in six years.
“Leilani, it’s Amira,” she said. My throat closed. Amira Perkins was my sister.
“Amira?” I said, and time drew a breath. “Are you— how did you get my number?”
“My friend in your class group sent it to me,” Amira said. “There’s a policeman who knows a guy who knows numbers. I called because— Leilani, come home.”
“I… I don’t know.” Tears came before I could stop them. “It’s been six years, Amira. Mom—”
“Your mother’s gone. You know that. But Dad wants you home for his birthday. Please, bring your son.”
“She said this like it was that easy,” I told Pax when I hung up. Pax looked quietly brave.
“Do you want to go?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
The drive out to my childhood home on the small mountain road felt unreal. The place I had left when I was twenty had been both shelter and cage. My footsteps faltered on the stone steps of the garden.
Denver Falk—my adopted father—sat in a wheelchair at the gate. Time had been a harsh sculptor. Amira looked younger and stricter and also tired in that way only someone who manages big things can look tired.
“Leilani,” Amira said, and she had the kindest face as soon as she hugged me. “You look pale. You should have called.”
“I thought not calling would protect you from me,” I said.
“Come inside. We ordered lunch.” Amira’s voice had the same practical warmth she always had. The house smelled of soups I hadn’t smelled in years.
Inside, my aunt—Judith Rodriguez—started in on me as soon as she could. Her voice was loud and sharp, and the room pulled tight like a net. But Denver patted my hand. “You’re home,” he said. It felt like the small, true thing I needed.
Pax walked over to the old living room and offered Denver a shy, “Happy birthday, Grandpa.”
“You look like your mother,” Denver said, and my chest both opened and closed.
At the table everyone asked the same questions: where I had been, who had I married, where Pax’s father was. I answered the parts I could. Pax’s father had died; that was all I would say about him.
After lunch Amira took me aside. “Dad’s birthday party is next Saturday. I want you there. I want the family to meet him.”
“I’ll come,” I promised.
Amira reached into her bag and pulled out an envelope. “Dad wanted to give this to you but asked me to wait. It’s a card and money.” I stiffened. I had vowed I wouldn’t take anything.
“You don’t have to—” I started.
“Leilani,” Amira said, stopping me. “Dad’s not asking for anything back. He misses you.”
That night I ran along the old mountain trail where I once ran as a girl. The air cleaned my head. The memories of the accident flashed in me like a quick, ugly film—mother in a black Audi, the truck, the taste of the dust. The image I could never entirely read was my mother’s lips, moving like she wanted to tell me something before she died. I had left and never answered questions. I had sheltered Pax and myself in small, safe places.
I told my neighbor, Elizabeth Atkinson, about the call. She was older and steady and had been my friend since we were kids. “Go back,” she said simply. “You can run from old shadows, but they always have ways of catching you. Sit down. Face it.”
I agreed to do the one thing that terrified me: return, at least for the birthday.
A week later at the marketplace, Pax tugged my hand. “Mom, can we buy a new jacket?”
“Of course,” I said. We went up in the mall toward the children’s section. I let him pick two small sets. I thought about money and how much I owed myself to make a better life for Pax.
From the other side of the escalator I heard a voice that hit a chord so deep I almost doubled. “Leilani?”
I turned. Dashiell Bloom stood on the second level, immaculately dressed, like a picture from a magazine.
My body stopped. I had once loved him. Six years ago we had walked on an island together and we had been honest in a way young fools can be—raw and sweet. I remembered his fingers gentle on my waist, his hands clumsy with the idea of kissing when another world had made him distant.
I looked quickly away. He had to be someone else’s fiancé now. Amira’s fiancé. My sister had told me about him before: an accomplished man, thoughtful, a private steely kind of boyish hero.
Dashiell’s eyes found me and held for a moment. He stepped down from the second level. Up close his features were carved—handsome, unbothered. He paused when he saw Pax, then registered my face, and for a second something flickered across his face.
“You look older,” he said softly. “Still beautiful.”
“Dashiell,” Amira said, appearing at his side, and there was a warmth between them that wasn’t only form.
He smiled at her. She introduced him in a soft way like she was proud and also sure. “This is my sister, Leilani.”
My heart beat fast. In one small, private place inside me there was hope and terror both.
Later, when we went to Amira’s home for dinner, Dashiell was there. He had come early. He brought a small medical device as a gift and placed it with fatherly ease into Denver’s hands.
“You remembered his favorite brand,” Amira said.
