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“Sorry,” Florence says. “I tried to be quiet.”
“I know. I just wanted to check that you’re all right.”
It’s impossible to focus on words while looking directly at Luca, so Florence settles on staring at a poster on the opposite wall advertising a local museum. “I’m fine. Just . . . restless.”
“I know that feeling.” More creaking, as Luca pulls her feet onto the sofa and settles her cheek on one knee. “Tonight was a good show.”
“I thought so too.”
Luca’s attention snags on Florence’s phone. Her earbuds are still in her lap, crackling softly as the video keeps playing. “What were you watching?”
Reluctantly, Florence turns her phone so Luca can see. On the screen, her father—rain-drenched and charismatic and boyishly handsome, everything that Florence can never be—croons another angsty love song.
“Jeffrey Blake?” Luca asks. Her eyes dart back to Florence’s face. “I didn’t think this was the type of music you liked.”
Florence almost laughs. “It’s not.”
“Then why are you . . .”
“He’s my father.”
To her credit, Luca only stares at her open-mouthed for a few seconds before regaining control of her facial features. Her gaze darts between Florence and her father on the screen, the same age that she is now. Florence wonders what she’s seeing. She doesn’t think they look very similar. She has his brows, maybe, dark and severe. The brown hair and large eyes.
“Is this a thing I was supposed to know?” Luca asks in the careful tone of someone tiptoeing across a minefield.
“No,” says Florence.
“Why not?”
“Because,” she says, “I don’t want my brand in this industry to be Jeffrey Blake’s daughter.”
Luca’s gaze is surprisingly attentive for someone who just stumbled out of bed in the middle of the night. “Why would that be a bad thing? People . . . I thought people liked him.”
“They do,” Florence says. The bitterness in her voice is impossible to overhear.
She can see the moment something reroutes inside Luca’s head. “You don’t want it to seem like your success is because of him.”
Florence turns her screen off. The quiet crackling of her earbuds dies. “He had nothing to do with any of this,” she says. “Genuinely. I didn’t even see much of the child support he paid. My mum stuck enough of it in a savings account to cover my education and donated the rest.”
“She didn’t give it to you?” Luca asks.
“No. It was . . . a pride thing, I guess. She wanted me to learn to get on without relying on his money. Learn how to budget, have a student job. Live like he didn’t exist, basically.” Florence shakes her head. “Anyway, the point is, his biggest contribution to my music career was gifting me a guitar for my thirteenth birthday, and even that was only because my mother told him I wanted one. Earl was the one who taught me.”
“Your father didn’t know you wanted one?” Luca asks.
“He left my mum when I was seven and was barely around even before that,” Florence says. “The last time we spoke was his annual birthday call in December. He doesn’t know a thing about me.”
Luca considers this for a moment before saying, “He sounds like a prick.”
Florence wants to laugh, but the lump in her throat feels as big as a walnut. Around it, she presses out a tired, “I hate him.”
It occurs to her only after she’s said it that she’s never spoken that particular sentence out loud. She’s afraid to look at Luca, but when she does, Luca is looking back at her, nothing on her face except quiet understanding.
They’re both silent for a moment. The person on the other side of the lobby has fallen asleep. The receptionist is chugging an energy drink in the pale glow of his phone screen.
“I still haven’t told my parents I dropped out of uni,” Luca says.
Florence turns to look at her. It takes her a second to understand what Luca is doing: reciprocating, balancing the delicate scales of self-disclosure that tipped in her favor. A truth for a truth.
