Page 14 of His Good Girl

Callum read the resume without making a face, which I appreciated because I made faces at it all the time. His eyes moved steadily down the page. He did not rush, and the silence stretched long enough for me to start hearing every possible criticism before he had voiced one.

“This is not as bad as you think it is,” he offered after a minute or so.

I stared at him. “Did Benjamin pay you to say that?”

“No. Benjamin would pay me not to say that.”

A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.

Callum set the resume on his desk. “It’s uneven. That’s different from bad. You have administrative experience, client communication, basic project coordination, vendor management, executive support, and you write well.”

“You got that from my resume?”

“I got that from the email and from the fact that you turned ‘reorganized orchids by emotional tone’ into a bullet point about adaptive event support.”

I closed my eyes. “Please forget that line.”

“I refuse. It’s the best sentence on here.”

“I was desperate.”

“It shows initiative.”

“It shows I have been to hell and back with floral arrangements.”

“There are worse hells.”

“You sound like you know.”

“I’ve built luxury towers for men who believed marble could compensate for personality. I know several versions of hell.”

The warmth between us settled into something easier for a few minutes. He asked about school, and I told him about the communications degree I had chosen because I liked people and words and had not yet understood how frequently both could be weaponized; the campus coffee shop where I had written papers until closing; the professor who had told me I had a talent for making complicated things sound human. He asked about theapartment, about whether I still saw my aunt, and about my father’s old things.

At one point, he said, “Your father would be furious you waited this long.”

I looked at him quickly.

Callum’s expression was steady. “Not with you.”

“With who?” I asked, with confusion evident on my face, no doubt.

“With me, probably.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“No?” He glanced toward the window. “I promised him I’d look out for you.”

The room seemed to grow quieter.

I swallowed. “You did?”

“Yes.”

“Was he dying when he made you promise that?”

Callum looked back at me. “He was your father. He had me making that promise since you were born.”

The laugh that came out of me was too soft to be useful. “That sounds like him.”