It unsettled him more than a joke would have.
“What’s that?” Benson asked, nodding at the tablet.
“I was looking at your calendar.”
“My calendar.”
“I know your password.”
“That is not the point.”
Liam was shameless. “I was trying to figure out whether you’re free next weekend.”
“For what?”
That got him a look. Liam set the tablet down on the counter. “You know for what.”
Benson took another drink, slower this time. He had known this conversation was coming the minute he saw the black envelope on his desk at work that morning, forwarded by an assistant who had assumed it was one more discreet social obligation in a life full of them. Benson slipped it into his briefcase and did not think about it again for nearly three hours, which, given the subject matter, granted him sainthood.
“She asked for a week,” Benson said.
“And this weekend is after a week.”
“That’s not the point.”
“No,” Liam agreed. “The point is that at the end of the week, we need to do something.”
Benson’s jaw tightened.Do something.He despised how reasonable that sounded.
Because Liam was right, waiting alone would not solve anything. Eden had not asked for silence because she wanted to drift away from them. She had asked because she could feel herself being swept toward something before she knew whether she could live inside it.
And Benson, in the first ugly hours after she had said it, had wanted to solve that by sheer force of stability. He had gone to work Monday morning and buried himself in spreadsheets and projections and the comforting logic of risk assessments, and somewhere between lunch and an argument with Oliver, he had understood that this was exactly the wrong instinct.
“Have you talked to her?” Benson asked.
“Not beyond what we said we would do.”
“Definebeyond.”
“One text about the shoes she wanted for her friend’s party. She sent me a picture. I said the silver ones were better.”
“Silver was correct.” They were close to white, and Benson loved Eden in white.
“I know.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I didn’t flirt. I didn’t start anything. I didn’t ask if she missed me. I’m not a teenager.”
“No,” Benson muttered. “Teenagers have more impulse control.”
Liam smiled faintly at that, and for a second, the world felt easier. Like a version of this – Liam in his kitchen, Benson drinking after work, some argument half-playful and half-not – might once have belonged to another life they had nearly managed to keep.
Then, Liam said, “She’s thinking too hard.”
Benson set down his glass. “That’s unfair.”
“It’s true.”
