Not ever. Not Victoria. Not anybody. Your mom is your mom forever.
This isn't about that. Do you understand? Emma didn't say anything. She looked down at her eggs and her chin did the thing her mothers used to do, the stubborn set.
That meant she was holding something in. And Ryan's heart cracked a little because he knew that look. He'd loved that look on another face a long time ago. Is she going to live here?
Emma asked very small. No, not no. This is just meeting lunch. That's all.
Nobody's living anywhere. Is she nice? Ryan thought about it. He thought about the woman the whole building called the ice queen the dragon, the woman who fired her own heart.
He thought about how she'd covered him before she'd needed to the midnight email the way she'd stood at the head of a boardroom and ended a man for threatening a child she'd never met. She's the kind of nice that takes a while to see, Ryan said. Honestly, she's had a hard life bug. She lost somebody she loved, too, just like us, so she can be a little.
She's got walls up like a castle, and it takes a while to get inside. But once you're inside, he tucked a piece of hair behind Emma's ear. Once you're inside, she's one of the good ones. I promise you that.
Emma considered this with the gravity that only seven-year-olds and Supreme Court justices possess. "Okay," she said finally. "I'll meet her, but I'm bringing Mr. Buttons, and if I don't like her, we leave.
If you don't like her, we leave," Ryan agreed. "Deal, deal." He picked the restaurant carefully. Not fancy. The last thing he wanted was for Emma to feel small or for Victoria's world to swallow his kid whole on the first day.
He picked a diner, a good one with red booths and a milkshake menu and a jukebox that didn't work, but that kids like to press the buttons on anyway. Neutral ground, a place where a billionaire and a single dad and a 7-year-old with a stuffed rabbit could all three be equally out of their depth. Victoria got there first. Ryan saw her through the window as they walked up and his heart did something complicated because she'd tried.
That was the thing that got him. She tried so hard. She wasn't in a suit. She was in jeans he'd never seen her in.
Jeans hadn't known she owned jeans and a soft blue shirt. And she'd done something different with her hair. and she was sitting in the red booth looking so profoundly visibly nervous that Ryan almost laughed. "Here was a woman who had faced down hostile boards and hedge funds and a room full of men who wanted her job, and she was terrified of a seven-year-old." "There she is," Ryan murmured to Emma, "the lady in the blue. That's Victoria." Emma stopped on the sidewalk.
She looked through the window at Victoria. She clutched Mr. Buttons to her chest. She looks scared.
Emma said she is scared of me. Of you. Ryan confirmed. Very scared of you.
You're a very scary person. And something in Emma. Some small watchful guarded thing shifted just slightly because a 7-year-old who has spent four years being the one who's scared does not expect to be the scary one. It rearranged something.
She looked at the nervous woman in the blue shirt through the diner window and instead of a threat, she saw for just a second something she recognized. They went in. They Victoria stood up too fast when she saw them and knocked the table and made the water glasses jump. And Ryan watched her register that she'd done it and flush.
And it was so unlike the woman at the head of the boardroom that he loved her a little more for it right there. Hi, Victoria said to Emma. not to Ryan. She barely looked at Ryan. She looked right at the little girl with the stuffed rabbit and she said, "Hi, you must be Emma.
I'm Victoria. I've been Your dad talks about you all the time. All the time. I feel like I know you already, which is silly because we've never met.
So," she stopped. She was talking too fast the way she had that first Friday in her kitchen. Sorry, I'm nervous. I don't I've never done this before.
Meeting somebody's meeting you. I've never done this. Emma looked up at her. She held Mr.
Buttons a little tighter. You knocked the table. Emma observed. I did knock the table.
You made the water jump. I made the water jump. That's a thing I do when I'm nervous. I knock into things.
Victoria sat back down carefully as if to demonstrate she could sit without causing a disaster. Your dad says you don't miss anything. I can see that's true. You noticed the water immediately.
Emma slid into the booth across from Victoria and Ryan sat beside his daughter. And for a moment, the three of them just looked at each other across the red table. And it was, Ryan thought, one of the most excruciating and beautiful things he'd ever sat through. Who's that?
Victoria asked, nodding at the rabbit carefully, like she knew it mattered. Emma's arms tightened. Mr. Buttons.
Mr. Buttons. Victoria nodded. Seriously.
He looks very well-loved. He looks like he's been through a lot. My mom gave him to me, Emma said. And it came out like a challenge, like a line drawn in the sand, like a test.
She said it. And then she watched Victoria's face with an intensity that made Ryan hold his breath because he knew what his daughter was doing. She was finding out right now in the first 2 minutes whether this woman was going to try to compete with a ghost. And Victoria Sterling, who had lost the love of her own life and understood better than almost anyone alive what it meant to hold on to an object because a dead person's hands had once held it.