Page 117 of Dying to Meet You

They both swivel to see her father standing in the kitchen doorway. “If this is a wardrobe emergency, I’ll stitch it for you while Natalie does... whatever Natalie is doing.”

Her mother blinks. “That’s not necessary.”

He actually rolls his eyes. “You want to get out the door in five minutes or what?”

She sighs. “Okay. Thank you. I’ll thread a needle.”

Natalie twists her mother’s hair carefully into a roll at the back of her head and pins it liberally. “This isn’t going to be very elaborate...”

“Good,” her mother says. “I don’t have time for elaborate.”

“All right. Then hold your breath.”

They take a gulp of air in tandem, and then Natalie mists the back of her mother’s head with setting spray, while her father watches with an openly amused expression.

When they both exhale, Natalie hustles around to sit on the coffee table. She grabs her makeup kit and roots around for a gold eye shadow.

“Don’t make it sexy,” her mother says, pausing to snip a length of dark thread. “I don’t want to send the wrong message.”

“Fine. Be boring.”

Her father’s lips twitch. He reaches over and plucks the threaded needle from her mom’s tense fingers.

“I didn’t tie the knot yet.”

“Yeah, I have eyes, Rowan.” He takes Natalie’s old spot behind the couch, licks his thumb, and expertly ties a knot at the end of the thread.

They both lean in toward her mother at the same moment, her father gathering the two halves of her mother’s dress. Natalie has the strangest sensation. Like she’s having a very lucid dream where she’s swapped places with a girl whose parents aren’t strangers.

“Close your eyes,” Natalie demands.

Her mother closes her eyes.

Natalie strokes gold eyeshadow across her lids. But then her father puts a hand on her mother’s bare shoulder, causing her to jump.

“Easy, Gallagher,” her father drawls. “Let’s not add ‘stabbing’ to my rap sheet.”

“Sorry, sorry.”

He gives her mother’s shoulder a quick squeeze, and Natalie is fascinated. She’s never been able to picture them as a couple, but suddenly she can. Her mother would be the high-strung one. Smart and ambitious and a little neurotic. Her father must have been the bassline—the calm, beating heart in the background.

He bends over his work, looping a tiny stitch between the two edges of the fabric with steady fingers.

Natalie puts the eye shadow away. “Mascara real quick,” she says. “And then lipstick.”

“I’ll do lipstick in the car,” she says. “Do you hear a car?”

“No,” she and her father say at the same time.

“He said he’s coming to get me at six.”

Natalie tenses. “He?”

“Hank Wincott.”

“Oh,” Natalie sniffs. “The boss man.”

Her father suddenly goes very still. Then he takes a visible breath. “Pass the snips?”