Dashiell smiled. “It’s useful, sir.” He curtseyed to Denver with the efficiency of a man who had practiced being respectful.
I kept my face calm. My voice was not particularly brave either—my throat had been rough after some late-night coughing. Dashiell asked only a few questions about my work and answered in small polite sentences.
After dinner Amira left to take a call and Dashiell asked me gently, “Are you okay? You look tired.”
“Just a bad throat,” I said. My voice felt small.
He nodded and stayed longer than I expected. For a moment we were alone in the garden. He looked at me the way a man studies something he owned in an old memory.
“You ran here before,” he said. “You used to run this trail a lot.”
“I needed to run,” I said.
“You were always fast.” He smiled like a memory could hold him. “You looked… alive.”
I fumbled for words, and I said what I could not keep: “Are you ever scared?”
“Of what?” he asked.
“You being someone else,” I said. “That things we have mean nothing when the tide comes in.”
He laughed at that, quietly. “The tide takes a lot. It leaves other things.”
“You never seemed like the tide,” I said.
“It’s easier to stop being the tide when you have people around you who steady you,” he said.
I touched his sleeve and everything felt a little sharper. Then Amira returned. The spell broke like a dropped glass.
A week later I signed a contract to help with the mall’s Mid-Autumn decorations. Kyle Carter, the operations manager, was warm and excited. He had a way of making small things heroic.
“Dashiell liked your work,” Kyle told me, handing over a clean, professional contract. “You were at the top of the list.”
I walked the storefront with the crew. Giving my art new life was a joy—scaling my little monkey drawings into giant installations, choosing colors, watching them hang.
One afternoon Holly barged into the mall office, desperate. She was on the roof, saying things to people, unbalanced. Her fiancé, Hudson Castillo, and her father had been arrested for embezzlement at work. She had come to the mall to demand Dashiell’s help.
“We need Dashiell,” she told us. She was thin and wild. “He is the only one who can fix this.”
We found them on the rooftop. Holly stood near the edge, wind whipping her hair. Two security guards hovered. Summer fog wrapped the skyline.
“Don’t come closer,” she shouted.
Dashiell walked slowly up. His voice was calm. “Holly, come down.”
“Why should I? My life is ruined!” She held her hands as if she planned to throw them into the void.
“You’re not ruined,” Dashiell said. “There are things to do. We can talk.”
She started to cry. The security guard moved to pull her back and she slipped. For an instant, the world narrowed down to a single foot over nothing.
I can still see her face—her eyes like broken glass. The guard caught her just in time. Dashiell and the guards pulled her back into safety. Holly’s scream broke into sobs.
“You convinced me I was the villain,” she cried to Dashiell. “You ruined my family.”
“It’s not that simple,” he said quietly. “But we will help you get through this.”
Pax clung to my hand tightly on the stairs, and I felt my whole world compress around him and the way he trusted me. That day, Dashiell looked at me in a way that made my chest squeeze. He helped because he couldn’t do otherwise. He had a moral center that people gravitated toward.
In the following days I worked at the mall longer hours. I finished the monkey sculptures. People loved them. On the day the mall won first in the city, the post went viral and the crew cheered late into the night.
“You’ll take care of us,” Kyle teased. “We pulled a win.”
“You all did,” I said, exhausted and glowing. My throat was still fragile; I spoke little, and wrote more.
At home Pax slept under a pile of stuffed animals. I drew late into the night. The quiet was a safe thing.
A week after the party, Dashiell called and surprised me. “Do you have time to walk?” he asked. He sounded distracted and light.
“I… can’t talk much,” I typed and sent. My voice was still healing. He knew. He came anyway and picked me up. His driver, Earl Weaver, drove us.
I was in the passenger seat with the windows down. Dashiell was behind me in the back, steady and calm. He asked about the sculptures and had a small smile when I explained the ideas.
When we stopped for coffee, he stood with both hands in his pockets and asked with a stranger’s bravery, “Do you remember the island?”
I did. That quiet place where everything had been raw felt like a crime scene and a cathedral. “Yes,” I said with a whisper.
“You used to hum to me,” he said. “You would sing and I couldn’t see, but I could hear a thousand things. You know, my eyes were bad then.”
“Yes.” I closed my hand around the small paper cup. My voice came out a breathless rustle.
“You were my first real love,” he said softly, the kind of sentence that makes schoolgirls in books swoon and adults wince.
My throat tightened. “You were mine too,” I wrote.
