“You’re standing beside him in a photo from 1987. Your face has been clawed out of it. He’s been bringing woman after woman to this exact table for a year and a half, and now suddenly you’re the one sitting across from him. So don’t tell me it’s nothing.”
“It wasn’t a date,” she said again.
“Then what was it?”
Helen looked down at the envelope in my hand with my name on it. And she said, quietly, “Your father was asking me whether eight years was long enough.”
She pulled out the chair across from the booth and gestured for me to sit.
“No,” I said. “You can tell me standing.”
She studied me for a few seconds, the way you study someone you’re deciding how much to trust. Then she said the most absurd sentence I have ever heard in my life.
