Page 120 of The Overtime Persuasive

Also, if I’m timing this right, I’m going to get his voicemail anyway cause he should be on stage.

The call rings twice. “Eva?”

Music thunders behind him, followed by the distant roar of a crowd.

I sit straighter. “Hi. Are you busy?”

“Define busy.”

Someone says something near him. Dad muffles the phone, answers them, then comes back. “I have about two minutes before a man with a headset physically pushes me back onto a stage. What’s wrong?”

“I can call later.”

“No.” His voice changes, the humor disappearing. “Talk to me.”

I look at the frozen image of Liam on my screen. “I think I’m falling in love.”

There’s a short pause. “Ah. Now I understand the tone.”

“It’s Liam.” I run my thumb along the edge of the phone, and start talking. Dad waits while I tell him about the taping, the mandatory meeting, and the chair I kept looking toward even after I knew Liam wasn’t coming.

When I finish, he’s quiet. Then he says, “And every empty chair you’ve ever looked at had my face in it.”

The air leaves my lungs in a rush. “Dad⁠—”

“It did.” His voice is gentle, but he doesn’t let me rescue him from the truth of it. “I told you I would be somewhere, and then the show ran late or the bus had to leave early or someone needed me to do something that took me from you. You learned not to expect people because expectations gave them the chance to disappoint you.”

My eyes drop to the menagerie of items Liam’s sent me, all spread across the coffee table.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he says. “For every time I taught you that.”

My throat tightens. “He still broke his promise.”

“He did. But have you heard him out?”

I huff. “You’re supposed to take my side.”

“I am taking your side. Your side includes the part of you that wants to be loved, not only the part that knows how to protect itself.”

I close my eyes. I hate it when songwriters make good points. It encourages them.

“Did he apologize?” Dad asks.

Mitch steps completely into the box, facing me with wide eyes, and sits on top of the tissue paper. I don’t have the energy to remove him.

Dad continues. “You have every right to be angry about the promise Liam broke. You can make him earn back your trust. But you don’t get to hand that man the bill for every time I failed to show up. That debt belongs to me.”

A tear slips down my cheek, and I wipe it away with the heel of my hand. “I don’t know if I can keep trusting someone when I know they might let me down.”

“Of course they’ll let you down. People are terrible. Very poorly designed.” He chuckles. “The question isn’t whether Liam will ever make another mistake. The question is what he does after. Patience doesn’t mean giving someone endless chances to hurt you. It means giving a good person the opportunity to prove a bad moment isn’t his pattern.”

I smile despite myself. He’s right.

“I can’t believe I’m about to toot my own horn, but here we go,” he says. “You know my song, ‘A Little Grace’?”

“Dad, everyone knows ‘A Little Grace.’ You wrote it for Mom.”

“I wrote it about this. It’s dedicated to her because she’s the one who taught it to me.” The crowd swells behind him. “People think that song is about her waiting for me. It isn’t. It’s about what her patience required of me. She gave me room to become better, Eva, but she never let me mistake grace for a free pass. She expected change, not prettier words.”