Page 70 of My Unexpected Surprise
Piper materializes at my elbow so smoothly it’s almost impressive. She’s holding two cups of coffee, and her expression has the particular quality of someone who has been watching something carefully and has reached a preliminary verdict.
“My father.” I take one of the coffees. It burns going down and I’m grateful for it.
“Ah.” She watches his progress across the room. “He’s very charming.”
“He really is.”
“In the way that makes the back of your neck itch.”
“Exactly that way.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and then, because Piper has never in her life sat with an observation when she could turn it into a sentence: “Dominic Calder redirected him.”
I look at her. “What?”
“Before I got to you. I saw what was happening, I was coming over, and Calder stepped in first.” She says his name the way she always does, like a word she’s been forced to learn in a language she finds objectionable. “He came up to your father, said something about consortium professional conduct protocols,cited a specific clause, and your father pivoted. Smoothly. Like he knew he’d been managed.”
“Dominic Calder.”
“I know.” She takes a long drink of her coffee. “I don’t know what to do with it either. I still hate him. But I hate him slightly less now, and I want it on the record that I resent it.”
I almost smile, which is something, given the last ten minutes.
“What did Dante say to you?” Piper asks, quieter now.
“He implied I’m making poor choices. That it might reflect on my fitness as a parent.” I say it flatly, the way I’ve learned to say all things Dante, stripped of the weight that would otherwise make them impossible to carry. “The usual.”
Piper’s jaw tightens. “Okay. I want to say several things about that.”
“I know you do.”
“And I’m going to restrain myself to one, for now.”
“That’ll be a first.”
“He’s wrong,” she says simply. “About all of it. You’re the best mother I have ever watched operate under pressure, and whatever he’s using to make you doubt that, he is wrong.”
I look at her for a moment, this woman who has been my best friend since we were twenty-two and sat next to each other in a seminar where neither of us was supposed to be and both of us pretended otherwise.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Don’t cry. We’re in public.”
“I’m not going to cry.”
“You have the face.”
“I don’t have the face.”
“You absolutely have the face.” She links her arm through mine, pressing her shoulder against me in the way she’s been doing since university. “Come on. The afternoon session starts in twenty minutes and you need to find Nico first.”
She steers me toward the far end of the room, and I let her, and I don’t look back toward where my father has absorbed himself into another cluster of delegates like he was always there and always will be, because that is the thing about men like Dante De Luca.
They never really leave. They just move to the other side of the room.
I find Nico by following the noise, the high bright shrieks of children who have been cooped up in adult spaces all morning and have found a patch of garden to be feral in. He’s running in wide, unstoppable circles with a boy roughly his age, arms out, making a sound that is either an airplane or a rocket or possibly a dragon. It’s unclear and his face is incandescent with the joy of being four years old and moving fast and answering to nobody.
I stand at the edge of the garden and watch him, and I breathe.
