Packing for Atlanta took eleven minutes. Saying goodbye took three days.
Teo owned a duffel bag — black, canvas, Goodwill on Flagler Street, six dollars. Everything he needed fit inside it with room to spare, which was either efficient packing or an indictment of how little he owned. Two shirts. Two jeans. Underwear. Socks. A charger. A notebook of lyrics he'd never shown anyone. The essentials of a man whose life could be compressed to forty liters because he'd never accumulated enough permanence to require more.
The guitar didn't fit in the duffel. It rode shotgun. It always rode shotgun.
He told the baby mothers separately. Three conversations. Three apartments. Three languages of loss.
Destiny first. Monday afternoon. Little Haiti. Naomi was at pre-K — he'd timed it that way. Cowardly, maybe. But telling his daughter he was leaving while she read his frequency with those four-year-old seismograph eyes was more than his structure could bear.
Destiny answered in a bathrobe. Between shifts. The ninety-minute window where she wasn't a pharmacy technician but a woman, and the woman was tired.
"Atlanta," she repeated.
"Ten days. Kofi's mom needs a musician."
"How much is it paying?"
"Two hundred. Maybe more."
She leaned against the doorframe. The calculation — the distance between what he said and what was true, measured in the specific units of a relationship built on beautiful half-truths. She didn't press.
"Bring something back for Nomi. She likes snow globes."
"There's no snow in Atlanta."
"She's four. She doesn't know that."
She went inside. Came back with a Ziploc bag: granola bar, gum, hand sanitizer, juice box. "For the plane."
A woman working sixty hours a week, stacking bills on her counter — and she'd packed him snacks. Because packing snacks was the verb her love conjugated into when all the other verbs had been exhausted.
"Come back," she said. Not come back to me. Just come back. The most generous version.
The door closed. He sat in the car holding the Ziploc and staring at the juice box — apple, Naomi's favorite — and the tenderness of it cracked something the tingling and the visions hadn't touched.
Janelle second. Tuesday evening. Overtown. Elijah in her arms, squirming, reaching, attempting to eat her earring with the determination of a toddler who believed everything was food until proven otherwise.
"How long?"
"Ten days."
"Who's covering your days with Elijah?"
Your days. As if they existed. As if there was a schedule instead of improvised chaos.
"Sofia. Zay."
"Sofia's not his father. Zay's not his father."
"I know."
She shifted Elijah to her other hip. The boy reached for Teo — full-body lean, the unambiguous physics of a child who wanted his father and saw no reason to be subtle. Teo took him. Elijah grabbed his shirt with the grip of someone who'd learned, at two, that holding on mattered because the thing you held might leave.
Janelle wanted a paper trail. Kofi's number. The address. Something retrievable. Because she knew — from case files, from statistics, from the topography of fatherhood in communities like theirs — that men who left sometimes didn't come back, and the difference between a disappearance and a trip was documentation.
He wrote the information on a Post-it. She stuck it to the fridge beside the co-parenting calendar — that grid of optimistic color-coding representing the structure she was building whether he participated or not.
"Come back functional," she said. Not safe. Functional. A woman who'd downgraded expectations from whole to operational and was trying to make peace with the reduction.
He kissed Elijah's forehead. Left. The boy screamed at the door — the short, sharp protest of a toddler registering departure. Teo heard it through the hallway, down the stairs, into the parking lot, all the way to the car.
Mika last. Wednesday night. Wynwood. The one whose goodbye would cost the most.
She cried. Not immediately. First anger: "You always leave." Then practical: "Luna has a checkup Thursday. You'll miss it." Then bargaining: "What if I came? I've never been to Atlanta. We could —" She stopped. Heard the fantasy collapsing — a normal trip, a family trip, the kind of trip taken by people who did things together instead of colliding and separating in patterns governed by a gravity neither could name.
Then she cried.
Luna was asleep. The angel wings watched from the wall — graphite feathers, three names, two wings, one spine. Teo held Mika against his chest, walking slow circuits, humming the sound from below language. She gripped his shirt the way Elijah had. The same clutch. The same desperation. His children and their mothers all spoke the same dialect of holding on.
"I'm twenty-one years old," she said into his shoulder. "I have a baby and a job that pays nothing and a man who loves me in a way I can feel but can't hold. And I'm tired, Teo. I'm so tired of being brave about this."
The word brave hit like a brick. Because she was. All three of them were. Destiny with her silence. Janelle with her notebook. Mika with her tears. The bravest people he knew — and their bravery was a direct consequence of his failure. Their courage divided by his absence. The most damning arithmetic of his life.
He stayed until Luna's next feeding. Changed a diaper. Made formula — two scoops, six ounces, wrist-test the temperature. He was good at this. The midnight mechanics. The soft parts. What he couldn't do was the money thing. The right-day thing. The system thing.
He kissed Luna's forehead. She didn't wake. Eight months old and she slept through his goodbye, which was maybe the kindest thing the universe had done for him all week.
At the door, Mika handed him a folded piece of paper. He opened it. Ink on napkin. A single angel wing, detailed, identical to the ones above Luna's crib. Beneath it, in her handwriting:
Come back with both.
He didn't understand it. He stared at the drawing — one wing, not two. Come back with both. As if she was giving him half of something and trusting the world to provide the other half. As if the drawing was a prophecy disguised as a goodbye, written in a language that Mika spoke instinctively and Teo hadn't learned yet.
He folded it into his wallet. Kissed her forehead. Walked out.
Three goodbyes. Three doors closing behind him. Three women standing on the other side, holding his children, watching the space where he'd been and doing the thing they always did: filling it.
He drove home in silence. The second heartbeat in his chest kept tempo with nothing — a rhythm without a song, a pulse without a purpose, counting down to something he couldn't see.
In his wallet, the angel wing waited.
One wing. Two words.
Come back with both.
[End of Episode 10][Next Episode: "Departure"]