“Do you still have the old phone you lent me?” she said.
He nodded. “Do you need it?”
“I want to call my parents.”
He retrieved it from a box under his wardrobe. She held it in her still-gloved hands for a moment, biting her lip, then dialed the number.
Her father answered with his usual greeting, made wonderfully absurd by his level of gusto. “Yellow?”
A strained giggle slipped from her throat, unbidden.
“Em? Is that you?”
“Yes,” she said, getting herself under control. Mostly. Her hands trembled. “I’m not catching you at dinner, am I?”
“No, just finished. Where have you been? We were getting worried—well, you could probably tell by the ten thousand messages. Would have been twenty thousand if you hadn’t dropped your home phone service.”
“Oh!” Three-and-a-half weeks since she’d last called them—no wonder they were getting worried. “I’m sosorry. I haven’t checked voicemail once. I’ve been ... spending time out of the office.”
“Spending time out of the office?” She could hear the grin in her father’s voice. “Well, that’s good. I got the impression you were all but sleeping there last semester.”
She squeezed her eyes shut.Thatsecret she could have let him in on, but she figured it would make him anxious about both her finances and her common sense, so she hadn’t. She’d never kept so much from him. There’d never been a reason before.
“How are you?” she said. “There’s nothing wrong, is there?”
“No, no—we just wanted to chat. Oh, and to tell you to check your email. Your mother sent new photos. You’ll really like the one she took from inside the barn while it was snowing—well, just take a look. I can’t do it justice.”
“I will,” she said, the queasy feeling in her stomach spreading in tendrils up her throat. She hated not telling him things. She hated the thought of what he and her mother would go through if, by a stroke of very bad luck, she didn’t come back from the mission.
“Areyouokay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. Perhaps a bit too quickly.
Silence. Then: “Hmm.”
Oh, God. She was in great danger of bursting into tears.
“Hmm,” he repeated.
“Dad ...”
“You’re with that highly inappropriate man, aren’t you.”
She sucked in a shocked little breath. He was as perceptive as he possibly could be, given the circumstances.
“Aha,” he said. “But what’s wrong? He’s not making you unhappy, is he?”
“No.” She glanced at Hartgrave, sitting in his chair, deep in thought. “Quite the opposite.”
Her father must have heard the truth in her tone, because he laughed and said, “All right then,” and prodded her no more. He told her about Houdini, their escape-artist of a rooster, strutting right into their house that afternoon. He relayed the news that the Alvarezes, one farm over, had won a trip to L.A. He read her a particularly funny restaurant review in the paper and made her laugh three times.
“Uh oh,” he said. “Your mother is giving me the evil eye. I’d better hand you over, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
That inescapably brought to mind the possibility, hopefully slim, that this conversation would be their last.Popwent the little bubble of home he’d created. Anxiety roared back.
“Wait!Dad—I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said, clearly taken aback by the vehemence of her declaration. But then her mother said something in the background that made him chuckle, and he added, “I have been informed that your motheralsoloves you, and if she doesn’t get an immediate opportunity to tell you so herself, she will wrestle the phone out of my clutches.”
