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“Elle est qualifiée?” He wanted to know if she was qualified.

“Quatorze ans à enseigner en maternelle.” I told him she’d taught kindergarten for fourteen years.

Cole’s head came around. “What was that? What did you just do?”

“Conversation,” Theo said, in English.

“In French. You speak French. Why do I not know this about you?”

“You never asked.”

“Fourteen years of five-year-olds,” Theo said, and turned a page. “She can handle one more.”

Ryan pushed his plate away. “You actually had Griffin set it up. I figured you’d sit on it.”

“I didn’t have a sitter.”

Kasperi leaned in on his elbows. “Is she going to live at your house?”

“In the casita.”

“So, yes.”

“Kasperi.”

Cole hadn’t touched his eggs since I sat down. “I’ll come,” he said. “Moral support.”

“No.”

Cole sat back with his coffee and stopped arguing, which was how I knew he was coming.

He came.

The meeting room off the main corridor had a round table, four chairs, and a window onto a parking lot where the August asphalt bent the air for about a foot above itself. Cole took the chair nearest the door and squared it to the table, then got up again and set a glass of water at the empty place to my right, as if he were hosting.

Iris was down the hall in Maren’s office.

Maren: Iris has commandeered my stapler and is “fixing” a drawing

Me: Don’t let her near the staples

Maren: Too late. Gerald needed surgery

I pocketed the phone. The room smelled like industrial coffee, with the rubber and cold air of the rink under it.

She walked in out of well over a hundred degrees. They ran the building cold all year. She came through the door with the parking lot still on her, damp at the temple, one piece of hair stuck to the side of her neck, and crossed from one climate into the other without acknowledging either one. The lot came in with her and lasted a few strides, hot asphalt and warm skin, and then the cold air in there thinned it out to nothing.

Her hair was auburn, and most of it was up. Her eyes were green, and they crossed the room fast, me, then Cole, then the window, then back to me. She had freckles over the bridge of her nose and down onto her cheeks. She wore a navy dress with no effort in it, sleeves to the elbow. It fit her at the waist and loosened over her hips, and I put my eyes where it loosened and then made myself bring them to her face. She was tall. Standing, her eyes would come up near mine, and I wouldn’t have to bend my neck to talk to her, which I did all day to everybody else.

Then she said her own name and I found out what her voice was.

It came in lower than her face had led me to expect, and it didn’t tip up at the end of it. “Delaney Rhodes.”

She came into a room with two large men in it and didn’t adjust. Cole had a face that had done commercial work, I was the biggest man in most rooms I walked into, and she came past the both of us like we were furniture.

I want to be the one she stops for.

I was halfway up out of the chair while I thought it.