Page 58 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“Raphael,” Asher says, “is currently walking our girl home for the fourth day in a row.”

“Our girl,” Maddox says, “is walking home because the three of us decided to give her space and took the fuck boy route, which itself is embarrassing as hell, keeping our contact with her at the bare minimum, and then executed that decision so thoroughly that she filled the gap with someone who actually shows up. That’s on us. Not him.”

The silence that follows is the particular silence of two men who know they’ve just been handed the correct answer and don’t enjoy it.

He’s right. That’s the actual problem and none of us have wanted to say it plainly. We made a decision and it was the wrong one, not in principle but in execution. We gave her so much room that we backed ourselves out of her orbit entirely and she didn’t stop moving just because we did.

He’s right and he’s also the one who booked a flight to Milan last week and only came back last night, so his standing to critique our execution is limited and I’m about to say so when Asher gets there first.

“You went to Milan,” Asher says.

“I had work.”

“You had work that could have been done from here. You left because you didn’t know what to do with yourself and you thought distance would help.”

Maddox opens his mouth.

“Did it help?” Asher asks.

A beat. “No.”

“No,” Asher confirms. “Because none of this is helping. The space isn’t helping, the distance isn’t helping, the room service I’ve been sending up without signing my name isn’t helping because she deserves to know it’s from me and I’m too busy being respectful to just go tell her I miss having her in the kitchen.” He picks up his vodka. “We’re all acting insane.”

He’s also right.

I’m fifty-one years old. I have been in rooms with extraordinary pressure for my entire adult life and I have always known what to do. I have made decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars with less internal deliberation than I’ve spent on a seating chart at the outdoor lunch tables. The younger version of me, the version who built this vineyard from a failing property and a significant amount of stubbornness, would have handled this completely differently. He wouldn’t have sat at a desk for two weeks constructing professional distance. He’d have gone to her. Directly. No committee, no consensus, no careful framework of emotional consideration. He’d have made it extremely clear that she wasn’t going anywhere and let her argue about it afterward.

I’ve spent twenty years developing the kind of restraint that apparently does not apply to Harper Brooks.

“We made a decision,” I say. “We made it with the right intentions and it produced the wrong outcome. We can either continue being correct about it or we can fix it.”

“How do we fix it without making her feel crowded?” Maddox says.

“We talk to her.”

“We’ve been talking to her.”

“Asher has been asking if she’s eaten. You’ve been texting emojis and borderline flirtatious one-liners at odd hours. I’ve been conducting every conversation we have like a board meeting.” I look at both of them. “That’s not talking to her. That’s performing distance while pretending to maintain contact.”

Another silence. This one’s heavier.

“So we stop performing,” Asher says.

“We stop performing.”

The south terrace comes into my sightline from the desk window and I’m not watching it, I’m thinking, I’m looking at the middle distance while I think, and it just happens to be the case that the middle distance contains the path from the boutique space to the residential suites and Harper and Raphael are currently on it.

He’s walking her back.

Her head tips back laughing at something, the full version, the real one that she hasn’t aimed at any of us in fourteen days, and Raphael’s shoulder is close to hers and his hands are in his pockets and he’s grinning and they look easy together in a way that lands somewhere in the center of my chest like a fist.

I set my glass down.

We agreed. Space. Don’t crowd the process. She’ll come to us when she’s ready.

She’s currently being walked home by another man and I have been patient for two weeks and I’m done.

The restraint. The consideration. The carefully maintained professional register. All of it can, as of right now, go directly to hell.