Chapter 6
It’s really easy to track someone these days. Especially if you are related. Especially if the person you’re tracking does not realize his phone shows up in the devices section of the tracking app of your phone. You, obviously, disabled this long ago, but parents? Parents are really easy to track.
Eve finds herself standing outside a Korean restaurant on the Lower East Side.
Through the window, she sees inside to white tiles and bright lights.
Everyone else in the restaurant is twenty-three, maybe twenty-four.
When she saw her dad was on the Lower East Side, she thought, yes, of course, how cold and clandestine, to go to a place where no one your own age will ever spot you.
And now that she sees the restaurant, which is not cold or clandestine at all, she finds she is angry.
This restaurant is too sceney. Eve and Shannon would go to a place like this.
There are only a few tables. Phillip sits facing the window, so Eve can see him, and the woman faces the wall. Eve can see only her hair, which is a sleek silver bob, and the Canada Goose puffer on the back of her chair. If Phillip looked out the window, he’d see Eve.
Eve watches them between the letters painted on the glass. The woman is talking animatedly. He listens. It’s a long time, and he doesn’t try to speak. He just watches her and she holds the stage. There is no chance he will notice Eve.
The woman’s fingers are covered in eclectic, oversize rings. When one of her wild gestures sends the water pitcher tipping precariously, Phillip steadies it and smiles at her. It makes him look, just for a second, like Julian.
The waiter pauses at their table and Eve can see the mouthing of words—something about drinks—but Phillip just taps his hand against the pitcher and says, Just water, thanks. He’s not wearing a ring. Just water. They don’t need drinks.
The woman reaches forward and rubs something, a drop of water or an eyelash, from his cheek with her thumb.
He leans across the table to kiss her, and she turns her head to the side, and with a jolt Eve discovers she knows this woman.
It’s Dr. Swann, who tested Eve for a great number of things when she was a teenager and who always had, Eve thought, a complete unwillingness to put up with any of Phillip’s bullshit.
Eve feels like she’s falling. What she had expected was the cliché: a younger, more naive version of her mother; a bottle of red in a velvet booth.
And instead she finds bright lights and cups of water and her father listening rather than speaking and a woman who does not seem, has never seemed, remotely cowed by Phillip’s bluster.
And maybe if it had been the cliché, Eve also would have done the cliché: burst in, demanded the truth, swept out in a blaze of righteous indignation. But Eve does not feel righteous.
She has never seen her dad this happy.