Page 58 of Back for More

“Without hesitation.” She looks down at her plate again. “Maybe not. I don’t know.” She lowers her voice. “I’m here. Isn’t that the answer to all your questions?”

I smile. “Almost.”

She sighs and slouches. “What else?”

“What are you going to do once you have access to all that money?”

She shrugs. “I haven’t really thought about what I’ll do, exactly. It’s more about how I think I’ll feel.”

“Rich?”

She considers this seriously. She’s quiet for a while before saying, “I think that, in some way, for a long time, the trust fund has represented the only thing my father is capable of giving to me. At this point…that money is a part of our family history that he’d be sharing with me.” She crosses her arms in front of her chest and looks up at me. “That’s why I want it. That’s why I want him to want me to have it.”

That revelation silences me to my core. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to feel that way. The fact that she’s told me this, so plainly, seems to make her even more vulnerable than she was last night. And whatever it made me feel to see her so vulnerable last night, I’m feeling it even more now.

But this thing that she wants is the one thing I can’t give her.

We finish eating and cleaning up the dishes in silence.

She wipes down my kitchen counter with a dishrag, dries her hands, and then excuses herself to the guestroom, coming back out in the clothes she wore last night.

She looks as put-together as she usually does, minus a layer of attitude. She’s holding her bag and crossing one leg behind the other, raising her shoulder to her cheek as she looks up at me. “I should get going. Thank you…for taking care of me. I mean, last night. And just now. Super low-key grateful for that whole magical thing you did with my lady business.”

“It was literally my pleasure. I am grateful to you also. I’ll drive you home.”

“Probably not a good idea.”

“I can drop you off a block away.”

She shakes her head, smiling. “Don’t want to risk my dad seeing us. I’ve already ordered an Uber.”

“I’ll pay for it, then.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“I don’t want you spending money you don’t have to spend right now.”

I go to the kitchen to pull out a twenty-dollar bill I keep in a drawer and place it in the palm of her hand. I know it’s hard for her to be in this position, and there are all kinds of other positions I’d rather put her in, but Iwill bethe one responsible for her getting home today, whether she likes it or not.

“Fine,” she says. “Thank you. I will pay you back in a year.”

“Deal.”

She stares at me for a few seconds and then steps forward to hug me. She buries her face in my chest again, like she did when we were slow-dancing last night. I wrap my arms around her shoulders and kiss the top of her head.

“Tu m’as manqué,” she says, her voice muffled, but I hear her very clearly. She probably thinks I don’t remember that French phrase she quizzed me on in high school, but I do. I remember everything she’s ever said.

“I missed you too.”

“I’m sorry for the way I left.”

“Okay.”

She looks up at me like she wants to say something else and then changes her mind. She nods and says instead, “I think Fanny Brice should stay with you.” Her voice cracks. “She loves you. She’s yours.”

“Is that how it works?”

“It should be.”