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Neil smiled, then faltered, then smiled again, even bigger. “I’m very glad to hear that. I’m not ready to fully retire yet, of course, but I have been thinking about scaling back my involvement with the company. Not in any official capacity—I’m still expecting to return to a fairly heavy schedule—but I’d like to delegate more. Take some time off, travel with you. Not work myself into an early grave.”
“Then it’s settled. No enormous life changes right now.” I beamed at him, but to my surprise, his expression fell.
His posture stiffened a bit. He slipped his hands from his pockets and rubbed them together, then spoke as though he were purposefully moving on from that part of the conversation. “It’s quite beautiful out here. Cold, but quite beautiful.”
Something was definitely up with him.
“Does it look like Iceland?” I’d never seen Iceland, and I was strangely eager for some connection between our childhoods. Because of our age gap, I found myself reaching for those superficial similarities, despite logically knowing that they didn’t matter.
He squinted out at the waves tossing in the distance, far beyond the shelf of ice around the shore. “The light is different. I’ve never seen light behave the way it does in Ísland.” He added cheerfully, “You’ll see.”
I would see. After our Upper Peninsula Christmas, we’d be flying to Reykjavik for New Year’s, to spend it with his brothers and their families. Runólf had recently had a baby with his second wife—“As if becoming a first-time father weren’t terrifying enough, he had to do it at fifty-two,” Neil had lamented—and Geir had five children ranging from their teens to their twenties. It would be a far cry from the chaos of a Scaife family Christmas, but I felt just as nervous at the prospect of meeting them as Neil had been of meeting my family.
So if he was going to be this weird the entire time, it was going to be terribly inconvenient.
“If something were wrong, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” I asked, taking his hand in mine and squeezing it.
He looked penitent at once. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. My mind was elsewhere. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Let’s go back to the car, before we freeze.” I pulled him along with me, still not sure what had caused his change in mood.
“I’m worried about Emma,” he finally confessed as I steered the car up the gravel drive to the road. “She didn’t sound like herself on the phone. She was too chipper to have just spent the day with Horrible Michael’s mother.”
I knew the reason behind Emma’s forced cheerfulness, but I couldn’t tell her father. She’d sworn me to secrecy when she’d confided that she and Michael were trying to conceive. Her concerns about her fertility had led her and Michael to begin trying for a baby shortly after they were engaged, but she didn’t want her father to know about any of it. While I knew that the reason for Emma’s emotional state was likely the arrival of yet another unwelcome menses, I couldn’t tell him that.
While gas lighting him was an option—“Are you sure you’re not just projecting your feelings of missing Emma onto her mood?”—I really wanted to st
ick to the honesty thing we’d been working on. “I know what’s wrong with her.”
“You do?”
“But I can’t tell you.”
“Why ever not?” It would drive him crazy, control freak that he was, to think I knew something about his daughter’s life when he didn’t.
I shook my head and smiled. “Because she asked me not to tell you, and she trusted me, so I’m not going to break her trust. She’s going to tell you what’s up after the wedding. But I promise, it’s nothing serious, nothing you can fix, and nothing you need to worry about.”
His mouth set in a grim line as he stared out the windshield, and I knew he wasn’t as stoically accepting as he looked. His devious mind would be furiously calculating all the ways he could find out what I knew.
“And don’t try to wheedle it out of me,” I warned him. “Emma’s trust is extremely important to me.”
He sighed. “You’re right. I suppose I should be glad that the two of you get along so well now. Even if it means you both get an opportunity to make me crazy.”
As I drove us back to the trailer where I’d grown up, Neil’s mood improved greatly. And that was oddly touching; he trusted me enough to put his worries about his daughter, the single most important person in his life, aside at my reassurance.
“Home sweet home,” I announced as I navigated the rental car down the dirt two-track through the pines at the back of my grandma’s property. The road widened into a clearing, and in the center sat the trailer I’d grown up in.
I knew it was small, probably smaller than anything Neil had ever set foot in before. I didn’t think he would love me any less, but I did wonder if he might view me differently when he saw the reality of how we’d lived. He was too good a person to make it affect his opinion of me negatively; it just wasn’t how he operated. But I wondered if he would have some misplaced rich guy pity for me.
I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it if he did.
“It’s a bit like a fairy tale cottage, isn’t it?” he mused, leaning toward the windshield to gaze up at the tall pines. “This must have been an extraordinary place to play as a child.”
I frowned. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I’d had plenty of happy hours pretending to be Belle rescuing the Beast from wolves, or chasing imaginary white rabbits into imaginary holes. “Yeah. It was, actually.”
“I used to love our family vacations to Austria. The forests were spectacular for pretending to be soldiers or hunters. Or bears.” He smiled at the memory, and I had to admit, the idea was cute. I’d seen photos of him as a child, and he’d been absolutely adorable. He and his sister would have looked like Hansel and Gretel playing in the woods.
Mom wasn’t back yet, so I retrieved the house key from the mouth of the frog fountain in the unused birdbath and let us in. I flicked on the light.
