Page 22 of His Good Girl

“I assumed she would.”

“You hoped she would.”

“Yes.”

“Dangerous hobby.”

I took the coffee from him. “What did you say to her?”

“Nothing inaccurate.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“I am rarely that.”

I looked at him over the rim of the cup.

Benjamin sighed. “I may have suggested that failure to appear would indicate she was merely looking for a handout from her godfather.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“She’s coming, isn’t she?”

“She’s twenty-five, recently fired, and already ashamed enough to write me that email. Did it occur to you that she might not need you to spear her with a bayonet first thing in the morning?”

“Yes. I rejected the thought as insufficiently motivating.”

I should have been angrier and I was, a little, but I also knew him. Benjamin had built his career on spotting weaknessin systems before the systems collapsed, and he had extended that habit to me with a devotion that was both touching and occasionally unbearable. He protected my calendar as if it were a national border. He protected the company because he loved it, but would have thrown himself under a cement mixer before admitting so. And, in some strange fierce way, he protected me from the parts of myself most likely to make expensive mistakes.

“Avery is not a threat,” I said.

Benjamin gave me a look so flat it deserved engineering review. “Everyone is a threat until proven otherwise.”

“She is not a reporter. She is not a council member’s nephew angling for a consulting contract. She is Avery. She is my goddaughter.”

“Exactly,” he retorted. “A sentimental variable.”

I did not answer, which was unfortunate, because silence encouraged him.

“She matters to you,” he stated flatly.

“Her father mattered to me.”

“That was not what I said.”

I set the coffee down. “Bring her up when she arrives.”

Benjamin watched me for a second too long, then nodded. “Of course.”

When she walked into my office, every serious, sensible, well-constructed thought I had prepared shifted by about three degrees.

Avery looked nervous enough to break and determined enough not to. Her brunette hair was pinned low at the back of her neck, still damp in places from a shower taken in a hurry, loose pieces curling at her temples. Her blazer was good but not expensive, her blouse soft ivory, her visitor badge clipped a little crookedly to her lapel. She held a slim black folder against her body like a shield she had decided at the last minute was not large enough. She looked young, yes. Of course she did. Twenty-five was young from where I stood.

But she did not look like the child in Robert’s kitchen, or the grief-stricken twenty-year-old who had let me hold her upright for twelve seconds after the burial because she had run out of strength and pride at the same time. She looked like a woman who had lost a job, slept badly, gotten ready in under half an hour, been insulted by my assistant, and still walked through my door with her head held high, which all mattered to me.

“Avery,” I said.

Her chin lifted a fraction. “Mr. Rowe.”