She nodded. He looked at her directly. The way he rarely looked at people directly because he'd learned that that people directly meant letting them see that you were looking. The park you saw us. I did.
She said something. I know. I'm sorry. She's She says things. She doesn't mean she meant it.
Her voice was even. Not warm, not cold. Just true. Children her age don't gesture at strangers in parks unless something makes them do it. She's reacting to something she read.
Whatever she read, she was probably right. He stared at her. Okay, he said finally. That's the most unsettling thing anyone has said to me in a long time. The corner of her mouth moved again.
Twice a month, she said. First and third Thursday, I'll have the front desk send the calendar. Yeah, he said. Okay. The door to the restroom opened and Ava came out, looked at both of them standing there and then looked at Caleb with an expression that was entirely too composed for a 7-year-old.
"Ready?" Caleb said. "Mhm," he held out his hand. She took it. They walked toward the elevator.
At the hallway bend, Ava glanced back once. Then she looked up at her father. "I like her," she said. Caleb pressed the elevator button. "I noticed.
Did you?" He looked down at his daughter. She was already looking forward. He pressed the button again, though it was already lit because sometimes a man just needs something to do with his hands. The elevator came.
They got in. The doors closed. And in the narrow quiet of that elevator, with his daughter's hand in his and the memory of a woman's gaze sitting somewhere in the center of his chest, Caleb Morrison, who had spent 3 years being very good at not feeling things in particular, felt something. He didn't name it. He wasn't ready to name it.
But it was there, and it was not nothing. The first Thursday came faster than Caleb expected. He'd spent the week telling himself it was just an appointment, a clinical appointment for his daughter, arranged by her school, staffed by a professional. He'd dropped Ava off at school, handled two service calls, eaten lunch standing over his truck's tailgate in a parking lot in Rockville, and driven home to shower and change before pickup. He'd done all of it efficiently, mechanically, the way he did most things.
He did not think about Natalie Witmore. He thought about her constantly, not in the way that embarrassed him, or not only in that way. He thought about her the way you think about a puzzle that doesn't fit any category you already have. She was a child development specialist in a quiet suite on the third floor of a professional building. She sat on the floor with a 7-year-old and talked about wooden figures with the patience of someone who had nowhere else to be.