He looked at me like I was a brittle treasure. There was no drama, no big entrance. There was only the quiet presence of a man who had kept a memory. “I don’t know what could have happened to us,” he said. “I thought— I thought I lost the chance because I did not see.”
He reached for my hand. It was a small, careful gesture. “Do you want to leave here? Come with me—work with us?”
My heart thudded like a small animal. I thought of Pax, of the life I had built, of the rules I had set to never take money from my family, of how small our apartment felt sometimes with the price of living and the cost of education looming like a shadow.
“You’ll lose things if you pick me,” I thought, but I didn’t say it. I couldn’t make my voice carry that far yet.
“You should come,” Dashiell said, and his voice was an invitation and a roomful of steadiness. “Work at the headquarters. We’re consolidating. I’d like your help.”
“I don’t want to be a charity case,” I typed back, and he laughed.
“You aren’t. You have talent. Let us be smarter about where your talent goes.”
I told Kyle I would start full time. I negotiated an hour early to leave for Pax. Kyle agreed.
At work the headquarters was very different from the mall—cool marble floors and glass walls. The elevator required a code or the right badge. They all pretended not to notice the little woman who came to their team like a comet.
At lunch one day, we played a childish game with the group — counting numbers and risky questions. When Dashiell’s turn came, someone asked, “When was your first love?”
“Six years ago, on an island,” he said. The table laughed. I felt a strange bloom in my chest.
That night I decided to have the small surgery to fix my voice so I could clear my throat of the thing that kept me distant. The doctor, Graham Engel, was kind; he told me the procedure would be simple.
“You should let someone come with you,” he said.
I had an answer before my pride could stop it: my sister had to be in the air for a business trip. I hesitated, then a message from Dashiell came. “Send me your address.” It felt old-fashioned and like something a person who wanted to protect could ask.
I let him escort me. He sat in the hospital waiting room like a man who belonged there and belonged nowhere else at the same time. He was quiet. He topped a small paper cup with his hand and looked at the way my fingers trembled. When I emerged, he was there with a gentle smile.
“You should rest,” he said.
“What about your meeting?” I asked.
“It can wait,” he said.
The days after the operation, my voice recovered slowly. I wrote notes. He read them and laughed at my terrible jokes. One afternoon as we worked on a project together late, his hand brushed mine over a table. It was such a small thing it could have been nothing. I let it be something enormous.
I never told Dashiell that Pax’s father had died. He knew I was independent. He never asked who had been in my life. He let me be what I was, not a puzzle for him to solve. He asked questions in small, useful ways. He came to Pax’s school when Amira suggested it. He brought small gifts and sat with Pax at the threshold of new rules.
Amira, who could read a room like a chessboard, watched us. She never accused. Once, when I saw her alone, she touched my shoulder.
“Be careful,” she said. “We’re all tied. I’m not going to fight you, Leilani. But I will not let my family fall apart.”
I thought of how she had pulled me back to Denver’s house. I thought of how much she had asked me to trust.
“Do what you need to do,” she said. “If he matters, be smart.”
One week everything shifted. Holly’s case spread through the news and the boardroom. Gene Fuchs, the suspected accomplice who had disappeared, had taken hundreds of thousands. The company had fallen short and Dashiell had to act fast. There were accusations, arrests. Dashiell moved through the storm like a man built from calm.
I watched him across meetings and sometimes I wrote little notes for him—rough sketches of the ideas I thought would help the brand. We worked late. We shared coffee that was never hot enough and small, silly jokes.
At one point everything that had been hidden came out: Holly had been in uneasily close circles with a man who had used company funds. Her mind had snapped. She complained to me about the world being unfair and to Dashiell about revenge. It was messy. When what she wanted was mercy and justice both, she couldn’t find one.
Then Amira told me something no one else knew. She called me at three a.m., voice thick with city-time emotions. “Leilani,” she said. “Dad asked me something.”
“What?”
“He wants to give you a post at the foundation. He wants you to help run a small program. He’s willing to invest. He asked me to say the word.”
A bargain in the dark of night. I stared at my phone and told myself to breathe.
“I can’t take money,” I said. “I won’t.”
“You can take a job,” Amira said. “It is your work, not his handout.”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s serious,” she said. “And he’s being very careful.”
When I went to the company headquarters that week there was an office move. We were told to move to the main building. Everywhere there was noise and boxes and the smell of new carpet. I watched Dashiell move with that quiet efficiency that made him look like a man whose life had been measured in choices. When he walked past me he put one paper box down and fixed me with an odd look.
