"I love it," she said, and her voice was thick. Lily, I love it more than anything anyone has ever made me in my whole life. And that's the truth, and I don't say things that aren't true. You can keep it, Lily said generously. It's yours.
It's always been yours. Daddy said not to give it to anybody else. He said it was saved for you. Victoria looked over the child's head at Nathan. And Nathan looked back, and neither of them said anything because there wasn't anything to say that the drawing hadn't already said better.
Dinner was chaos. Lily was, as advertised, a menace with a fork. There was sauce on the table and sauce on the child. And by some law of physics, Nathan had never understood in seven years of spaghetti night sauce on the ceiling. Victoria, who ate lunch alone in a glass office matching china, sat at a wobbly kitchen table with a paper towel for a napkin and twirled spaghetti badly and laughed until her sides hurt as Lily demonstrated the correct and highly incorrect ways to eat a meatball.
She got sauce on her $400 blouse and did not care. She had never in her life not cared about a thing like that. And she sat there in a stranger's kitchen that was rapidly ceasing to feel like a stranger's kitchen. And she did not care at all. And the not caring felt like the most expensive luxury she'd ever been able to afford.
After dinner, Lily insisted on showing Victoria everything. Her room, her books, the specific rabbit she'd had since she was two, whose name was inexplicably Gerald and Victoria had laughed so hard at that she'd had to sit down on the edge of the bed because the only other Gerald she knew held an umbrella outside a building she'd sold. Lily made her read a bedtime story. And Victoria, who read quarterly reports and merger documents and had not read a children's book aloud in her entire adult life, read a story about a bear who couldn't sleep, doing all the voices badly, and Lily corrected her on the voices and made her do them again and fell asleep halfway through the third attempt with her head against Victoria's arm. Victoria sat very still on the edge of the small bed.
A sleeping child leaned against her, the bear book open in her lap, and she looked up at Nathan standing in the doorway, and she mouthed silently, "I don't know what to do. " And Nathan came in and gently lifted his daughter and laid her down and pulled the blanket up and did the thing he did every night. Stood in the doorway for a second looking at her. And Victoria watched him do it and understood that she was watching the single most important thing in this man's life. The thing he'd have burned the world down to protect and that he was letting her stand in the doorway and watch. They went back out to the living room.
Nathan poured two glasses of the sparkling grape juice she'd brought because neither of them wanted anything stronger because the last time either of them had touched real alcohol was a bottle of wine in a restaurant that had ended a whole life and started a new one. And neither of them wanted to blur a single edge of this night. So Nathan said handing her a glass sitting down on the old plaid couch, the same couch she'd slept on in his gray shirt on the worst and best night of her life. You found me up a ladder. I found you up a ladder.
She sat down beside him. Not too close. Both of them careful. Both of them aware that after 2 and 1/2 months of not touching everything, now was new. I've been trying to figure out for a week how to do it with any dignity.
And there wasn't any dignified way. So, I just walked down to the 14th floor and there you were with a screwdriver in your teeth. You could have called. I could have, but you didn't call me for 2 and 1/2 months. And I understood exactly why.