Bertie whimpered, louder this time, and lunged for the door again, causing me to run a few steps to get my footing back. I knew whatever moment we’d maybe been about to have—if there even had been one—was now over. “See you,” I said, trying for casual, only to have this undercut by stumbling two more steps after Bertie. I maneuvered us out the front door, hoping that maybe he was still watching us go.
Almost exactly twenty minutes later, I brought Bertie back inside. He hadn’t been bad to walk—he kept trying to pull when we first started, but I did what Maya had told me to do with dogs who were pullers and kept the leash reined in tightly. Once he seemed to see what the new protocol was, he was fine on the leash, albeit determined to sniff every tree we’d passed on our half-mile loop.
I stepped inside the house and unclipped Bertie’s leash. He ran toward the kitchen, and I followed, a few steps behind, watching as he made a beeline for his water dish—B.W. painted on the side—and started slurping loudly. I tucked my hair behind my ears and pressed my lips together, hard and quick, the way Palmer’s sister Ivy had taught us when we were in eighth grade. I looked around, but there was no sign of Clark. And I knew that logically there was no reason for him to still be there.
Even so, I took my time as I hung up Bertie’s leash and double-checked he wasn’t tracking dirt all over the house. When I started to feel creepy about being in someone’s house when my job there was done, I gave Bertie a quick pat on the head, then headed out the door, making sure to lock it behind me.
Once I was walking to my car, I pulled out my phone again and looked down at the texts.
ALEXANDER WALKER
Hi—I was thinking we could get dinner tonight.
The Little Pepper? 7 p.m.
The Little Pepper had been an Asian fusion restaurant the three of us had gone to together a lot when I was younger, but it’d been closed for years now, torn down after a fire. It didn’t surprise me my dad didn’t know it was gone—I was honestly shocked he remembered we’d ever gone there. My dad never talked about our past, except in the campaign stories I’d heard him tell over and over again, until they were just well-polished anecdotes and not memories.
I got into my car and cranked the AC, still looking down at my phone.
ME
Little Pepper’s closed.
I hesitated, then typed again.
ME
But we can go to the Crane if you want. It’s pretty good.
I put my phone down and prepared to back out of Clark’s driveway—I didn’t want him to think it was weird that I was just sitting there, hanging out after I’d walked his dog. But a second later, it buzzed, and I picked it up.
ALEXANDER WALKER
Sounds good. Meet there? Or meet at home?
I stared at the last word he’d typed. I knew what he meant, of course. He meant the house we were both currently living in. But whenever I saw or heard that word, I always thought of the farmhouse first. Our house in Stanwich Woods was never the place that came to mind.
ME
I’ll meet you there.
? ? ?
I’d gotten a text when I was merging onto the highway, and so it wasn’t until I pulled into the Crane’s parking lot that I was able to look at it.
ALEXANDER WALKER
Stuck in traffic by East View. There in 15.
I looked at the words on my screen for a moment, trying to get them to them make sense, before I realized that the text had been sent twenty minutes ago, which meant I was probably late.
I hurried into the restaurant, feeling like everything was suddenly backward. I had gotten used to my dad being perpetually ten—or more—minutes late, to the point where I rarely showed up for things with him on time. I’d start getting texts from Peter, or some random intern, usually a minute before my dad would be there, and then get up-to-the-second information about where he was and what he was doing, like he was a plane whose progress needed to be monitored. So it was beyond strange to walk in and see my dad sitting at a table, waiting.
“Hi,” I said, sliding down into the seat across from him. “Uh—sorry. I thought you’d be late.”
“It’s fine,” my dad said, giving me a quick smile. “No problem.”
I reached over and took a sip from my water glass, noticing how strange it was that my dad’s BlackBerry wasn’t on the table with us—that, frankly, my dad was here at all, not jumping up to take calls or sending e-mails while I texted with my friends or played games on my phone.
“Something to drink?” the waitress asked, and when I saw who it was, I sank a little lower in my seat, holding up my menu to block my face. My friends and I had almost been kicked out of here by this same waitress—Wanda—when she and Toby got into an argument about the complimentary mint bowl and how many was considered a reasonable number to take. It had been a few months, though, so hopefully I was in the clear.
“Iced tea,” my dad said, and I piped up, “Diet Coke.”