“Do you want to talk?” he asked later, in the empty hallway.
My heart told me to say yes; my head told me no. I told myself how wrong it would be to take his love from Amira. I had watched my mother die behind secrecy, and I did not want to do that to another family.
“You showed up again,” I said finally.
“You left,” he said simply.
“I had to leave,” I said. “My choices were not simple.”
He took a breath like a man opening a sealed letter. “I didn’t know why you left. I thought you hated me.”
“I was a coward,” I wrote. “I thought I’d ruin you.”
“You weren’t the thing that ruined me,” he said.
I looked down at my hands. My fingers felt callused from drawing but raw from hope.
That week a project took us away together to meet a partner in a neighboring city. We shared a car, and at night the hotel light threw a soft pool over the table. We ate room service and he told me a story about a childhood dog he loved. I told him about the first time I’d sold a drawing.
In two small days we learned how easy our conversation could be again. He listened to Pax’s stories like it was a treasure he had been given.
“You make a good team,” he said in a breath.
“You make me brave,” I wrote, and the paper I slipped to him sat between our plates like a small white flag.
The secret that had been a weight began to feel like a key. One night, after an awards ceremony, Amira stood between us and said with a look and a voice that was a little braver than usual, “Dashiell, do you want me to step back?”
He looked at her like someone who had been given a choice with no guide. “Amira— I love you,” he said. He took her hands. It was not a cold answer, but it was small.
She smiled in a way that was both fierce and gentle. “I love you too. I want you to be happy.”
My entire internal compass spun. This was not the melodramatic scene I had feared from the novels. It was a measured, mature exchange between two adults who cared in different ways. Amira’s love was not a demand; it was an offering tied with ribbon.
That night I thought perhaps the story would slip into a place where everyone could stay whole.
But life is complicated in the best of ways. A rumor—thin as spun sugar—started. Someone in the company murmured that a woman who worked at the headquarters might be hiding a past with Dashiell. The rumor turned into a thread. That thread tugged on many collars.
On a cold evening the thread became a rope. A dinner invitation turned into a turning point. We were all at a small banquet. I should have known something was wrong the minute the room looked like a stage. Holly sat at a nearby table, face drained and set. I felt something heavy in the air.
Amira interrupted the flow of small talk. “Leilani has always been honest with me,” she said, to no one in particular and to everyone at once. “If anything would change between Dashiell and me, she would tell me.”
“Amira—” Dashiell started, and then stopped. He looked at me. There were a thousand things in his eyes.
“You are my sister,” Amira said to him. “You are my future. If anything you said would break me, it would be because you chose otherwise, not because of her.”
He looked at Amira like you look at something fragile and polished, and he bowed his head a little. “I love you,” he said.
That night nothing exploded. It was the quiet which pulled me into a deeper place. I decided to tell him everything, because secrets that sit between people become nothing but silent landmines.
We were alone in a hallway, the party noise muffled behind closed doors. I took my breath like it had cost me a coin.
“I’m not who you think I am entirely,” I said. “I had a child after I left. His father died. I am a single mother.”
Dashiell’s face was steady, like a man listening to the weather.
“Will that be a problem?” I asked.
“It’s not a problem,” he said. “It’s part of your life.”
He reached for my hand and his fingers found mine. It was simple. It was honest. It was sweet.
“Amira matters,” he added. “Family matters. We will choose carefully.”
His words were a promise, not a drama. And that was the sweetest part.
A week later, the rumor died because it had no heat. People moved on. Holly received the help she needed and the legal process took its course. The company restructured. Dashiell chaired meetings with coolness and kindness. He stopped by our small kitchen with coffee and asked how Pax had done at school.
Amira watched everything with a thoughtful patience and a smile that had deep wells. She came to the park to watch Pax’s small fencing matches and clapped loudly as if she were his aunt with every right to brag. She came with Denver and they took acorn cakes to the bench where Pax could high-five them both.
One evening, after the board meeting had ended and the office had emptied, Dashiell stayed. He found me in the quiet corner where I often drew. The light through the windows had gone gold.
“You made a difference today,” he said softly. “You always do.”
“You made a difference for me too,” I typed slowly. I was still careful with my voice as it healed.
He whispered, “I know.”
He took my hand then, and this time the world did not feel like it could be taken away. This time it felt like something I could carry and protect.
