“I’ve been holding onto it for years,” I say. “Had a hundred names picked out for a boy, but this was the only one that ever felt right for a daughter.”
“When you know, you know.”
“Exactly.” I scoot closer to her, handing off a soft book that she promptly puts in her mouth. “She’s cutting some new teeth … everything’s a teething toy.”
He watches her with intention, hardly moving, studying her like she’s some kind of living photograph. Or maybe he’s trying to mentally capture this moment so he can lock it away forever, knowing there’ll never be another like it.
“I’m not a baby person,” he says. “So I apologize if this is awkward.”
“I wasn’t a baby person before I had her either,” I say. “I mean, I love her because she’s my own, but I was never one to fawn over other people’s babies. It just seems so contrived, you know? Whenever people freak out over other people’s kids, it feels forced to me.”
“When was she born?”
“Last June.”
“My mother was born in June. What day?”
“The seventeenth,” I answer.”
His lips inch into a sad sort of smile. “Hers was the sixteenth.”
Was? Is she no longer living? I don’t ask—it’s none of my business.
“She passed last year,” he volunteers. “About five months after we lost my dad. She would’ve loved to have been a grandmother, but that never happened.”
“No siblings?”
“I have an older sister, but I haven’t seen her since I was a kid. Don’t even remember her, really. Just that she caused our family a lot of grief.”
If his parents have passed and he’s estranged from his only sibling, it makes sense why he wanted to meet his child. The tension in my shoulders dissolves a little more as the man before me transforms from an athletic god to a mere mortal.
But only slightly.
He’s still very much Fabian Catalano—the man, the myth, the legend.
“I could find her for you.” I’m probably—okay definitely—overstepping boundaries here, but I can’t help it. “It’s kind of what I do for a living. I mean, partially. I’m a genealogist. I help people track long-lost relatives and help create family trees, that sort of thing. I’m really good at locating people …”
His brows knit as if he’s considering, but then his mouth presses into a hard line. “Appreciate the offer, but that won’t be necessary.”
I’ve rarely heard of someone not wanting to find a long-lost family member, but once again, it’s none of my business so I let it go.
Lucia tosses an orange stacking block in Fabian’s direction and it rolls to his feet. A second later, she’s off to the races, pawing across the living room on all fours until she reaches him. Hoisting herself on his knee with hands covered in slobber, she bounces and grins.
He eyes the wet streaks on his skin, and I toss him a nearby burp rag.
“Sorry, she’s teething.”
“You’d mentioned that.” He cleans up the drool, folds the rag, and places it neatly on the cushion beside him—only to have Lucia grab it and wave it around like a flag. “But it’s fine.”
“Everything’s a toy at this stage …” I say.
He watches her every move, transfixed, as if he’s never seen anything like this. And maybe he hasn’t. He said so himself, he doesn’t want kids and he isn’t a baby person. This is probably a trip to Mars for him.
“She seems like a happy kid,” he says.
“So happy,” I emphasize. “For the first few months of her life, she slept in a bassinet at the side of my bed. I kid you not, starting at about two months, she woke up every single morning with a smile on her face.”
“Maybe she was just happy to see her mom.”
I chuckle. “Yeah, maybe.”
His cocoa eyes—the ones that match my daughter’s speck for speck—divert onto mine for a moment.
“So are you doing this on your own?” He nods toward the baby. “Or is there someone else in the picture.”
“Just me. Which is fine. I mean, I obviously knew what I was getting into when I went into this. My younger sister lives about ten minutes away. She’s my nanny. And my parents are always a phone call away. And I have the best neighbors. Always willing to help out if I need anything. It’s true when they say it takes a village.”
He slides to the floor and takes a seat closer to our daughter. It’s weird having this rich, famous tennis player in my living room like just another weeknight. Though I’ve never understood the idolization of people just because they’re extremely athletic. I dated a guy once who was obsessed with Tiger Woods. He actually cried when he recalled the time Tiger took a break from golf. He claimed it sent him into an actual depression and called it his own “blue period.” He didn’t touch a golf club again until Tiger was back.
“Do you have any games coming up?” I ask because I don’t know what else to say but this silence is deafening. “Or tournaments? Matches. I don’t know what you call them. I literally know nothing about tennis.”
He laughs through his nose. “I’m playing the Rosemont Open next week in Atlanta. Going head to head with Xander Fox.”
“Never heard of him. Is he good?”
Fabian laughs out loud this time, and his smile is so brilliant it lights his eyes—and the room. This makes him only slightly less intimidating but ten times more gorgeous.
“The media likes to paint us as rivals,” he says, “but we’ve known each other for years. He’s actually a good friend of mine. I was the best man at his wedding two years ago. Of course ESPN didn’t mention that.”
“Does it bother you? Having no say in the way you’re portrayed?” I think of the video of him storming off the interview set.
“It used to.”
“I’m going to be honest with you, after I learned you were Lucia’s donor, I googled you.”
He looks to our daughter, then back to me. “And what’d you find out?”
“Mostly that you have a temper … and a thing for beautiful women.”
“Or maybe beautiful women have a thing for me …” He winks. “It’s hard to meet people. I train most of the year. And when I’m not training, I’m playing. When I’m not playing, I’m fulfilling endorsement deals and other contractual obligations. Half of my relationships have been set up by PR companies. And most of the photos you see, those paparazzi pics of us grabbing coffee or dining outside at some trendy café in New York? Those are staged.”
Well, I feel deceived …
I make a mental note to cancel my US Weekly subscription.
“Why not just try to meet someone the old-fashioned way?” I ask. “And then keep it on the downlow. Plenty of celebrities lead private lives.”
“Success—especially in the world of sports—has more to do with relevancy than anything else. If you don’t keep people talking about you, if you don’t make sure your name is constantly in the news, they’ll move onto the next hot thing and forget you exist. At the end of the day, we’re all replaceable. There’s always going to be someone waiting, ready to take your place.”