He got back to work. 2 weeks turned out to be exactly right. Not because anything was fully resolved. By then the professional restructuring was still settling the property, was still adjusting to the new operational methodology and the particular low-grade awareness of what people thought and said had not entirely disappeared because it never entirely disappeared in places where people worked closely together.
But 2 weeks was enough time for Daniel to feel sure that what he was doing was right. Not reckless, not reactive, considered, decided, and right. He told Sophie on a Thursday evening. Not as a big announcement.
He told her the way he told her most things, straightforwardly at the kitchen table while they were both doing something else. "Remember we talked about Olivia?" he said. Sophie looked up from her homework. "The lady from work?" "She's coming for dinner Saturday." Sophie put her pencil down.
This apparently warranted full attention. "Here to our house?" "Yes." "Is she going to think our house is small?" Daniel looked at her. "Why would she think that?" "Because Marcus said she's really rich." "Marcus," Daniel said to the ceiling again for the second time in 2 weeks, "talks too much." "Is she?" "She has more money than us, yes." "But is she going to think our house is small?" He thought about that. He thought about Olivia sitting on the concrete next to a pool pump housing in her work clothes.
About her standing in a maintenance office doorway with two coffees, like it was the most natural place she could be. About her saying it's the most normal I feel all week. "No," he said. "She won't." Sophie considered this and picked her pencil back up.
"What are you going to make?" "I was thinking the chicken." "With the lemon?" "With the lemon." She nodded with the gravity of someone approving an important decision. "That's the right one," she said. "It's the best thing you make." He went back to his own papers. "Daddy," Sophie said after a moment.
"Yeah?" "I'm glad she's coming." He looked up. She was already back to her homework pencil moving across the page completely matter-of-fact about the thing she just said, the way she was matter-of-fact about most things, dropping truth into the air and letting it land without needing to watch it fall. His chest ached with how much he loved her. "Me, too, bug," he said.
"Me, too." Saturday arrived the way important days always arrive, looking deceptively like a regular day. The alarm at 4:47, the coffee, the morning. He drove Sophie to her friend Lily's house for the afternoon and came back and cleaned the house with the particular thoroughness of a man who had been doing his own housekeeping for 6 years and knew where all the edges were that company wouldn't see, but he would know about. He started the chicken at 4:00.
Olivia arrived at 6:00. He heard her car in the driveway, not the company car, a different one, quieter, and he wiped his hands on a dish towel and went to the door and opened it before she could knock. She was standing on his porch in jeans and a dark blue shirt, her hair down, no briefcase, no tablet. Nothing that belonged to the professional version of herself.
She had a bottle of wine in one hand and what appeared to be a box of cookies in the other. She looked at him. "I didn't know what to bring," she said. "So, I brought both." "You didn't have to bring anything." "I know.
I also bought flowers and then left them in the car because I thought flowers was too much and cookies were better." She paused. "I've been overthinking this for approximately 48 hours." He looked at her, this woman who ran 23 properties and negotiated with boards and had never in any professional setting he had ever seen her in appeared uncertain about a single thing standing on his front porch overthinking cookies. Something in him turned over quietly. "Come in," he said.
She came in. She stood in the entryway of his house and looked around with the focused attention she gave to everything and he watched her take it in, the framed photos on the wall, Sophie's drawings on the refrigerator visible through the kitchen doorway, the slightly worn couch and the bookshelves, and the evidence everywhere of a life that was small and full and genuinely lived. "It's warm," she said. "It's a house." "No." She looked at him.
"I mean, it's warm. It feels like people live here." She paused. "My house has good furniture and very little evidence that anyone actually exists inside it." That can change, he said. She looked at him.
He gestured toward the kitchen. The chicken has about 30 minutes. You want to open the wine? She followed him into the kitchen and the evening began.
He got Sophie at 7:30. She came through the front door at a run saw Olivia at the kitchen table and stopped so abruptly that her sneakers squeaked on the floor. She stood in the entryway and looked at Olivia with the direct assessing gaze of a child who had not yet learned to perform social ease. Olivia looked back at her with equal directness.
You're Sophie, Olivia said. You're Olivia, Sophie said. Yes. You sent me the birthday card.
I did. Sophie thought about this for a moment. How did you know it was my birthday? Your dad mentioned it, Olivia said.
And I have a good memory for things that matter. Sophie considered her for another moment. Then she walked fully into the kitchen, climbed onto her bar stool, looked at the cookies on the counter and said, "Did you bring those?" I did. Can we have them for dessert?
That's up to your dad. Sophie looked at Daniel with the expression of someone who already knew the answer. After dinner, Daniel said. Okay.
Sophie looked back at Olivia. My dad says you're nice to him. Olivia glanced at Daniel. Something in her face was careful and warm and slightly undone.
I try to be. He's nice to everyone, Sophie said. But not everyone is nice back. So I like that you are.