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If you'd asked Silvia Rodriguez what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have said a pony. She had no interest in riding one, of course—they were far too big and smelly for her liking—she just wanted to be one. In her barely-older-than-infantile mind, she always assumed she'd be the prettiest, bestest smelling pony in all of South Chicago, and that had been the dream for a good seven years. After that, she wanted to be an astronaut, a magician, and, bizarrely, a ringleader.
The lawyer thing sort of snuck up on her when she was in middle school and a petite, terrifying Criminal Defense lawyer named Bella Barnes got her off on a shoplifting charge she didn't commit. Of course, the majority white jury had been willing to pin it on her—just another dead-end kid from a dead-end neighborhood making dead-end choices. But on the day of her trial, all four-feet-nine-inches of Bella Barnes walked into that courtroom with a smile on her face and steel in her voice, and that had been that.
The lawyer thing didn't seem like much of a choice after that, more like a calling breathed into her, her purpose laid bare for her to poke and explore.
The problem was that Silvia was a coward. Okay, maybe coward wasn’t the right word. She was just sensitive is all, or at least that’s what her mother used to call it. The kind of sensitivity that had her crying into her sweater sleeves every time one of those sad animal commercials came on when she was trying to catch up on her soap operas, the kind of sensitivity that made her want to safely escort every squirrel, bird, snake across the street so that they didn’t end up pancaked under some jerk’s tire.
The kind of sensitivity that would get her laughed out of a courtroom before she even spoke one word.
It wasn’t that Silvia couldn’t be a tough, big-shot lawyer—she could do just about anything she put her mind to—it was that she didn’t want to be. Becoming a lawyer, becoming a woman of steel like Bella Barnes was would take so much more out of her than she was willing to give. So Criminal Defense lawyer was out of the question. So were about ninety percent of the other types of law she’d seen inaccurately depicted all over TV.
Estate Law, like being a lawyer, just sort of fell into her lap. One question, lead to one article, lead to one course, and then boom, suddenly she was sorting people’s affairs into neat little piles for a living.
Silvia expected the profession to be slightly boring by sheer virtue of the fact that there’s often very little of interest about the dead, but she couldn't have been more wrong. As it turned out, it's the dead, or soon to be, that are the most interesting—every secret love, heartbreak, and child oozing out into the world for all the prying eyes to see.
Silvia has seen a lot of interesting cases over the last six years—some of them weird and bizarre, sad and exhausting, and others just plain obnoxious—but this one, well.
Silvia doesn't even know how to classify this one.
Edmundo Diaz is not the worst client she’s ever had, not even close. He doesn’t ask for anything outrageous, and aside from being drop-dead gorgeous, nothing really stands out about him as being particularly interesting. He’s a firefighter—probably the thing that’s lead him to her door—but aside from that, he’s a perfectly normal man with a perfectly normal request.
Well, semi-normal.
Silvia folds her hands underneath her chin. Edmundo stares back at her, eyebrows slightly raised, the picture of patience.
"So, just to be clear: You want to make a—” she glances down at her papers, “—Mr. Evan Buckley your son Christopher Diaz's guardian in the event of your untimely death."
"Yes, that is correct."
"And you... don't want to tell him about it?"
"Eh," he says. Eh, like he's not breaking Silvia's brain. "I'm sure I'll tell him eventually."
"Right," Silvia says slowly. “It just—and forgive me if I’m overstepping—but it just seems to me like the kind of thing you might want to mention to him? I’ve seen more people than I can count go to court for less.” In one memorable case, Silvia had actually had to call the police when two brothers nearly came to blows over their deceased parents’ antique teacup collection.
This is not a teacup. This is a child.
Edmundo only shrugs. “Probably, but you don’t know Buck. If I tell him now—” he waves his hand, “—I don’t know. He’ll make it a thing. It doesn’t need to be a thing, it just needs to be done. Besides, I’m not planning on dying any time soon. As long as I don’t die, he doesn’t need to know.”
He nods like this is a perfectly sound reason and explanation, and it’s not not sound, but Silvia still finds herself taking a deep breath. Edmundo’s request isn't even the weirdest thing Silvia's ever heard in her office. Once, an elderly woman dying of stage four bone cancer came into her office requesting all thirteen of her Siamese cats be bequeathed to the local zoo upon her death. It's not what he's asking, it's just—
"And you're sure you don't want him to be here for this?"