But real things need time. Choices need courage and a line of truth. I went to Amira and told her I had feelings for her fiancé—fully and plainly. The conversation did not end with knives. It ended with an embrace.
“Be careful,” she said again, but this time it sounded like permission. “We are family, Leilani. Choose the right thing, and if you choose love, we will make room.”
She surprised me by smiling and saying, “If you both find out you want the same life, I will step aside. I want neither of you to be lonely.”
That sort of mercy stunned me. It made me cry because she saw us, and still loved us.
We moved slowly. Dashiell left room for Amira to define her life. He never acted in secret. He asked for every decision to be fair and kind. He never demanded. He requested.
Time became our ally. We worked on projects together, we signed papers for Pax’s school, we learned how each other’s mornings were arranged. Dashiell asked Pax about his favorite color and sent small notes to Amira, who read them with a smirk. There was an honesty in the way he lived that made me trust him in a way I’d never trusted anyone.
The day came when Pax’s picture was in a school showcase and Dashiell came to see. He brought flowers for Denver and a little toy plane for Pax. He sat in the back and watched my son with a kind of focused attention that felt miraculous.
“You know,” Dashiell said that evening as we walked home a little crooked under the streetlights, “I used to think love had to be one kind of story.”
“What changed your mind?” I wrote.
“Meeting you,” he said. “And seeing you live your life. Love can be quiet. Love can be hard. It can be honest.”
Pax called him “Uncle Dashiell” at first. Then, slowly, he called him “Mr. Bloom” with a shy smile, and finally one day he said, “Dashiell.”
One night, when the city was a spread of small lights and a cold wind, Dashiell stopped at our doorway and looked at me. He looked like a man weighing something he had been given.
“Leilani,” he said. “I want to be with you. I want to be with you and Pax, if you’ll have me.”
My heart gave a thud like a bell. I thought of every moment that had been heavy with waiting and every late-night drawing that had paid for this life. I thought of Amira and how she had given me room.
“Yes,” I wrote on a paper and held it out. He took it and folded it small and put it in his pocket.
We did not announce a grand wedding. We built a small life together, public enough to be honest, quiet enough to be ours. Amira stood by my side at the small city hall party where we signed papers, smiling like someone who had chosen mercy over claim.
Denver came with a small grin and Pax held a paper flag. “My Dad?” Pax asked later in the car.
“You have Dashiell,” I said. “You have me.”
Pax thought this over with a wise look, then nodded like a judge. “Okay.”
Months later, when the mall monkey sculptures won a regional award and the company gala sent a camera crew our way, Dashiell took my hand and introduced me as “my wife” with a small, proud tilt. Amira applauded too, tears in her eyes.
“You did the right thing,” she told me later, hugging me like a sister and like a friend.
“So did you,” I said.
Life did not smooth itself into a picture from a book. We argued about bills, about who would get up at night with Pax when he had a fever, about the best way to hang a picture. But there was laughter too, and good coffee, and late nights with sketchbooks open on the table.
Once, on a rainy morning, Dashiell called me by the nickname I had given him years ago on that island. It was a sound in his mouth like coming home.
“You remember that beach?” he asked. He sounded soft.
“I do,” I said.
“Sometimes I think the world is like a long island. We wander and we learn how to be with each other,” he said. “I used to be afraid I would never see you again.”
“You found me,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And now I don’t plan on losing you.”
We walked down the small street with Pax skipping ahead, and the city made its ordinary sounds. A woman in a coffee shop smiled at the sight of our small family.
At night, when the lights of Dashiell’s office blinked in the distance and the world felt large and complicated, I would sometimes remember the day my mother had died and whisper to her in the dark. I told her that I had turned my mistakes into something fierce and kind.
Pax would tuck his arms around us both and murmur, “I have two dads now.”
“You do,” Dashiell said, and it was not a joke. He meant it. He sat very still like a man who had chosen to learn a whole new language.
That is the thing about love: it asks for small certainties, for a thousand honest mornings, and for people to keep showing up. We showed up for each other, quietly and fiercely, and built a life that surprised us with how real it felt.
On a warm night years later, standing on a small balcony with a cup of tea, Dashiell leaned close and whispered, “You used to hum to me, remember? Sing something.”
I thought for a moment, then sang a single line of a tune I had once used to soothe a small restless man in my arms.
Dashiell closed his eyes and smiled like the world had been righted.
“You came back,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I came back.”
And we kept going forward, step by steady step, making a family out of second chances and careful truths.
The End
— Thank you for reading —