Page 21 of Touch of Class

“Exploits and triumphs, as always,” he called gently after her, and she had no reason to doubt the assertion. He’d never given her any reason to doubt either his sincerity or his capabilities. Still, as she climbed the stairs to her own space, for some reason, she thought of Gillian.

She paused, midstep, midway up. Did she think of Gillian the same way she thought of Hugh? At least in that sense? Surely not. Hugh was the person she counted on most in the world, and Gillian was … what? An archnemesis? She smiled at the hyperbole, perhaps a dramatic holdover from her teenage self. No, Gillian was a prickly if distantly aloof thorn, a complicating factor, a wrinkle in the fabric of a life she’d been eager to smooth. There was no need to equate her with sincerity or capability, though maybe she’d always been the latter. To Daphne’s knowledge, Gillian had never failed at anything that mattered to her, even if those things varied greatly from what mattered to Daphne.

Or at least they always had before. Only tonight, they hadn’t entirely. Gillian clearly cared about her work. She also seemed to love her people enough to allow herself to listen, to consider their curiosity, even to let them tease.

Daphne had seen a softness in her, fleeting and yet undeniably present, almost vulnerable in the moment when the topic of prom night had come up. Gillian hadn’t snapped or withdrawn. She’d surrendered to the memories Daphne had the power to share, and in doing so drained all Daphne’s desire to do so.

Then, in the moment when Gillian’s picture-perfect professionalism had yielded to her friends’ gentle ribbing, the way her entire façade had cracked, letting something more radiant shine through, Daphne’s heart had nearly seized.

Had that been what piqued her interest? Something sincere amid all her carefully cultivated expertise?

She shook her head and began to climb once more. She couldn’t dissect slivers of something Gillian kept carefully guarded. She’d lost too many nights’ sleep splitting hairs and looking for the good in people with a microscope.

No. Daphne was past the point of accepting scraps. She needed to surround herself with people who oozed genuine generosity, and she suspected she’d found that in Robin, Brooke, and Tegan. She had to let that abundance sustain her rather than search for crumbs Gillian clearly hadn’t intended to drop.

“Morning.” Brooke stuck her head in Gillian’s office door, startling her so thoroughly the papers she’d rested on her knees fluttered to the floor.

“Whoops.” Brooke came in, then crouched down to help collect them.

“Don’t worry about it,” Gillian said quickly, but it was too late. Her most detail-oriented friend had already paused to peruse the subject matter.

Glancing up, Brooke’s blue eyes filled with concern, or maybe it had already been there before she even came in. “Harlow’s monkeys?”

“Just a review,” Gillian tried feebly.

“Are you about to take my job teaching at the college?” Brooke stood but continued flipping through the pages.

“Hardly. Maura hasn’t spoken to me since Robin started dating her only child.”

“Should we send Robin a thank-you note for that? Or does it bother you that your most steadfast and committed mentor is no longer actively positioning you as her heir apparent?”

Gillian shook her head. The topic was too big to face within the more pressing chaos of her current moment. She hadn’t even thought about Maura when she’d pulled those files, which might speak to the vast number of things on her mind, or perhaps the recency of various conflicts. “I’m not focused on the five-year plan at the moment.”

Brooke sat down in the seat usually reserved for clients, but Gillian got the distinct sense she was about to have those roles flipped. “Want to talk about this?”

“The study?”

Brooke smiled placatingly. “Sure, if you want to tell me why you’re reviewing foundational concepts from intro psych classes you could teach in your sleep—”

“Would we call this foundational?”

“I guess it depends on what you’re taking from a study about stuffed monkeys.”

“Harlow put animals in a situation where they had to choose between attaching to a surrogate ‘mother’ with the ability to provide food versus one providing comfort, and every single one of the primates bonded with the one providing comfort.”

Brooke pressed her lips together as if trying not to laugh. “Thanks for the recap.”

“I’m not recapping. I’m questioning why an experiment based basically on the abuse of primates has been extrapolated so thoroughly into human development. It’s almost unquestionable.”

“I think plenty of people have questioned the methodology and ethics.”

“But not the findings. It’s been so thoroughly accepted that a group of therapists will sit in a room and nod sagely as a hippie on a full-sized bed declares, with faux authority, that physical touch is a vital human need, essential to good emotional and mental development or sustainability.”

Brooke sat forward. “I’ve been wondering when you’d circle around to the good part.”

“How do you know there’s a good part to any of this?”

“I’ve known you for almost as long as you’ve known everything there is to know about Harlow’s monkeys. So, if you want to talk about ethical implications of touch experiments from the 1960s, we can, or we could jump to why this woman has you tied in knots.”