Page 69 of Power Play

“Thanks.”

“I said you’ve been good. I didn’t say the other thing.” He watched the last of the crowd move along the concourse above us. “December. I need the man who played these three games. Not the one who played October.”

“You’ll have him.”

“Mm,” Calloway said, and walked off.

I got home after dark, still in the suit I’d flown in. Iris hit me at the door at a dead run and I caught her one-armed and got the strike situation, chapter and verse, before the bag was off my shoulder.

Delaney was at the stove with her sleeves shoved past the elbow and her hair sliding down out of the clip, and the kitchen smelled like browning butter and the cilantro she put through everything. Her eyes came up to mine and sat there, directly, past what a greeting called for, and dropped back to the pan. I was in my own kitchen doorway with my kid on my hip, wanting her so badly my hands ached.

We ate, and then I did the bath. The water slopped over the side and soaked both my knees through where I knelt on the mat. Iris fell asleep on the second page, which she hadn’t done since she was two, and I sat on the floor of her room with my back against her bed a long while after there was any reason to.

Then the door was shut and the hall was dark and my daughter was asleep. I went out to the kitchen and put my knuckles down on the island, both my knees still wet from the tub.

The casita door opened and shut.

She walked in the same as she always had, straight through, and got two steps into the room before she saw me at the island with only the stove light on.

She stopped.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

She had the whale mug in one hand. She set it down on the island in front of me like it was suddenly a problem, and the base of it knocked the stone harder than she meant.

“I was going to make tea.” Her eyes cut to the kettle and returned to me. “That is all the plan I arrived with.”

“I said I’d get you a night.”

“You did.”

“Then I let it sit.”

“I’m aware. I have been extremely aware. It is affecting my work product.” She backed up until she hit the counter by the stove and gripped the edge behind her.

“I needed to be sure.”

“Of me?”

“Of me.” I came around the island without hurrying. She watched me do it and gave no ground. “You did the brave thing against that door and I went and got careful, and I’d been telling myself careful was the same as right. It isn’t. I wanted you to know I know the difference.”

Her breath ran high and shallow and her chin was up, and she wasn’t adjusting one degree of herself.

“Okay,” she said.

I stopped in front of her, so close she had to tip her chin up to me.

“I’m going to ask you for something,” I said, “and I need a word. Not a face.”

“You’ve got a word.”

“Not yet. I haven’t asked yet.”

She let out a breath that started as a laugh and didn’t finish. “That is deeply annoying and it is working.”

“Delaney.”