Page 242 of Wild Card 13

“Your office has a dog bed, three stacks of files, and lighting that makes people look recently exhumed.”

“Again, rude.”

“Again, accurate.” His mouth twitched. “You are spending too much time there for it to feel like a storage room. Get a better chair. A lamp. Some shelves. Something for the dog that does not look like it was chosen during an evacuation.”

“Dottie likes her bed.”

“Dottie likes licking snow off boots. Her standards are not the issue.”

I pressed my lips together, mostly because if I smiled too much, I might cry, and that would be embarrassing for both of us.

Dad looked at the card, then back at me. “Murphy beds have come a long way.” He shrugged. “If you are going to keep sleeping in your office, we might as well stop wasting money on rent.”

“I am not putting a Murphy bed in my office.”

“Lo said the same thing.”

“Lo knows about this?”

“Lo knows everything.”

“That is terrifying.”

“Yes.”

I took the card because he was not going to lower his arm and because the softness in my chest had become too big to keep resisting without turning it into something brittle. The plastic felt absurdly heavy between my fingers. “I am not buying a bed.”

“Fine.”

“I mean it.”

“A very long couch, for the dog.” He smiled fully again, and there was my father. Not the owner. Not the man who could make Charlotte disappear with a bucket of lawyers and a calm phone call. The man who loved me in practical solutions because practical solutions had always been easier for him to hold than the messy, beating things underneath.

And because I was his daughter, I understood that language.

“I’ll get a lamp,” I said. “Maybe a chair.”

“And something on the walls.”

I looked down at the card in my hand. “Thank you.”

It was not enough to fix every complicated thing between us. It did not make him see all the ways I had built my life around his and called it choice.

But it was something.

A father standing in his office, offering a credit card and terrible furniture suggestions because he had noticed I was tired and wanted one corner of my life to feel less hard.

I could let that matter.

“I have a meeting in ten,” he said eventually.

I stood, taking my coffee with one hand and tucking his card into the inside pocket of my blazer with the other. At the door, I paused. “Charlotte is really done?”

Dad’s face went calm again. Certain. “Yes.”

One problem closed.

I nodded. “I love you,” I breathed out, my fingers tapping on the plastic lid.