Chapter 14
fourteen
CALLUM
I was rearranging the bookshelf when Willow caught me.
Not casually rearranging. Not making a minor adjustment to a volume that had drifted out of alignment.
I was on my knees in the living room, every architecture text and novel pulled from the shelves and organized into stacks on the floor, sorting by category and then by author and then by spine height, which was the point at which I realized I'd lost the plot.
"You rearranged those two days ago," Willow said from the kitchen doorway, coffee in hand, wearing an old t-shirt I’d forgotten about and a pair of her own shorts that were doing criminal things to her legs.
"And the day before that. At what point does reorganizing a bookshelf qualify as a cry for help? "
"I'm optimizing the visual balance. The taller volumes were creating an asymmetry on the third shelf."
"Callum."
"The Renzo Piano monograph was next to the pocket edition of Palladio. The scale difference was—"
"Callum." She crossed to me, set her mug on the coffee table, and crouched until we were eye to eye.
Her hair fell over one shoulder, still damp from the shower.
She looked rested and warm and far too perceptive.
"Your daughter's plane lands in four hours.
You've cleaned the apartment twice, ironed shirts you're not going to wear, and now you're having a breakdown over book spines.
" She put her hand on my knee. "You're nuts if you think I can't recognize a full-blown anxiety crash-out. Talk to me. What's going on?"
I sat back on my heels. Looked at the mess of books surrounding me. Looked at her.
"I haven't seen Elena in five months," I said.
"The last time she visited, we had dinner at a restaurant where she spent forty minutes on her phone and I spent forty minutes pretending not to notice.
Before that, she canceled twice." I picked up the Piano monograph, turned it in my hands without seeing it.
"This visit is different. She specifically asked to come. She wants to meet you."
"And that's bad?"
"That's hard to say." I set the book down. "Elena is brilliant. She has an IQ that makes mine look modest and a bullshit detector that makes yours look broken. She will assess you, assess us, assess every detail of this apartment, and she'll know."
"Know what?"
"That I'm in over my head. That I'm a forty-year-old man who can design a building to withstand an earthquake but can't maintain a relationship without structural failure.
" I met her eyes. "That I'm with a woman who's three years older than my daughter and I don't have the moral high ground I'd need to defend that to anyone, let alone her. "
The age. There it was. The number I'd been swallowing for weeks, the math I'd been refusing to do in full daylight. Willow was twenty-three. Elena was twenty. The gap between them was a rounding error. The gap between Willow and me was a generational canyon.
In the privacy of this apartment—in bed, in the dark, with her body against mine and her laugh in my ear—the number evaporated. It meant nothing when she challenged me, when she saw through me, when she made me feel present in a way I hadn't managed in a decade.
But Elena's arrival was a floodlight. And I wasn't sure what it would illuminate.
Willow was quiet for a moment. Then: "Do you want me to go? I can stay at Mika's tonight. Give you space."
Yes. The answer rose fast, instinctive, self-preserving. Send Willow away. Meet Elena alone. Keep the two halves of my life in separate rooms where they couldn't collide and produce shrapnel.
"No," I said. "Stay."
The hesitation had lasted a fraction of a second. Half a heartbeat. Barely perceptible.
Willow perceived it.
Her face didn't change. She didn't call me on it, didn't push, didn't make me explain the gap between my answer and my impulse. She just nodded, squeezed my knee, and stood.
"Then I'm going to need more coffee," she said. "And you're going to need to stop fondling that book and put the shelf back together."
She returned to the kitchen. I stared at the Piano monograph and felt the particular self-loathing of a man who'd just flinched in front of the person he was supposed to be brave for.
Elena's flight landed at two-seventeen. I knew this not from checking the arrivals board but from checking the airline's tracking app fourteen times since noon, a behavior I recognized as pathological and continued anyway.
Willow had offered to come to the airport. I'd said no—that Elena would want a moment, just the two of us, before the introductions. Willow had accepted this with a nod and a "makes sense" that carried zero judgment and made me feel worse.
I stood at the arrivals gate, watching passengers file through the security doors. Families reuniting. Business travelers speed-walking toward the exit. A toddler melting down near the baggage claim with the full-body commitment I remembered from Elena’s childhood years.
Then Elena.
