Dean's attitude suggested this was going to be a capital-C Conversation. The amount of things that fell into that bucket which could also conceivably have begun with something he'd overheard at work were fairly limited. Jumping to conclusions was practically inevitable when there were so few possible conclusions in sight.
Hudson wanted to leave, Don Juan assumed. He traveled for work regularly, and some trips were much longer than others. Probably he had an opportunity to leave for a much longer stretch, and this was going to be a Conversation because he didn't know if Don Juan was stable enough to handle the world in his absence. (And would he have been wrong? Don Juan came here tonight unplanned because he hadn't been able to sleep. Where would he go if Hudson left for months?)
"We can talk about it," he insisted. He didn't want Hudson turning down opportunities for his sake, as depressing as the idea of going without him for any length of time was. He didn't want Hudson to treat him like he was fragile, even if he currently was.
Don Juan's brow knit for half a second. His initial thought was to wonder why Hudson had phrased it as a question, because Hudson was the only person in the world that had already known about Adriana and his relationship with her. Had the existence of the girl really never come up? It seemed unlikely, but then... why would they have talked about it? Don Juan had always been resolute in his stance that she was much better of without him, so there wasn't much to say. Until now, anyway. Now that his parents were involved, he'd lost a good deal of agency in the decision.
"I knew she existed," he clarified with a frown. It wasn't necessarily surprising that that was the way the story was being repeated, though; everyone else had just heard she existed. "My parents just found out over Christmas, so now things are getting... complicated," he said with a sigh.
Don Juan shrugged. He was reticent to get into too many details, reluctant to make this another conversation like the one on Christmas Day with all his family standing around expressing their various forms and degrees of disappointment.
"Solicitor complicated," he said as though he didn't know anything deeper than that. He had the sense that the solicitor didn't really want him to discuss it with anyone, anyway, so this wasn't much of an exaggeration. They weren't telling him the details of how they planned to proceed with the case, because they assumed the more he knew the more he'd be able to fuck up, either intentionally or accidentally. He wasn't feeling optimistic about their outcome regardless; it would take a persuasive solicitor indeed to convince anyone that he was more fit to raise a child than Klaas Spaans was.
As for whether he'd been planning to tell Dean... the question confused him, honestly. Even if he hadn't forgotten that Dean didn't already know, this wasn't an issue for the pair of them. It was something his parents were doing, and now something people were talking about, but it wasn't as though it had anything to do with Dean. Even if they somehow won custody of Kaatjie, it wasn't as though Don Juan was going to be bringing her by here. Unless Dean thought this was another thing he'd end up having to worry about, sooner or later, the way he'd been the one picking up the pieces when Adriana had died and Don Juan had gone sulking by a frozen lake about it.
"I've only met her once," he said, hoping to give some reassuring evidence towards the point that he wasn't going to go spiraling if the court case didn't go their way. "She sort of ambushed me."
Don Juan didn't like the look of how Dean drained his whiskey. He was stressed, that seemed clear, but precisely what had snagged him was less clear, at least to Don Juan. "Alright," he echoed warily. He took a small sip of his own glass to buy himself a second to think. The root of this had to be that he was worried Don Juan would collapse under the pressure of something sooner or later, and he didn't know how to convince Dean that wouldn't happen. He wasn't even necessarily convinced himself that it wouldn't happen, only that he didn't suspect the thing that might cause him to buckle would be Kaatjie. She'd either stay with her uncle or she would move in to the Dempsey estate and be chiefly raised by his mother; either way it wasn't much his concern.
"What are you thinking?" he eventually asked when he'd exhausted himself trying to guess.
Don Juan took a long breath. Dean's opinion was a common one, he supposed, because his family had all had the same type of reaction on hearing the news. If he'd been secretly raising a daughter for a decade then maybe this sort of thought would have been warranted, but what was supposed to be shocking about this discovery, really? That he'd slept with a woman when he was nineteen? No one was surprised by that.
"Don't see why it ought to be," he said with another shrug, verging on defensive. "I was nominally involved in her conception. I met her once. I'll show up in court when the solicitor says to. Otherwise it's not much to do with me." He shifted his gaze away and tilted his whiskey glass as though he were more interested in that than the conversation. "Mum wants to take her in, Ana's brother doesn't want to let her go. It's between them, really."
Don Juan couldn't help it; he scoffed at the question. "I don't want to fuck her up." Which meant he didn't want to be involved by extention. There was no kind of involvement he could have with a young girl, still developing all her notions about how the world worked and how she fit into it, that wouldn't leave her ruined to some extent. If she made it to adulthood and managed not to have a single thing in common with him, it could only possibly be to her benefit.
"I don't think that'll happen," he said, crossing his arms loosely over his knees. "Between you and me I think the case that I'm a fit parent is a pretty weak one."
Don Juan looked at Hudson with his mouth set in a firm line. He did believe it, and none of Dean's sentimentality was going to dissuade him. "You came to get me after her mother died," he pointed out, meaning that Dean knew better than most people how entirely incapable he had been at the time of taking care of anyone; he hadn't even been able to take care of himself. And he hadn't made great strides in the interim, either. He wasn't drinking himself to death in the wilderness at the moment, but Dean still didn't know the half of what trouble he'd gotten himself into only a few months ago.
He didn't want someone depending on him if he wasn't sure he'd still be here tomorrow, and at the end of the day he wasn't sure of it. Even now that he was sober — it was too new and still felt too tentative for him to fully trust that it would last. But he was sure Dean didn't want to hear that, and certainly didn't want to hear about his brush with death back in December.
He finished his glass. "It doesn't matter what I think, anyway. It'll come down to who has the more persuasive solicitor. I just think they've got a lot more evidence in their favor than we do."
Don Juan set the empty glass down and laid down next to Hudson on the bed, nestling into the crook below his arm. He took another long breath. "I want her to be better than me," he muttered. The way he phrased it didn't sound selfish, but maybe deep down it partly was. He held on to a lot of guilt for people he'd hurt throughout his life; he didn't want to drown under the weight of having ruined her life, too. And whatever people said about her having been abandoned, or what she'd lacked by not having a father growing up — he was entirely sure she was better off than she would have been if she'd been depending on him for anything in the last decade.
"I made her cry," he admitted quietly. "When she found me."