She would look at someone and she'd say, "I know what you need." Not like a party trick, like a genuine read. And she was almost always right. He looked at Natalie. She would have looked at you and said, "You need someone who doesn't need you to be anything you're not."
Natalie's chest did something she wasn't going to examine right now. Most people look at the company and decide who I need to be to match it. Yeah, I noticed. I looked you up. She raised an eyebrow.
You looked me up. Due diligence. I was bringing my daughter to your office. And then I He paused. And then I read the Bloomberg piece and I sat in my kitchen for a while and tried to understand what someone like me was supposed to do with someone like you.
What did you conclude? That categories are mostly useful and occasionally completely useless. He looked at her directly and that my daughter is smarter than both of us. She laughed. a real one. She really is.
She's also, and I say this with complete love, slightly unnerving. Gerald has layers, Caleb. Gerald, he shook his head. She's given that fish more character development than most novels I've read. The evening had gone very still around them.
The kind of still that happens when everyone else in a place is quiet and the two of you are the only sound. I need to tell you something, Natalie said. Her voice changed just slightly. He heard it. He waited.
The therapeutic relationship with Ava. I thought about it carefully like I said I would. And I've been talking with a colleague of mine, doctor Patricia Owens. She's excellent. She works specifically with children who've experienced loss.
She's she's better than me for what Ava needs now. He was very still. I don't want to pull that rug out from under her. She's attached. I know.
I want to handle the transition carefully with Ava's involvement, with her understanding of why, not abruptly, not in a way that feels like abandonment. She looked at him steadily. I would never do that to her. But I think I think I need to be honest about the fact that my objectivity in that room has limits now. And Ava deserves someone without limits.
He looked at his hands. You're not. He stopped. What? You're not doing this to create room for something else. or not only for that.