Edmundo shrugs again, unbothered. "Why should he be?"
Silvia opens her mouth to reply but quickly closes it. If Edmundo doesn't see a problem here, she's not going to be the one to bring it up.
Silvia summons her customer service smile from her days working at Krispy Kreme and nods. "Certainly, Mr. Diaz.”
“Eddie, please.”
“Eddie, of course. I'll just need your partner's information so I can contact him in the case of..."
Her voice trails off. Eddie’s face scrunches up, confused.
Oh boy.
"Is there a problem?"
"Buck's not my partner." He pauses. "I mean, he is, but he's my work partner. Not my, you know, partner-partner. We're not together," he finishes.
Hm.
Silvia sets her inkpen down so she can hear better. "Certainly. Just to be clear," she says for the second time that day, because things have yet to become clear to her, "You want to give legal guardianship of your son to your work partner."
"Well, Buck's more than that."
"But you just said—"
Eddie sighs, exasperated. "I mean, yes, he is my partner and yes, we work together, but he's not just my work partner. He's—” he shakes his head, eyes growing distant. "He's everything. He's the one I look to when I need help, the one who's always there for me, the one my son can count on. That matters. That my son loves and trusts him matters. You know?”
“Of course, Mr. Diaz. Eddie. I never meant to imply—”
He waves her off. “No, don’t. It’s fine. It’s just—he saved his life, did you know that?"
He seems to be waiting for an answer. Silvia shakes her head.
"Weird. I thought it might have been on the news. Yeah, Buck, he was on the pier with my son the day the tsunami hit. They were caught right in the thick of it."
Belated panic wraps itself around Silvia's lungs. Her hand goes up to the pendant dangling from her necklace on instinct, a sterling silver cross her grandma used to say would protect her. The tsunami is long over, has been for a while, but she still whispers a prayer of protection and healing for all who were involved.
"I’m sorry to hear that,” she says gently. “What happened? How did they…"
She doesn’t know how much she’s allowed to say, whether anything she asks is going to cause her client any undue stress. But Eddie only smiles, face softening like a marshmallow over an open flame. "Buck did what Buck does. He fought for my son. Exhausted, bleeding, on blood thinners, even—he just never stopped."
Silvia leans back in her seat. "And he brought him home."
"No."
She sits up. "No?"
"No. At some point during the day, Buck and Chris got separated. He couldn’t find him. He, ah. He actually told me he was dead. Worst two minutes of my life, I can tell you that much,” he says with a bitter laugh.
Silvia can’t even imagine. She leans forward, enraptured. She can’t help it. Silvia has long since stopped trying to fight the desire to listen to people’s stories when they tell them. The truth is that for most of her clients, she’s usually the last stop before they end up in the hospital or the morgue. If they want to vent their life stories to her, she’s not going to stop them. Discretely, she sends an email to her secretary to push back her 4:30.
“So, what happened?”
“A stranger found him. Carried him for hours until he was back safe with us.”
“Wow,” she breathes. “And that was the moment you knew you wanted Evan—”
“Buck,” Eddie corrects.
“Sorry, Buck, to be your son’s guardian?”
“No. That was the moment I knew Buck was special, the moment I knew he cared for—loved—my son just as much as I did. The moment I knew I wanted him to be his guardian came after.” His smile slips, the light in his eyes dimming to shadows. “I almost died a couple weeks ago. Close call, too close. It comes with the job, but the whole time I was recovering I couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen to my kid if I wasn’t around. I don’t want him shopped around in some system and I sure as hell don’t want him shipped off to live with my family.”
He says the word family like it tastes sour on his tongue. Silvia can relate.
“They’re not bad people,” he says automatically. Silvia knows that line well. “They’re just not capable of loving him the way he deserves to be loved. Not capable of fighting for him the way he deserves to be fought for. My son is disabled, but he’s not a burden. I don’t want him to be with people who will treat him like he’s a burden. I want him to be with someone who knows him the way I know him, who loves him the way I love him.” Eddie takes a shaky breath. When he speaks again, his voice trembles. “You know, Buck, he keeps Christopher’s favorite cereal in his cupboards. I’ve never asked him to. Chris has never asked him to. He just buys it every few weeks along with his protein shakes and his microwave TV dinners, and that’s the kind of person I want my son to be with. That is the person I want my son to be with.”
