“You were about to say something.”
“I was going to ask how the first one went.” She pulled at a loose thread on his duvet. “Since you’ve told me nothing, which is technically fine, but also means I’ve had to piece it together from available evidence.”
“What available evidence.”
“You smiled at your phone three times on Sunday. Bea saw you when she came by with Anna.” Stella looked up. “Also you whistled while you were making eggs on Saturday morning, and you only do that when you’re in an annoyingly good mood.”
Tyler checked his collar in the mirror. “I whistle sometimes.”
“You whistle when your photos come out well and apparently when a date goes well. Those are your two whistling occasions.” She tilted her head. “So it went well.”
“It went fine.”
“The whistling suggests otherwise.”
He picked up his coffee, remembered it was cold, set it back down.
“She’s easy to talk to,” he said to the window.
“You mentioned that before.”
“It’s still true.” He turned back to the mirror, smoothed the collar. “We talked for two hours. I didn’t notice.”
Stella absorbed this. “What did you talk about?”
“Her mother. My photography.”
“And?”
He found he was smiling at the mirror and stopped. “She asked good questions. About the photography. Not polite questions—actual ones. She wanted to know how you decide what’s worth shooting.”
“What did you say?”
“I said you know it when the frame feels finished.” He shrugged. “She said that’s how she knows when a student’s ready to leave her office. When they stop asking permission to feel what they feel.”
Stella was quiet for a moment. “Okay. That’s actually good.”
“Yeah.”
“I like that.” She stood and came to stand beside him in the mirror, examining their reflections—him in the blue linen with the untameable morning hair, her in the Sydney FC shirt looking like she’d never once been anxious about anything. “The blue is right. You look like yourself.”
“I always look like myself.”
“You look like a more intentional version.” She nudged his arm with her shoulder, brief and easy. “She’s going to like it.”
Tyler picked up his keys from the dresser. Checked the time. He had forty minutes before he was supposed to meet Lindsey at the place on Forest Avenue—for a five minute drive—with the good pastries and no teenagers, which was a description he had now said in his head approximately thirty times.
“You’ll be okay?” he said. “Anna’s got the Shack covered, I can ask her to?—”
“Dad.” Stella gave him a look. “I’m sixteen. I have homework, a camera, and a grandmother who will feed me if I appear near her kitchen. Go.”
He went.
He was gone two and a half hours.
Stella had finished her calc homework, developed two rolls from the week’s shots at the Shack, eaten half a pack of Tim Tams she’d been saving for an occasion that apparently this qualified as, and was onto the second chapter of her English reading when she heard the door.
She didn’t look up. “How were the pastries?”
