I'm just not leaving yet. Luna pressed closer to her father's side. She was 6 years old, and she understood with a particular clarity of children in charge situations that something serious was happening. She did not cry. She watched, but her grip on Lucas's hand had tightened, and Lucas felt it, and he placed his free hand briefly on top of hers.
At the table, Evelyn had not moved. She sat with her hands in her lap and her gaze moving slowly around the room, taking inventory, it seemed, of every person present. Her expression had not changed, but she was watching Lucas with an attention that was different from how she watched everyone else. More careful, more considered, as if she was trying to figure something out. The guests with their phones had multiplied.
Three tables, now four. A woman in a red dress near the back had turned entirely in her chair. Dominic leaned slightly toward Marcus and said something too quiet to carry across the room. Marcus nodded once and took another step toward Lucas. Sir, daddy.
Luna said very quietly. Lucas looked down at her. They're going to make us leave again, aren't they? She said. It was not quite a question.
Lucas crouched down to her level. Right there in the middle of the room in front of everyone, he crouched down to his daughter's eye level and held both of her hands in both of his. Hey, he said quietly. You okay? She nodded.
Her eyes were very bright. Are you scared? She thought about it. Genuinely thought about it with that careful honesty of hers. A little, she admitted.
Me too, he said. A little. She blinked as if this surprised her, as if the possibility that her father might be afraid had not previously occurred to her. And now that it had, it made him somehow more rather than less reassuring. "But we're not doing anything wrong," he continued.
"So, we're going to stand here for a minute, and we're going to be okay." "All right." Luna looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked past him at Evelyn. Evelyn was watching them, still and quiet, her hands folded in her lap, her dark eyes holding something that had not been there earlier in the evening, something that had not made it past whatever guard she kept around herself under ordinary circumstances.
It was, if you looked closely enough, the expression of someone who had just recognized something they had long since stopped expecting to find. Luna looked back at her father. "Okay," she said. Lucas stood up. Marcus was 2 feet away.
Last chance to do this easy, Dominic said. Lucas looked at him with an expression that was tired and clear and entirely unafraid. I'm not trying to make this hard, he said. I'm just waiting until she's been treated right. Remove him, Dominic said.