Amelia stared at him. Her throat had done something complicated. She pressed her lips together and looked at the desk for a moment and let the feeling move through her without speaking until she could trust her voice. That she started, he said quietly. His wife, she said, I know he said again.
She breathed. "All right," she said finally. He smiled. "The real one, the one that changed his whole face." The dinner with Walter was the Wednesday of the following week, and it was nothing like what she had expected, which in itself told Sundersam about how far her expectations had been calibrated by the worst version of what things could be. Walter was not warm.
That was not what he was, but he was present in a way he had not been during their first meeting, sitting at the head of his table, with the deliberate attention of a man who had decided to pay it, passing her the bread without being asked, asking her questions that were sharp enough to require real answers. He asked about Cincinnati. He asked about the hotels she had worked in. He asked with a directness that surprised her about her family. And she answered, "Honestly, there wasn't much family to speak of, a mother who had died when she was 14, no father she could account for, an aunt she had worked for briefly, and then left.
And Walter Carter heard all of it without his expressiing, and without offering any of the performative pity that she had learned to dread." "You built yourself," he said when she'd finished. "Not a question. I tried to," she said. I'm still working on it, aren't we all? He said, and meant it as a simple fact, not a comfort.
At the end of the meal, when Hector had cleared the plates and the three of them were sitting with coffee going cold in their cups, Walter said, "My son is going to make you a permanent fixture in this house one way or another. You might as well know what you're getting into." She looked at him steadily. "I've been studying the accounts," she said. I have a reasonable picture. The accounts, he said, don't tell you everything.
No, she said, what would you add? He looked at her. He's stubborn, he said. He'll hold a position past the point where a reasonable man would let it go. He doesn't argue loudly, which means you don't always know when dug in until you've already pushed against it for a week.
He paused. He's also, he stopped, turned his coffee cup once in his hands. He's been lonely, Walter said quietly. For a long time. I haven't known what to do with that.
I'm not built for he made a gesture brief and unexplained that encompassed everything he couldn't articulate. But I've known it was there and I've known what it cost a person. She was quiet. He isn't lonely now, she said carefully. I want you to know that Waltered, he said.