“It’s not a favor. It’s a promise.”
“Promises about being nice are weird, Dad.”
He spread his hands. “I want to like him. Is that allowed?”
“Yes,” she said. “Liking him is allowed. Deciding before he talks is not.”
Richard held her gaze and, to his credit, did not make a joke. “I hear you.”
He did hear her. Hearing is not the same thing as clearing a space. That night he lay beside Claire in the dark and said, “She thinks I’ve already made up my mind.”
Claire, awake and facing the ceiling, said, “Have you?”
“I’ve made up my mind to have standards.”
“Then apply them after you know a single true thing about him that didn’t come from your own worry.”
He turned onto his side. The conversation ended the way too many of their important conversations ended, not in a slam, in a quiet that let each of them keep the sentence they liked best. He kept standards. She kept the demand for one true thing. Both of them slept. Neither of them slept well.
Saturday morning was ordinary on purpose. Claire went to the market for rosemary she did not strictly need. Richard washed his car in the driveway and waved at the neighbor. Sarah tried on the skirt, took it off, put it on again, and texted Marcus a photograph of her boots with the caption These are the boots of a woman who is not apologizing. He replied, Good. Apologies are for things you did.