Page 12 of Claim

“I’m sure she would.” I shook my head. “It won’t be necessary.”

“Your mother worries.” Father fiddled with his sleeve. “Not excessively. But… perhaps appropriately.”

I hummed, noncommittal.

“It’s been some time since you brought anyone to dinner. Or mentioned a date.”

“I don’t schedule them.” I kept my focus on my notes. “They tend to happen organically.”

“Do they?” His tone was mild. Curious, rather than sceptical.

“Not recently.”

Not at all, really. How could I go looking for something I didn’t want?

He nodded once, as if that confirmed something. “Your mother wondered whether it was a matter of inclination or opportunity.”

I glanced up. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

A corner of his mouth twitched. “No. They aren’t.”

We sat in silence for a while longer, the drip beside him ticking steadily, the low murmur of the unit filling the space where more candid families might have spoken.

Until my father broke it with, “Lord Wolfe asked after you.”

My fingers paused over the keyboard. “Oh?”

“At a dinner last week. Perfectly innocuous. He said he hasn’t seen you of late and was curious how you were settling into practice.”

“That’s kind of him.”

“He suggested you might benefit from broadening your circle. Socially, as well as professionally.”

I closed my laptop. “And you thought?”

“I thought he was offering something in his own idiom. Access. Visibility. Connections.”

“Companionship?” I tipped my head.

“I would suspect that is an option.” Father looked away and I couldn’t gather the inference in his tone.

So I had to check. “One that you favour?”

He glanced back to me. “Would you?”

I breathed out a laugh. My father, the master of stepping neatly around the centre of things. “Didn’t we cover this… eight weeks ago?”

I didn’t need to count. The length of a remand had a way of fixing itself in the mind.

Father adjusted the wires around his arm. “He asked whether you were seeing anyone.”

“And you told him?”

“That it wasn’t my place to speculate.”

I exhaled. “Magnanimous.”

“He strikes me as… attentive. Perhaps excessively so.”