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“I’m going to check on Evie. She should be done with piano practice.”
I let him go without insisting I check his handiwork first.
But when he was gone, and enough oxygen returned, I twisted around to look at my hair in the mirror. My breath caught again.
Noah hadn’t needed my feedback after all.
He’d executed a perfect Dutch braid.
CHAPTER 23
NOAH
It was not a good week.
Training sucked. Avoiding Carina in my own house sucked. Taking Evie to meet the Andersons in lieu of our weekly father-daughter dinner especially sucked.
But I didn’t have a choice when it came to any of these things, so on Sunday night, I donned a nice blazer, bundled Evie and me up in the car, and drove us to the restaurant. My stomach was a pit the entire time.
I wish Carina were here. The thought floated through my head before I firmly pushed it to the side.
She was my nanny and maybe, possibly, my friend. One that I was irritatingly attracted to. She wasn’t my emotional support person, and I didn’t need her to get through a dinner.
It’s just dinner. It’ll be fine.
Thankfully, the restaurant wasn’t far from the house, and I found parking right by the entrance. I cut the engine and glanced at Evie in the rearview mirror. “How are you feeling? You ready?”
She nodded. She was wearing her favorite blue dress, and I’d twisted her hair into a French braid for the occasion. Carina’s styling lessons from earlier that week had come in handy. But other than a somewhat surprised “I love it!” when I’d finished doing her hair, Evie had been unusually quiet all night.
“Alright.” I injected fake enthusiasm into my voice. “Let’s go meet your grandparents.” The last word tasted bitter on my tongue.
Grandparents. Such an intimate term for people who had the gall to bulldoze their way into our lives after eleven years of radio silence. I didn’t care whether they knew about Evie or not during that time; it was their presumptuousness that bothered me.
But I’d agreed to this dinner, and I was trying to be open-minded for Evie’s sake, so I didn’t say anything else as I cut the engine and led Evie into the restaurant.
The Andersons were already waiting inside. They sat stiff-backed and rigid by the hostess stand, their expressions tight. They were dressed up in fancy bespoke clothing again, but Elizabeth wasn’t wearing her diamonds, and Oswald had forgone a tie. I suspected they were trying to appear more down-to-earth. It didn’t quite work.
Elizabeth saw us first. Her eyes skipped right past me and landed on Evie. Once they did, she melted. There was no other way to describe it. Her entire face softened, and her lips parted like she couldn’t remember how to breathe. She was up and out of her seat before the door fully closed behind us. Oswald was slower to rise, but his eyes brightened to the same wattage as his wife’s.
I started to introduce them, but Elizabeth was already crouching, bringing her eye level with Evie. “Evie, I presume. I’m Elizabeth. You can call me Liz or Grandma, if you’d like.” She held out her hand. I heard none of the subtle disdain she’d displayed the other night at my house.
Evie pressed against the side of my leg, half hiding behind me, but she gave Elizabeth’s hand a tentative shake. “Nice to meet you.”
Oswald introduced himself with a similar handshake. “Good to finally meet you, young lady,” he boomed. “You look just like your mother.”
Elizabeth’s eyes misted over. “You really do.”
Evie shifted her weight. I braced myself for the cloud that usually crossed her face whenever her mother came up in conversation, but she responded with a shy, if somewhat uncertain, smile instead.
I noticed the hostess hovering in the background, waiting discreetly for the right moment to interrupt.
“Let’s continue this at the table,” I said. My chest felt uncomfortably tight. Seeing Evie side by side with her grandparents highlighted their physical resemblance in painful detail—her nose, her chin, the set of her mouth. All pure Anderson. I’d walked around in a haze since Elizabeth and Oswald showed up at my doorstep, but tonight drove home the fact that this was real. It wasn’t a hallucination or nightmare I was hoping to wake up from. And the idea of letting new people into our lives, whether they got shared custody or not, scared the shit out of me.
I buried my unease beneath a hopefully relaxed expression as we followed the hostess to our private dining room. It was Evie’s night to feel all the emotions and process them. I didn’t want to weigh her down with my own neuroses.
Once we were seated and we’d placed our orders, Elizabeth retrieved a small velvet box from her purse. It was wrapped in a white ribbon that tied into a bow. “We brought you a gift. Something small we thought you’d like.”
Evie looked at me. I gave her a small nod, and she wasted no time yanking off the ribbon and opening the box. Presents were one of the few things capable of overriding her shyness around strangers.