She came through the doors with a carry-on slung over one shoulder and her dark hair cut shorter than the last time I'd seen her—chin-length now, sharp, framing the face that was equal parts me and Jessica.
Gray eyes. My jawline. Her mother's mouth.
Twenty years old and carrying herself with the self-possession of a woman who'd learned early that the people who were supposed to show up often didn't.
My fault. That armor was my craftsmanship.
"Dad." She accepted my hug with the controlled warmth of a person honoring a treaty. Not cold. Not hostile. Just... careful. A woman who'd learned to budget her affection based on historical returns.
"You cut your hair," I said, taking her bag.
"Three weeks ago. I texted you a photo."
She had. I'd responded with "Looks great," which, in retrospect, was the conversational equivalent of a form letter. "It suits you. You look good, sweetheart.”
“Thanks.” She studied me as we walked, those gray eyes—my eyes, reflected back with her mother's sharpness. “You look different…less rigid.”
"Rigid?"
"You know what I mean. You usually have this face going on—" She scrunched her brow, set her jaw, did a dead-on impression of me concentrating. "Long division face. That's your default setting. Today you look almost relaxed." She glanced sideways at me. "Must be the girlfriend."
There it was. Tossed out casually, a grenade disguised as small talk.
"Her name is Willow."
"Oh, yeah, sorry. Willow. She didn't come with you?"
"No, I thought it best to pick you up first, then, we'll meet up with Willow later. Is that okay?"
Elena shrugged. "Yeah, sure, whatever."
I needed a decoder ring for my daughter's 'Yeah, sure, whatever' did that mean she was cool with my decision or that I'd already fumbled?
I unlocked the car. Loaded her bag. Took my time walking to the driver's side while I frantically tried to formulate some semblance of innocuous small-talk with my only child.
"So, how are you doing, kiddo? School good? Anything new?"
"Dad, you're so bad at this. Let's not pretend that you care about the details of college life. Tell me about Willow. Mom said that she's…um, young."
I bit back a swear word. How did Jessica seem to know things I hadn't volunteered yet? Then I remembered that Jessica was probably still gossip-level friends with people that still circulated in my circles.
"Right, yeah, so I think you'll really like Willow. She manages a coffee shop. She's sharp, funny, stubborn. She doesn't take my shit and she doesn't pretend to be impressed by my resume." I started the engine. "And yeah, she's younger than the women I usually date…"
"How young?" Elena fished, her gray eyes narrowing.
"Um, twenty-three."
Elena looked away before I could read her face. She said to the window, "Yep, that's pretty young."
"Does the age thing bother you?" I asked in earnest.
"Does it bother you?"
"It did, at first," I admitted. "But then, I got to know her and it seemed to matter less."
"Look Dad, I'll just be honest, the age doesn't bother me in theory, because, whatever, men are visual and men are drawn to hot women,” Elena said, adjusting the strap on her seatbelt—a habit she'd picked up from Jessica and never dropped.
"What bothers me is whether you're going to do the thing you always do. "
I shifted against the discomfort that was choking me to ask, “And what thing is that?"
"The thing where you go all-in on a new obsession, pour everything into it, and then the second it gets hard, you just..
." She waved a hand. "Disappear back into work. You did it with Mom. You did it with me. You did it with that Portland condo thing that ate two years of your life and then poof, you never mentioned it again." She turned to face me. "Are you going to do that with this new girl? Because I don’t want to go through the work of processing my feelings about my dad dating a girl that’s nearly my age if I don’t have to. Know what I mean?”
The question hit my sternum with enough force to chase the air from my lungs.
“That’s a lot to unpack, kiddo,” I finally managed.
She shrugged. “Life is too short to beat around the bush. Besides, you always taught me to go straight to the point. So, here I am, doing that.”
I couldn’t argue her statement but man, did it hit hard.
“Fair enough,” I said. “You want the straight truth? I like her. I like her a lot. I didn’t plan for this but it happened anyway. I don’t know how things will unfold but I’m interested in finding out.”
“Hmm. I guess we’ll just have to see.” She wasn't being cruel. She was being twenty, and jaded, and armed with a lifetime of receipts. "I'm not trying to be a bitch about it. I just—I've seen this movie. I know how it ends. And I want better for you."
That part I wasn’t prepared for. The fact that my daughter wasn’t being mean for the sake of being salty but because she actually cared more than she wanted to admit.