Page 48 of His Good Girl

At some point after the entrées arrived, Avery asked, “Did my dad ever ask you for help?”

I looked up. “Constantly.”

Her eyes widened. “Really?”

“Not with money, if that’s what you mean. But with advice or decisions or things he pretended were casual questions until I realized he had been worrying them to death for weeks.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“He would call and say, ‘Quick question,’ which meant clear your whole afternoon.”

Avery’s smile softened with a flash of sadness and a glimmer of warmth. “What did he worry about?”

“You.”

She glanced down.

“It wasn’t because he thought you were incapable,” I wanted to make that clear. “It was because he was your father, and fathers are arrogant enough to believe worrying is a form of engineering.”

That got me another laugh, quieter this time.

“He worried about whether you were too hard on yourself,” I said. “Whether you felt things more than you admitted. Whether he and your mother had protected you too much or not enough, depending on the hour.”

Her throat moved. “He never said any of that.”

“He wouldn’t have. He preferred advice that came disguised as checking your tire pressure.”

“God.” She looked away toward the restaurant window, blinking once. “I miss that.”

“I know.”

For a moment, I almost reached across the table for her hand. It would have been acceptable, comforting, human even. A gesture Robert would have understood and perhaps expected from me. But the meaning of touch had changed, at least for me, and I was not willing to borrow innocence from the past to cover the present. So I did not touch her. I let the silence linger instead.

After a while, she looked back at me. “Thank you for telling me.”

“There are better stories.”

“I want those too.”

“You’ll have them.”

“Tonight?”

“Not all tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Because then you would have no reason to tolerate me later.”

The words left my mouth before I could rethink them.

Avery’s expression immediately changed by a fraction.

Later opened the smallest possible door. The kind a careful man did not open without meaning to. I took a sip of wine and watched her over the rim of the glass, already regretting the sentence and yet unwilling to take it back.

She saved me, or herself, by smiling. “I’m mainly tolerating you for the expensive steak.”

“Good. I respect a clear motive.”