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But the question was right there, and it was enormous, and she’d asked it from the least defended place she had, and the least defended place she had was so small and so open that the thought of putting something real into it — something heavy, something that couldn’t be taken back, something that would live there once it was placed — made my hands go cold.

So I joked.

“You mean professionally? Because I think you’re overestimating Gerald’s flight capabilities, and I’d like that noted in the risk assessment.”

The words came out easy. Warm. The grin I’d been born with deployed at full voltage, the dimples doing their work, the whole charm apparatus firing on every cylinder it had.

The sound it made in the room was wrong.

I heard it before I saw it — the wrongness, the gap between what she’d offered and what I’d returned. The joke sat in the air between us with the quality of a thing that had been put where it didn’t belong, and the silence after it was not the comfortable silence of two people on a floor but the silence of a woman who had opened a door and found it still locked.

Something crossed her face.

I saw it because I was looking down at her, and her profile was turned toward the lamp, and the light caught the side of her face and I watched the expression move through it — a flicker, a flinch, a brief tightening around her eyes that lasted less than a second and was gone.

She reset.

I watched that too. The speed of it was the worst part. The professional register came back like a shade being drawn — smooth, practiced, the muscles of her face rearranging themselves into the composed, faintly ironic expression she wore in meetings and on phone calls and every time someone handed her something she couldn’t use.

“It’s a fair point,” she said. “Gerald’s flight risk is significant. I’ll add it to the liability section.”

Her voice was fine. Her voice was the producer’s voice, the one that could charm a county clerk, and the transition from the small voice to this one had taken less time than it took me to draw a breath.

She was already gone.

I’d opened my mouth to fix it before she’d finished the sentence about Gerald, but the sentence about Gerald was the door closing, and by the time I said her name, the lock had turned.

“Priya.”

“Hmm?”

“I was joking.”

“I know.” She picked up the pen. Started adding something to Gerald’s hat. “You’re always joking. It’s part of the brand.”

The word “brand” landed in my stomach with a weight I deserved.

She said it without bitterness. Without edge. The observation of a woman who had catalogued my faces and my patterns and my tools the way she catalogued everything — accurately, without judgment, with the detached competence of a professional assessing a variable she’d already accounted for.

I put my hand on her hair.

She went still. The pen stopped.

“I feel like you’re the first person who’s ever looked at me and seen the thing I actually am,” I said.

The words came out plain. No grin. No dimples. No charm apparatus. Just the sentence, sitting in the room where the joke had been, taking up the space the joke had wasted.

“Too late,” I added. “I know it’s too late. I should’ve said that first.”

She turned her head. Slowly. Her cheek rested against my knee, and she looked up at me, and her face was the face from the night she’d said “goodnight, Daddy” — open, searching, reading whatever was on mine.

“It’s not too late,” she said.

Her voice was warm. Gentle. The voice of a woman accepting an apology from a man who had hurt her and meant well and was trying, and the warmth of it was worse than anger, worse than cold, worse than any version of this where she’d made me pay for the joke.

I looked down at her. Her cheek on my knee. Her eyes on mine. The warmth in her face that I hadn’t earned and she was giving me anyway, and the knowledge — specific, heavy, unavoidable — that the only tool I’d ever owned was the one that had made her flinch.

“I’ll do better,” I said.