The kitchen was quiet for a moment. Olivia looked at Sophie for a long beat and Daniel could see her taking it in this 9-year-old girl with her mother's eyes and her father's honesty and whatever was happening in Olivia's face went too deep for him to fully read. Me, too, Olivia said quietly. I like it, too.
Sophie nodded as as that settled everything, picked up her glass of water, and turned to Daniel. "Can I watch something until dinner?" "30 minutes," he said. She disappeared toward the living room. Olivia turned to look at Daniel.
"She's extraordinary," she said. "I know." "She looks like you." "She looks like her mother." "She has your directness." He looked at Olivia. "Is that a good thing?" "It's my favorite thing about you," she said simply. "So, yes." He turned back to the stove.
They cooked together in the easy, slightly improvised way of two people who were in the same space for the first time, but had known each other long enough that the newness of it wasn't awkward. It was just the next version of something that had been building for a while. She handed him things when he reached for them. He told her where the plates were without being asked.
They moved around each other in the small kitchen without collision, finding the rhythm of it naturally. At one point, she was reading the back of the olive oil for no particular reason, and he was checking the chicken, and they weren't talking, and the quiet was the good kind, the kind that didn't require filling. "This is nice," she said to the olive oil bottle. "Yeah," he said to the oven.
"I don't do this," she said. "Cook. Be in a kitchen with someone. Just being." She set the bottle down.
"I do a lot of things with a lot of people, but most of it is purposeful. Most of it is toward something." She paused. "This is just here." "This is just being here." He turned to look at her. "Is that okay?" he said.
"It's more than okay." She met his eyes. "It's something I didn't know I was missing until I had it." He held her gaze for a moment. Then Sophie appeared in the kitchen doorway and said, "Is it dinner yet?" and the moment folded into the next one, the way moments did, each one making room for what came after. Dinner lasted 2 hours, not because the food required it, but because the conversation did.
Sophie had decided in her thorough and systematic way to find out everything about Olivia that she considered relevant, and her questions were the questions of a child who had never been taught to be indirect. She asked what Olivia's job actually was. Olivia explained it in terms Sophie accepted. She asked if Olivia liked it.
Olivia said yes, and sometimes no, and that was the honest answer about most things worth doing. Sophie approved of this. She asked if Olivia had grown up in California. Olivia said, "New York first, then California, then everywhere." And Sophie asked what everywhere meant, and Olivia explained about moving for school, and then for work, and then because the job was what it was.
And Sophie listened to all of it with focused attention. Then Sophie said, "Do you have kids?" "No." Olivia said. "Do you want them?" "Sophie." Daniel started. "It's okay." Olivia said.
She looked at Sophie. "That's a big question." "I know." Sophie said. "You don't have to answer if it's private." "No, I" Olivia paused, thought about it honestly. "I used to think that part of my life was too complicated for that.
Too full of other things." She looked at Sophie steadily. "I think I'm revising that opinion." Sophie thought about this carefully. "Then" "My mom died when I was little." "I don't really remember her." The table was quiet. "I know." Olivia said gently.
"I'm sorry." "Daddy talks about her sometimes." Sophie said not with sadness, but with the straightforward matter-of-factness that she brought to everything. "He says she was funny and brave." She paused. "I think she would have liked you. She liked people who were honest." Olivia looked at Sophie for a long moment.
When she spoke, her voice was careful and genuine. "That's one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. It's true, Sophie said, and went back to her chicken with the air of someone who had completed a necessary task. Daniel looked at his plate.
He was not going to do anything embarrassing at his own dinner table. He took a breath and looked up and found Olivia watching him, and in her eyes was something that required no words and didn't ask for any. He nodded once. She nodded back.
They finished dinner. He drove Olivia to her car at 8:30 after Sophie had gone to bed. Sophie, who had said goodnight to Olivia with a hug that was brief and fierce and entirely unprompted. The way Sophie did everything and which had clearly done something to Olivia that she was still quietly carrying when they walked out into the driveway.
They stood beside her car. The night was clear and cool. Thank you, Olivia said, for tonight. Stop thanking.
I know, I know. She smiled. I can't help it. Old habit.
She looked at the house, at the light in Sophie's window going dark as he watched. She's going to be an extraordinary woman. She already is. She gets it from you.
She gets it from both of us, he said, and the us landed between them without either of them choosing it, just emerged naturally the way the right word does when the right thing is true. Olivia looked at him. Daniel, she said. Yeah, I've been thinking about something.
Tell me. She turned to face him fully the way she did when something mattered. No deflection, no professional distance, just straight. I've spent 3 years running something that wasn't built for me, she said.
I took it because it needed to be taken and I was the one who could. And I'm good at it. I know I'm good at it. But there's a version of my life I stopped letting myself think about somewhere along the way.