He arrived at two o'clock in a car he hadn't driven, in a suit that cost more than my monthly rent, and he walked into that conference room and looked at the twelve-page prospectus I'd printed and bound and set at the head of the table. He sat down and read it. I drank my coffee and didn't fill the room, which was something I'd been practicing.
When he finished he set it down and looked at me.
"The staffing model is underfunded in year two," he said.
"I know. I'm in conversation with two corporate partners who have workforce development mandates. Year two gets addressed in the next draft."
He looked at the prospectus. Then at me. "The vision statement is strong."
It was the most my father had ever said about something I'd built. I knew that. I also knew it was him at full capacity, and I had stopped standing at the door waiting for more. I picked up my coffee.
"Thank you for coming, Daddy," I said.
He nodded once, picked up the prospectus, and put it in his coat pocket. I watched the car pull away from the window and sat in the conference room a little longer, looking at the light coming through the glass. That was all of it. It was enough.
Whitney called that evening while I was walking home.
"I can't talk long," she said, before I'd finished saying hello. "Preston's family is doing the rehearsal dinner venue walk-through tonight and I have seventeen unread texts from his mother about chair sashes, which is apparently a category of textile that carries genuine emotional weight."
"Chair sashes are load-bearing in certain families," I said.
"I'm learning that in real time. You look different."
"You haven't seen me. I haven't sent you a photo in weeks."
"The panel clip. The one Bree posted." A pause. "You look like you landed somewhere."
The leaves came down around me in the cold, gold and amber and the deep red of the oaks lining this block. My boots were good on the wet pavement. I had my tote on one shoulder and the wrap coat pulled close and I was carrying all of it lightly.
"I did," I said.
"Are you happy?"
"Yes."
"Good." I could hear her smiling. "That's genuinely all I wanted to know. Preston's mother is calling. I have to go defend a chair sash. I love you."
"I love you too. Tell her ivory."
"Sorry?"
"For the sashes. Ivory. It's a color that loves you back."
A beat. "That is the most you thing you've ever said to me." She was already laughing. "Goodbye."
She hung up. I walked the last two blocks home with the cold on my face and the city doing what it did in the early evening — people coming home, lights going on in windows, the smell ofsomeone cooking drifting down from an open floor above me — and my phone buzzed.
Wells. Two words: You good?
I typed back: Still alive and undefeated. Miss me?
Three dots. Then: Don't push it.
That was the whole conversation. It was everything.
I SMELLED THE DOG BEFOREI opened the door.
Not unpleasantly — in the way of something very large and very alive that had recently been outside and had already formed strong opinions about interior seating arrangements. The scent reached me on the landing and I stood there a moment with my key in the lock and thought: Rafe.
