She was not going to pretend that the wound was healed. It was not. It would take a long time to heal, maybe longer than she could currently imagine.
But she was sitting at a table with her father.
She had a father. A complicated, imperfect, silver-haired, slightly emotionally controlled man who burned toast and had spent 30 years running from something and had finally, at 61, stopped running.
She had a father.
She looked sideways at him. He was listening to Benjamin, and there was the hint of that small, brief smile on his face, the 1 she had seen on her first day, the 1 that appeared and disappeared so quickly, the 1 she understood now was all the more precious for being rare.
He felt her looking at him.
He turned.
Their eyes met.
He did not smile. Not the small smile. Not any smile. He simply looked at her directly, fully, with no control over his face at all, with 30 years of regret and an entire morning’s worth of overcooked eggs and something new and frightening and necessary in his eyes.
She looked back.
For a moment, they were just 2 people. Not employer and employee. Not a wrong waiting to be righted. Not a 30-year-old story or a question that had finally found its answer.