Silvia pretends she doesn’t hear his voice crack at the end there, even though her own eyes are burning hot with tears.
He’s a good dad, she thinks. She’s known this man for all of a couple hours but she’d put money on this assumption. Silvia’s encountered enough people in her line of work that she knows how to pick the good ones from the bad, and this one is good. He’s full of grief, and loss, and pain, but somehow, he’s blended all that sorrow up and turned it into love for that little boy on his cellphone lockscreen, for the man he’s just inked into his will and his son’s life forevermore.
“Buck seems like a really special person,” she says once they’ve both gotten themselves together.
Eddie’s face softens again instantly, a switch flipped. “Oh, man, you have no idea. I don’t know where I’d be without him. God knows that man’s kept me alive in more ways than one more times than I can count.”
Silvia bites her lip. Swooning is still considered very unprofessional, but oh, the look in his eyes. She wonders if anyone has ever looked like that when talking about her. So far, she’s only had two real relationships and somehow, she doesn’t think either the high school boyfriend who ruined her reputation or the girl who accused her of going through a phase upon learning she was bisexual ever looked at or spoke about her with such warmth. She feels cripplingly lonely all of a sudden and she doesn’t now what to do with it.
Silvia clears her throat, determined to get through this meeting without crying. “So, the will. You’d like Buck to be Christopher’s legal guardian. That can be arranged. We’ll just have coordinate with family court and then it’s settled. Just so you are aware, Mr. Diaz, Mr. Buckley is allowed to refuse custody, in which case Christopher will be placed in foster care until such a time as the next available relative has been contacted and is willing to accept custody. Have these terms been made clear to you as I have read them, Mr. Diaz?”
He shrugs. “Sure. But he’s not going to refuse.”
Silvia doesn’t swoon, but her smile does turn slightly gooier than is probably allowed. “I’m sure he won’t, Mr. Diaz.”
They finish their meeting in another few minutes. Eddie leaves with a small smile and a wave, and no sooner than the door closes behind him does Silvia put her face in her hands and cry a little. She knows what Eddie said—that he and Buck are just friends and it’s not her place to doubt that—but Silvia trusts her eyes more than she trusts his voice and what she sees is something special. Maybe it’s friendship, maybe it’s more, but it’s solid and it’s there.
And it’s not just in the way he talks about Buck, it’s in everything.
It’s in the way he says his name and the reverence with which he holds every letter in his mouth like they are a part of his teeth and his skin. If a name has ever been cradled by someone’s lips, held safe in the cavern of one’s mouth, Buck’s name is safe with Eddie. It’s in the way he protects him even when the man isn’t there. Buck, Eddie had corrected her use of his name with just enough swiftness and just enough edge that Silvia knew she’d be wise not to forget it. It’s in the way he reflects on memories of Buck and his son like they’re droplets of sunlight plucked from the star itself and placed right in his hands to have and hold and cherish until the end of his days.
It’s all so romantic.
Silvia reaches for her cellphone in her desk; the urge to text either one of her exes right now is strong. She knows they’ll both answer—that either one of them will ask her to come around, and that she’ll have meaningless sex with either of them until she stops feeling sad about her life for a few hours.
She doesn’t know what makes her stop—whether it’s a sudden burst of maturity or just a sense of sickening, adject displeasure at the mere thought of that future. What Silvia does know is that all reaching out to her exes is going to do is make her sad—sad if something works out with one of them, and sad if it doesn’t—and Silvia is tired of chasing things that make her unhappy.
She closes the desk drawer, takes a breath, and with it, she lets her exes go. When she gets home, she’ll delete their numbers and their pictures and have herself a good cry on the sofa while Gordon Ramsey yells in the background. She deserves better than whatever Alicia and Miles could offer her anyway. She wants what Buck and Eddie have—all that unwavering trust, and unflinching devotion. They’ve faced tsunamis and death, and somehow they’re still standing.
It’s a story for the ages is what it is, and if Buck and Eddie haven’t swallowed all the love in the world for themselves, Silvia thinks she’d like to have some of her own.
The clock on the wall ticks to 4:30. Right on the dot, her next client pounds on her door. So with a small smile on her face, and a new determination flowing through her veins, Silvia takes another breath and moves on.