Page 46 of His Good Girl

I nearly choked on my water.

Avery’s eyes flashed with satisfaction. “Exactly.”

“Orchids?”

“Orchids.”

“Quietly sensual orchids?”

“She said peonies were too emotionally available.”

I laughed properly then, not the contained office version, but the kind that loosened something under my ribs. Avery looked pleased with herself and a little relieved, as if laughter had been a door she had hoped would open and was surprised to find unlocked.

“Robert would have loved that story,” I said before I could stop myself.

Her smile tilted, not disappearing, just changing. “He would have made it worse.”

“Much worse.”

“He would have asked what the sexiest fern was.”

“Boston ferns. Obviously.”

Avery laughed again, and a knot in my chest tightened at once.

That was the problem with the dinner. It did go well. Better than it should have, even. When she spoke about her old jobs, I could see the pattern beneath the comedy from how she had made herself agreeable to unreasonable people, to how she had mistaken endurance for professionalism, and how each bad environment had taught her to mistrust her own judgment a little more. But she told it well. Too well, maybe. Marlena became a character with a voice like freezing rain. Lydia became a floral war criminal. Avery could make nearly anything funny, which meant I had to listen for the places where the humor thickened over pain.

I did not scold her.

I had done enough of that in the office.

Instead, I gave her my attention without turning it into instruction. I asked what she had liked about the work before the people ruined it. I asked what she had been proud of. I asked who, in all those chaotic rooms, had trusted her, and why. Those questions did more than another lecture would have.

She answered slowly at first, then more honestly. She liked being useful before anyone noticed there was a problem. She liked taking messy information and making it understandable. She liked remembering details, making people feel taken care of, the calm that came after a plan finally worked.

“That’s not nothing,” I said.

She looked down at her wine. “It feels like nothing when you put it on a resume.”

“Most important things do.”

“Is that supposed to be comforting?”

“No. Just accurate.”

“You’re very committed to accuracy.”

“It has saved me from having several buildings fall down.”

“Only several?”

“A gentleman does not count his near-misses at dinner.”

Her smile came again, easier this time.

I told her a few stories of my own, carefully chosen. I told her about the first engineer who had red-penned my calculations soaggressively it looked like a crime scene. The project manager who once told me I had ‘the interpersonal style of poured concrete in winter.’ The client who had fired me from a small renovation job when I was twenty-eight because I refused to sign off on a load path that existed only in his imagination and possibly a cocktail napkin.

“You got fired?” Avery asked, visibly delighted.