30. Lucy #4
I let him. Some truths were not ready for fathers. Especially fathers who owned the team employing the man at the center of them.
Dad reached into his suit jacket and pulled out his wallet.
I frowned. “What are you doing?”
He held out a credit card between two fingers.
I stared at it. “No.”
“Yes.”
“I am twenty-five.”
“And?”
“I have my own money.”
“And?”
“I am not taking your credit card to decorate my office.”
“You are not decorating. You are making the space functional.”
“My office is functional.”
“Your office has a dog bed, three stacks of files, and lighting that makes people look recently exhumed.”
“Again, rude.”
“Again, accurate.” His mouth twitched. “You are spending too much time there for it to feel like a storage room. Get a better chair. A lamp. Some shelves. Something for the dog that does not look like it was chosen during an evacuation.”
“Dottie likes her bed.”
“Dottie likes licking snow off boots. Her standards are not the issue.”
I pressed my lips together, mostly because if I smiled too much, I might cry, and that would be embarrassing for both of us.
Dad looked at the card, then back at me. “Murphy beds have come a long way.” He shrugged. “If you are going to keep sleeping in your office, we might as well stop wasting money on rent.”
“I am not putting a Murphy bed in my office.”
“Lo said the same thing.”
“Lo knows about this?”
“Lo knows everything.”
“That is terrifying.”
“Yes.”
I took the card because he was not going to lower his arm and because the softness in my chest had become too big to keep resisting without turning it into something brittle. The plastic felt absurdly heavy between my fingers. “I am not buying a bed.”
“Fine.”
“I mean it.”
“A very long couch, for the dog.” He smiled fully again, and there was my father.
Not the owner. Not the man who could make Charlotte disappear with a bucket of lawyers and a calm phone call.
The man who loved me in practical solutions because practical solutions had always been easier for him to hold than the messy, beating things underneath.
And because I was his daughter, I understood that language.
“I’ll get a lamp,” I said. “Maybe a chair.”
“And something on the walls.”
I looked down at the card in my hand. “Thank you.”
It was not enough to fix every complicated thing between us. It did not make him see all the ways I had built my life around his and called it choice.
But it was something.
A father standing in his office, offering a credit card and terrible furniture suggestions because he had noticed I was tired and wanted one corner of my life to feel less hard.
I could let that matter.
“I have a meeting in ten,” he said eventually.
I stood, taking my coffee with one hand and tucking his card into the inside pocket of my blazer with the other. At the door, I paused. “Charlotte is really done?”
Dad’s face went calm again. Certain. “Yes.”
One problem closed.
I nodded. “I love you,” I breathed out, my fingers tapping on the plastic lid.
My father pushed away from the desk, crossed his office in four long strides and engulfed me in a hug. “I love you, too.”
We held each other as a few pieces of my heart stitched themselves back together. I forced myself to pull away from his warm embrace to head back downstairs.
My office looked exactly as he had described it.
The overhead light was too harsh. The walls were too bare.
The desk was too clean in the places that did not count and too cluttered in the places that did.
Dottie’s bed, which I had considered perfectly acceptable thirty minutes ago, did look a little like I had chosen it while fleeing a natural disaster.
Dottie lifted her head when I came in. She blinked.
I sat behind my desk and set the Paper Lantern cup beside my keyboard. It was empty now, but I had not thrown it away. I told myself that was because there had not been a convenient trash can upstairs.
Charlotte’s folder sat on the corner of my desk. I picked it up, opened the drawer, and placed it inside. Closed. Handled. For the first time all morning, a small pocket of relief opened beneath my ribs.
I opened my browser. For a moment, my fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Then I searched for office lamps. Warm light. Brass base. Adjustable shade. Then bookshelves. Then washable dog beds that did not look like dog beds but mini couches.
Dottie came over and rested her chin on my knee, apparently sensing the possibility of personal benefit. Her tail thumped once against the floor.
“Yes, but apparently we are becoming women with fancy things.”
I clicked on a chair I did not need. Then a lamp that looked like it belonged in a room where a person might stay awhile.
On my desk, the empty Paper Lantern cup sat beside my mouse, its little gold logo turned toward me.
I looked at it for half a second too long.
Tomorrow morning was not a promise.
Not yet.
But for the first time in eight years, the thought of Ty Burns showing up again did not feel only like danger.
It felt like a question.
And despite every careful, guarded, exhausted part of me, I had already started making room for the answer.