My track record was the evidence, and the evidence was damning. I drove. Let the silence fill the car without trying to plug it with reassurances that would ring hollow.
Elena pulled out her phone, AirPods already materializing from her pocket, conversation finished with the decisive efficiency of a generation that treated emotional confrontation the way I treated architectural reviews: say the necessary thing, move on.
I merged onto the highway and spent the next fifteen minutes pretending her assessment hadn't gutted me.
It had.
I dropped Elena at the Langham downtown. She'd booked the room herself—insisted on it—and I knewbetter than to argue. She wanted her own space. Her own territory. A place to retreat if the evening went sideways, which was the contingency planning I recognized as inherited.
"I'll pick you up at six-thirty," I said, idling at the curb. "Reservations are at seven. Marcello's."
"Italian?" She slung her bag over her shoulder. "Fancy."
"It's a nice place. You'll like it."
"I'll like any place that isn't an airplane." She ducked down to look at me through the open passenger window. "Hey, Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm glad I came. Even if I give you a hard time." A half-smile. Brief. Then she straightened and disappeared through the hotel entrance.
I sat at the curb for a full minute, hands on the wheel, staring at nothing.
Then I drove home to Willow.
Willow had changed. Three times, apparently.
I noticed the evidence the moment I walked in—a rejected blouse tossed across the guest bed, visible through the open door. A pair of earrings abandoned on the bathroom counter. The subtle disarray of awoman who'd tried on multiple versions of herself and couldn't settle on one.
For all her teasing about my panicky shelf reorg, she was just as edgy.
She'd landed on a cream sweater and dark jeans, her hair dried and falling in those loose waves that made me forget important details like preventing my jaw from dropping in an embarrassing display of manly awe. She'd also cleaned the kitchen—already spotless, now aggressively so—and arranged a plate of those almond croissants from the bakery near Brew & Bean.
"How'd it go?" she asked, too casually.
"She's sharp. She's guarded. She already knows you're twenty-three—Jessica apparently has spies in my social circle."
"Great. Love that for us." Willow tugged at her sweater hem. "How do I look? Is this okay? I changed three times and I'm not sure any of them were right."
I crossed to her. Kissed her forehead. "You look perfect."
"That's what you'd say regardless."
"That's what I'd say regardless," I confirmed. "And it would be true regardless."
She smiled, but it didn't quite land. Her hands went to her back pockets—a Willow tell. She did that when she didn't know what to do with them.
"Hey." I tipped her chin up. "She's going to love you."
“You don’t know that." Willow held my gaze. "And she's twenty, Callum. Three years younger than me. What am I supposed to do with that? How do I act? I'm not her stepmom. I'm not her peer. I'm this weird in-between thing that doesn't have a playbook."
"Just be yourself."
"That's the most useless advice in the history of advice."
"It's all I've got."
She exhaled. Squared her shoulders. “Still sucks.”
