Page 174 of Only the Hunter

The door opens before we reach the top step. Mr. Thompson comes out first wearing jeans and a crewneck sweater in a way that still somehow reads as a power move. A black Doberman is at his heel. Behind him, Scott appears with the easy, unhurried quality of a man who has had six months to adjust to his father’s new place—a birthday gift Mr. Thompson gave himself, apparently, and one Scott has clearly already claimed a favorite chair in.

After everything passed, and before Evie returned to work, the two of us visited him in New York. For all his griping via text, in person, he was fine. Supportive even. Like I suspected he would be if I made it clear how serious I am about his sister.

Evie steps forward and her father pulls her in; not a handshake-and-shoulder pat, but a real embrace, the kind that lasts long enough to mean something. His eyes are glassy when he releases her.

I’ve never seen that. Not once, not in all the years I spent orbiting this family as a kid, catching Mr. Thompson only in passing—leaving for a business trip, arriving late to a dinner already underway, a voice on the phone Evie’s mother would go quiet for. He was never a person I knew, so much as a fact about Evie’s life, mostly relayed secondhand, mostly unflattering. I built the rest of him out of what my mother said and what Evie didn’t say, and it hardened into something I never thought to question.

His emotion alters the version of him I’ve been carrying for as long as I can remember.

I extend my hand. “Mr. Thompson.”

He grips it firmly. “Gabriel.” He pauses, giving the moment purposeful weight. “Thank you for bringing her home.”

I don’t know what to say to that. I settle for, “Yes, sir,” which is the safest response to most things he’ll ever say to me.

It’s our first visit to her father since we moved in together. She initiated the move—told me it was silly for me to keep paying rent on a three-bedroom apartment when I spent every night at her place. And I concurred. Three bedrooms had been a poor decision to begin with, but I wanted a room to lock my guns and a home office. In her place, I’ve created both those spaces in her basement.

Scott claps me on the back. “Flight okay?”

“Good.”

“You look annoyingly rested.”

“You look exactly the same.”

He grins. It’s the same grin he had as an incorrigible teen—the one that showed up right around the time his parents split and his dad stopped saying no to him. The one that preceded every decision his sister would have vetoed if she’d been asked. Still the same.

The tour takes twenty minutes. There is a lot of gold. Not subtle gold—not gilded frames and warm lighting—but ceiling medallions and inlaid floors and a chandelier in the entryway that I estimate, conservatively, weighs more than my car.

I watch Evie take it all in with the diplomatic neutrality of a woman who has cross-examined federal officials and is not going to let a chandelier get the better of her.

“Dad,” she says, in a tone that covers a great deal of ground with very few syllables.

“I designed it myself,” he says, with the satisfaction of a man who has never needed anyone’s approval and has somehow still managed to want it. “The first home without a wife’s opinion. Every single room is my design.”

Evie blinks once, which is her version of a very loud response.

I look at a gilded ceiling rose in the dining room and think: she has never, not once, decorated anything without a reason. Every object in her townhome is either functional or meaningful. This house and my girlfriend are the same person’s creations, and I cannot reconcile it, and I decide to find that funny rather than alarming.

“Two rooms,” her father says, pointing at me as we pass the guest corridor. “My house, my rules.”

“We’re staying at his mom’s,” Evie says smoothly.

“Good,” he says, as though he’s won something.

Scott catches my eye behind his father’s back and mouths, “Don’t.”

I would never argue about a guest room, but when Mr. Thompson inquires about my mother, I’m careful to avoid any mention of my mother’s late best friend, who is also his ex-wife—if that’s even what Scott meant when he mouthed don’t.

In the afternoon we settle by the pool. The curved design is edged in pale stone with water so blue it looks rendered. The Doberman has decided I’m acceptable and is now lying at my feet. Scott and Evie have gone inside to supervise the caterer for tonight’s party.

Mr. Thompson and I sit in the shade and let the quiet be what it is for a moment.

“You were the friend I worried about,” he says.

I look at him.

“Of all the boys who came around. You were the one who saw her.” He chuckles, but it’s private—the kind of laugh that contains something he’s been sitting with for a long time. “I knew. I worried.”