Emma heard herself say. Ethan looked at her careful like he was making sure. You don't have to. I know I don't have to. She heard his words come back out of her own mouth and watched something shift behind his eyes.
Quick, controlled, but there I'd like to. He was quiet for a moment. Okay, then he held the door open. Come on in. The kitchen table was small.
That was the first thing Emma noticed. It was a table built for two. With a third chair added that didn't quite match, and she understood immediately that it had probably been two for a while. And the third chair was recent. Maybe Lily had voted for it.
Maybe it was for guests that didn't come as often as the extra chairs suggested should happen. She sat with her ankle elevated on the extra chair and watched Ethan cook. He hummed while he did it. Low, unself-conscious, not a song she recognized, just a rhythm he kept with himself while his hands moved. He made the grilled cheese in a cast iron skillet, pressing it down with a spatula at intervals, and the smell of it butter and bread, and something underneath she couldn't place yet, filled the kitchen in a way that made Emma realize she hadn't eaten since noon.
Lily set the table with the careful deliberateness of a child who had been doing it long enough to have a system. She said, "Emma's utensils first, then her own, then her father's, then stood back to evaluate." "The forks go on the left," Emma said. Lily looked at the forks, looked at Emma, moved them all to the left without comment. Then, how did you know that?
My grandmother used to make me set the table every Sunday. She was very particular. My grandma doesn't make me set the table. Lily climbed into her chair, but she makes me sit up straight, which is basically the same level of work. Ethan sets a plate front of Emma, and she looked down at the sandwich, golden, pressed, oozing at one edge, and saw it then, the thin green layer visible at the cut.
Pesto, she said. Lily gasped. You guessed the secret. The color gave it away. Lily looked at her father with an expression of pure betrayal.
She guessed the secret. The secrets still in the sandwich. Ethan sat down. The guessing doesn't remove it. Lily considered this philosophically, then took a large bite.
The tomato soup came from a pot on the stove, not the can. Emma noticed actually made with onion and something else, and Lily had arranged apple slices on a small plate into the approximate shape of a heart that was listing significantly to the left. "It's a heart," Lily announced. "I can see that." Emma picked up a slice.
It's a very ambitious heart. Daddy helped with the left side. That's why that part's better. She pointed without hesitation to the side that was still recognizably heart-shaped. Mine's the other part.
Ethan did not dispute this. The conversation that happened over dinner was the kind that surprises you by going somewhere real. It started easy. Lily's teacher, who was funny and strict in a combination, Lily found confusing. A book Emma had read to her class that week.
A furniture piece Ethan had been restoring for a month that was finally almost done. But it deepened slowly without ceremony. Emma talked about the library about a boy who came in every Tuesday alone and always picked the longest book he could find and how she'd started reserving the good ones for him before anyone else could take them. About the way kids sometimes needed a library to be a different thing than what it said over the door. Not just books, but a place where nobody expected anything of them for a little while.
Ethan listened to that. Really listened. Not the polite kind. Not the nodding while formulating kind. The kind where you can feel a person actually receiving what you've said.
What made you a librarian? He asked. She thought about the real answer. Books were the first thing that made me feel like the world was bigger than what was directly in front of me. A pause.
When I was a kid, things at home were complicated. Books were the place where complicated things resolved themselves, where the people who hurt always found their way to something better. Eventually, I wanted to be the person who handed those to somebody else. It was more than she'd meant to say. She reached for her water glass.
Ethan was quiet for a moment. Lily was eating her apple slices in focused silence, though Emma suspected she was listening to every word. She told me her mom picked books, Lily said, pointing at the refrigerator where among the drawings was a small photograph, a woman with Lily's exact eyes and a bright, direct smile holding a book with both hands like it was something important. That was before when I was a baby. The table went very still.
Emma looked at the photograph. She looked at Ethan. He was looking at the table, the muscle in his jaw doing something controlled and steady. Then he looked up. Lily's mom died when Lily was two.
His voice was level. It had the levelness of something practiced until it stopped cutting as much. Heart. Nobody saw it coming. Emma didn't say, "I'm sorry."
It seemed thin next to something that large. Instead, she said, "She has your daughter's eyes." Ethan looked at the photograph. Something in his face went somewhere complicated and then came back. Yeah, he said.
She does. Lily, who seemed to have the particular emotional intuition of children who have navigated grief alongside adults, reached over and put one hand on Emma's arm. Not her father's. Emma's. It's okay, she said with the gravity of someone explaining a difficult but manageable situation.
We talk about it. Daddy says you're allowed to be sad about things and still have dinner. Ethan closed his eyes for exactly one second. Emma put her hand over Lily's. That's a very smart thing for a daddy to say.
Lily nodded. He has other good ones. I'll tell you them later. She picked up her spoon. More soup.
It was nearly 8 when Emma finally said she should get home. The hour had arrived slowly in the way good hours do it had not announced itself or pushed. It had simply been and then it was over and Emma became aware of the fact that she'd stopped counting the minutes at some point and couldn't have told you when. Ethan put her bag by the door. Lily was beginning to droop the particular heavy litted slowing that meant she was fighting sleep with the last of her resources, which in a six-year-old's case was not many.