Chapter 36:

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Grant leaned against the hallway wall and listened to his own breathing for a while. Then he took the elevator down and drove home.

The fish soup. She’d mentioned the fish soup. Not Brooke, not the years of neglect, not the snow or the birthday or any of the larger cruelties—the fish soup. Because the fish soup was proof. Proof that even now, after a year of regret and a hundred gift boxes and a handwritten note that made him cry, he still didn’t know the most basic facts about the woman he claimed to love.

He could say it was always you a hundred times. The fish soup said otherwise.

Over the next week, Darcy worked and Grant took Nell. It became routine: mornings at the hotel, the handoff in the lobby, Nell climbing into his car while Darcy went to meetings. Every evening, Grant brought her back. Sometimes Darcy was already in the lobby. Sometimes she came down a few minutes later, still carrying her laptop bag, still wearing her conference badge, still moving through the world with the focused competence that made Grant feel, each time, like he was meeting her for the first time.

They were polite. They were cordial. They talked about Nell—logistics, schedules, pickup times. Nothing more.

Nell, meanwhile, was becoming someone Grant hadn’t met before. Away from the villa, away from Brooke and Colby, with a year of Carrow between her and the worst of it, she was louder. Funnier. She argued about ice cream flavors with the conviction of a trial lawyer. She sang in the car—badly, without shame. She told Grant about Mrs. Owens’s pencil earrings and about Mr. Hops the tap-dancing rabbit and about her plan to become a space vet, and Grant listened to all of it with an attention so focused it was almost comical, like a student taking notes on a subject he’d neglected for an entire semester and was now trying to pass in a week.

One afternoon, peeling tangerines in the hotel restaurant, he tried again.

“Nell, are you still angry with me?”

She took a tangerine segment and ate it thoughtfully.

“No.”

“Then… could you call me—”

𝘔𝘰𝘀𝘵 𝗋𝗲a𝗱 t𝗵𝗶s 𝗐𝘦𝖾k o𝘯 𝗀𝘢l𝗻оv𝘦𝗅𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝗆

“I’ve forgiven you,” she said, cutting him off. “But I don’t want to call you Daddy.”

He waited. She ate another segment.

“Because every time I called you Daddy, you got angry. You only paid attention to me when I called you Mr. Ashford.” She wiped her fingers on a napkin. “So I’m going to keep calling you Mr. Ashford. It works.”

The logic was airtight. She’d found the only version of their relationship where he didn’t punish her, and she was staying in it. Not out of spite—out of self-preservation. She was seven years old and she’d figured out that the safest distance from her father was the formal one, and she was maintaining it with the calm pragmatism of someone who has learned to manage a difficult situation by controlling what she can control.

Grant peeled another tangerine. His hands were steady. The feeling inside him was not.

“I was wrong before.”

Nell nodded. “I know.” She took the tangerine from his hand. “Can you make french fries?”

“French fries?”

“Mommy doesn’t let me eat them from restaurants. She says the oil is bad. But if you make them at home they’re okay.” She looked at him with an expression that was, for the first time, something close to conspiratorial. “She doesn’t have to know the oil is from a restaurant.”

Grant laughed. It surprised them both.

“I’ll make them. From scratch. Good oil.”

“Deal.”

He made them. It took him an hour because he’d never made french fries before and the first batch was soggy and the second batch was burnt and the third batch was, according to Nell, “acceptable.” She ate them with ketchup, sitting on the hotel room floor with her legs crossed, dipping each fry individually with the methodical precision of a scientist conducting an experiment.

Grant sat across from her and ate the burnt ones.

When Darcy arrived, Nell ran to the door.

“Mommy, come quick! Mr. Ashford made french fries today.” She pulled Darcy by the hand to the table where the surviving fries were arranged on a plate next to a small cup of ketchup. “They’re really good.”

Darcy looked at the fries. Looked at Grant, who had flour on his sleeve and a burn mark on his thumb and an expression that was trying very hard not to be hopeful.

She took a fry. Ate it. Said nothing.

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