He played the fish song first.
It was a simple thing — a bouncing melody in C major he'd invented three visits ago while Naomi ate goldfish crackers on this same stool. He'd been noodling, killing time, waiting for Destiny to finish a phone call, and the melody came out of nowhere: bright, playful, syncopated, with a little trill at the end of each phrase that made Naomi giggle. He'd forgotten it by the time he left that night.
She hadn't forgotten a single note.
She swayed now, her body moving in a rhythm that was slightly behind the beat — not because she couldn't find it, but because she was savoring each phrase before moving on to the next, the way some people read slowly, not because they're struggling but because they're tasting the words.
Teo transitioned into the rain song without pausing. A descending pattern in a minor key — meant to sound like individual drops hitting different surfaces: glass, tin, leaves, water. He'd built it during a thunderstorm at this counter while Naomi pressed her face to the window and narrated the lightning. She held her hands out now, palms up, catching imaginary rain, her face tilted toward an imaginary sky.
Behind him, he could feel Destiny. Not watching the performance — watching the performer. Studying the way his shoulders dropped when he played, the way his jaw unclenched, the way the sadness in his eyes reorganized itself into something adjacent to peace. He knew she was doing this because she always did it, and he knew she would never tell him, and he knew that the version of himself she saw at this keyboard — unlocked, unguarded, made temporarily whole by the simple act of pressing keys in the right order — was the version she had fallen for, the version she kept saving plates for, the version she was waiting for when she watched the phone and nobody called.
Then the one that makes him close his eyes.
He didn't know what Naomi meant by that title until his fingers found it — a slow, modal piece that emerged from somewhere below conscious thought. Not composed. Channeled. His eyes closed. The kitchen dissolved. The bills on the counter. Destiny's exhaustion. The four feet of laminate. Gone.
There was only the sound, and the sound was —
His fingers tingled.
Not the playing-tingling. Not the good kind, the musician 's-callus-on-ivory feeling he'd known since he was thirteen. The other tingling. The one from this morning. The guitar. The breakfast table. The bones-ringing-like-tuning-forks sensation that meant something was happening inside him that had no name and no permission.
His eyes snapped open.
The keys he was pressing were glowing.
Faintly — so faintly that in full daylight it would've been invisible. But the kitchen faced east, and the afternoon sun had moved past the window, and in the resulting dimness, each key his fingers touched emitted a soft luminescence. Gold. The same gold he'd seen on his family's skin at breakfast. The same gold that had no business existing in a kitchen in Little Haiti on a Wednesday afternoon.
He pulled his hands back. The glow stopped.
He pressed the keys again. It returned — not from the Casio, he realized with a coldness that started at the base of his skull and spread downward. From him. From his fingertips. The light was coming through his skin, and the keys were simply reflecting it.
"Pretty," Naomi said.
Teo's blood went cold. "What?"
"Your hands are pretty. They're doing the shiny thing."
He stared at his daughter. Her face was open, delighted, utterly unafraid — the face of a child watching something magical and accepting it the way children accept all magic: as a feature of the world, not a glitch in it.
"You — you see that?"
"The gold." She pointed at his left hand, hovering above the keys. "It's brighter when you play the eyes-closed song. Can you do it again?"
He looked at Destiny. She was leaning against the refrigerator, thumbing through her phone, half-watching. She hadn't seen. She hadn't heard. The angle was wrong, or the light was too faint, or adults simply couldn't perceive what a four-year-old could perceive — and that thought opened a door in Teo's mind that he slammed shut immediately because the implications behind it were too large and too strange to fit inside a Wednesday.
He looked back at Naomi. Her eyes — his eyes, brown and too honest, genetic mirrors — were wide and waiting. Patient. As if she had all the time in the world for her father to catch up to what she already understood.
"That's our secret, okay?" he whispered. "The shiny thing. Just ours."
Naomi considered this with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice evaluating precedent. Secrets were serious business. Secrets required trust. And trust, in Naomi's four-year-old economy, was the most valuable currency — hoarded carefully, spent rarely, never extended without collateral.
"Okay," she said. "Play the fish song again."
He played. His hands did not glow. The moment passed. And by the time Destiny looked up from her phone, everything was normal — Teo smiling, Naomi swaying, the Casio wheezing through its thirty-two keys — because Teo had spent twenty-three years perfecting the art of looking normal while the ground beneath him turned to smoke.
Four more songs. Naomi requested encores with the imperious confidence of a patron who knew exactly what she wanted from her artist. Destiny leaned against the refrigerator with her arms crossed and her face aimed at the ceiling, doing the thing she did when his music made her feel things she didn't have permission to feel.
Then it was time.
It was always time. That was the cruelest part of being a father who existed in three-hour increments — the clock never stopped, and every minute with one child was a minute stolen from another, and the math of his life was a zero-sum equation that always left someone in deficit.
He kissed Naomi's forehead. "I gotta go, baby girl."
"You always gotta go."
Five words. A surgical strike from a child who didn't know she was drawing blood.
"I know. But I always come back."
She held out her pinky. He hooked it with his. The gesture felt like a contract signed in the only ink that mattered, and the terms were simple, and he had no idea if he could meet them, and he swore to them anyway — because that's what fathers did. They signed things they couldn't honor and spent the rest of their lives trying.
Destiny walked him to the door. In the doorway — the threshold between her world and his car, between the kitchen where plates waited and the night where three apartments rotated like planets around a sun that was burning out — she said:
"There's a plate in the microwave. For next time."
"Destiny —"
"Don't." Hand up. "I'm not asking for anything. I'm telling you there's a plate."
He nodded. Stepped out. The door closed behind him with the soft finality of a prayer that knows it won't be answered tonight.
His car. 5:49 PM. The sun was going down over Little Haiti, painting the sky in golds and purples that looked — if he was being honest, if honesty was something he could still afford — exactly like the light that had come through his fingertips twenty minutes ago.
He gripped the steering wheel. Hands still warm.
His phone buzzed.
Janelle. Not a call — a text. He opened it, and the words hit with the specific, compressed force of a woman who had learned to say everything in as few characters as possible because she didn't have the time or the emotional bandwidth for paragraphs:
Elijah's running a 102 fever. Are you coming or not?
Two children. Two parts of the city. One man with twelve dollars in checking and a guilt so heavy it had developed its own gravitational field.
He started the engine. Pulled out. Drove toward Overtown, toward his son, toward the second of three women who had loved him enough to carry his child and not enough — or too much, or in the wrong direction — to demand that he stay.
In the rearview mirror, Naomi's face hung in the apartment window. Small. Round. Watching. Already learning the shape of departure — the specific silhouette of a car pulling away, the way taillights look when the person inside them is someone you love, and they are leaving, and you are four years old and fluent in the only language that matters.
The language of almost.
Almost enough. Almost here. Almost a father.
Almost.
[End of Episode 4][Next Episode: "The Hard Parts"]