Page 21 of His Good Girl

By the second paragraph, I had leaned back in my chair. By the fourth, I had stopped pretending I was reading it as a businessman, but it was not the words themselves that held my attention.

It was Avery’s honesty.

She had tried to make herself sound reasonable. I could see the effort in every line from the apology for emailing late to the quick assurance that she did not want money, did not want a handout, did not want me to fix her life. She had offered me all the escape routes before I had even needed one. Then, between those careful little fences, the truth had broken through anyway. She was embarrassed. She was tired. She had been trying too hard for too long to prove she did not need anyone, and now she had finally written to the one person her father had made promise, more times than necessary, that she could always count on.

I read the email twice.

Then a third time, though there was no practical reason for it.

The photograph on my shelf caught my eye when I looked away from the screen. Robert Hale at thirty-eight, sunburned and laughing on a half-framed deck in Maine, one arm thrownaround my shoulders, the other holding a beer he had later knocked over with a set of rolled drawings. Avery’s father had been too easy with affection and too stubborn with everything else. I had never known anyone so certain that love was meant to be loud in ordinary ways. Pack a sweater. Call me when you get there. Did you eat? Let me look at the contract. Let Callum help if you need something and I’m not around.

He had said that last part long before he knew he would not be around.

I forwarded the email to Benjamin with two words.

Make room.

His response came within twenty seconds, because Benjamin Mercer believed sleep was an amateur hobby.

Benjamin:Define room.

Me:Nine o’clock.

Benjamin:Today?

Me:Yes.

Benjamin:You have Lang at 8:30, zoning council at 9:00, Dana at 9:20, and the mayor’s office circling like well-dressed vultures.

Me:Move them.

Benjamin:For your goddaughter.

I looked at that word for a moment.

Goddaughter.

It should have settled the matter. It should have put everything in a neat, respectable box with a properly labeled lid and returned me to the business of protecting the company from men who smiled into microphones while sharpening daggers under the table.

I had known Avery since she was born. I had held her at a baptism that had been more champagne than church. I had watched her run barefoot through her parents’ yard, had seen her at sixteen pretending not to like the charm bracelet I bought her because liking it would have made her too easy to please. I had stood in a black suit at her mother’s funeral and then again at her father’s, while she tried so hard not to fall apart that it had nearly broken my heart to look at her. But the woman who had written that email was not a child.

And that, inconveniently, was where the trouble began.

Me:For Robert’s daughter. And because she asked properly.

Benjamin:Properly is doing heroic work there.

Me:Be kind.

Benjamin:I will be effective.

Me:Benjamin.

Benjamin:Fine. I will be effective with decorative kindness around the edges.

By the time he reported that she had responded and was on her way, his tone suggested he had personally dragged civilization back from the brink. He appeared in my doorway at quarterto nine with a tablet in one hand, a coffee in the other, and the expression of a man prepared to defend a castle against a sentimental invasion.

“She answered,” he said.