“No. Not yet. Thanks for reminding me. I’m going to call Mom. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Amanda, don’t go. What—”
She hung up. Jesus, what had I done now? I wasn’t getting anything right at the moment. Things were so much easier when she lived with her mother. Up until the move, I could do no wrong. All I had to do was tickle her, crack a joke, read her a bedtime story and she thought I was amazing. Now everything I did led to an eye roll or a Daaad.
Fuck. I needed to call to Pandora. Maybe I could send Amanda over to Zurich the weekend of the dance? That way, there would be no boys, no dating and I wouldn’t have to worry about going to jail for murder. My daughter was fourteen—she wasn’t ready for the reality of the male species.
“Come in,” I barked at the loud rap on the door. Harper entered the room. I groaned. Being in the same room as her was the very last thing I needed.
“What?” I asked as she strode toward me.
“The revised Bangladesh report.” She held up some papers.
“You could have left it with Donna.”
She placed the report down on my desk with a bang. “I’m sure if I’d left it with Donna, you’d have told me I should have handed it to you directly.”
Oh. Sass. I hadn’t been expecting that. I had to bite down a grin. She was right; I was giving her a hard time. But it wasn’t personal. Okay, it was a little bit personal. She just irritated me. I prided myself on being unemotional at work. I’d always been able to separate the different areas of my life, to shut one world down while I was in another. Harper blurred the lines. During our meetings I fixated on the curve of her neck, or the pull of her sweater across her breasts. I’d be left trying to figure out her scent or imagine how her skin would feel under my fingers. I tried to shut that part of my imagination down. Over and over.
I stared at the screen of my laptop. “Well now you’re here, just leave it on my desk and I’ll try to get to it later.”
“I’ll leave your sandwich with Donna then,” she said as she turned on her heel. Was she wearing a new dress? It looked good on her, showing off her ass and the sway of her hips while being high necked and demure.
I didn’t have time to answer as she headed out and slammed the door.
Jesus, I was getting attitude everywhere I turned today. Was there a full moon? I picked up my cell and dialed Amanda. No answer.
I had a pile of papers to get through, but I wanted to get to the bottom of the situation with Amanda. If she was hoping to go to her dance with a date, we had a lot to talk about. I pulled all my things together. I’d work on the train. Leaving the office would be a double bonus—I could be with my daughter and put some distance between me and Harper. But it wasn’t a long-term solution. I couldn’t just stop coming into the office to avoid Harper. I needed a plan to keep her away from me. A way of making sure she didn’t want anything to do with me.
The journey back to Connecticut had unwound me, and I was able to focus better with every mile put between me and Harper.
“Pancakes?” Amanda asked as she skulked into the kitchen. The French doors were open and a light breeze circled around us. Despite us being anything but a traditional family, I’d always liked that this house had a traditional family feel. It had none of the sleek lines, gloss, and glamour of my New York apartment but I liked both of them, felt at home either way.
I nodded, cracking an egg into a bowl. Since she’d transitioned to solid food, Amanda and I had shared pancakes on Sunday mornings and talked. Pancakes were our thing.
“You’re home early,” she said. She’d hinted that she wanted me home on the phone, but she’d never expect it. It was nice to be able to surprise her. She understood work was important but that she always came first. In so many ways she was mature, but every now and then I’d get a reminder she was still fourteen.
I nodded again.
“Like half a day early,” she added.
“Thought I’d spend some time with my favorite lady. I sent Marion home, so we’re having pancakes.” Marion cooked for both of us on the nights I was home. Two nights a week Amanda’s two sets of grandparents fought over her. Because she’d spent so much time with them when she was little, it was almost as if she had three sets of parents, and my two sisters provided the aunt input.
Amanda hopped up onto one of the barstools at the breakfast bar, watching as I whisked up the batter.
“Speak to your mom today?” I asked. I’d learned I couldn’t just launch in and ask Amanda who she was hoping to ask her to the dance and on what basis. No, I had to wait for her to talk. Lucky for me, Amanda was a talker.
“Nope. Not yet.”
I stayed silent, trying to encourage her to speak.
“Bobby Clapham invited Samantha to the dance.”
I gripped the whisk harder but kept my mouth shut. I had to hear her out.
“And I thought that Callum Ryder would ask me, but he hasn’t said anything.”
Fourteen. No one told me dating was going to start this early. Could I call Pandora and agree we would lock Amanda in her room until she turned twenty-one? I could give up work and home school her for a few years, then she could do a college correspondence course. It was an option.
“Callum Ryder, he’s in your class?” I’d never heard her talk about him. Or maybe I had and I’d just taken no notice. Because Amanda liked to talk, I tuned out large chunks of what she said. It was just too much to take in—all the friends, the squabbling, the concerns that would last five seconds. I couldn’t keep up. The stuff I did take in passed through my brain quickly, and I retained almost nothing about her friendships at school. I was beginning to realize such an approach may have been a mistake.
“Oh my God. Don’t you listen to anything I say?” she whined. “Callum moved here from San Francisco last semester. Don’t you remember me telling you?”
“Oh, right.” I nodded, trying to cover up the fact I had no idea what she was talking about. Why hadn’t we sent her to an all-girls school? “And you want him to ask you to the dance?”
A blush crept up her face and a piercing pain shot through my chest. She was too young for all this. “Maybe,” she said. “But only because he’s funny, and I saw him dance once during lunch and he seemed to be able to move in time to the music.”
“So everyone is going as couples?” I tried not to shudder as I spoke. My baby girl.
“What do you mean?” she asked, plucking a grape from the bowl of fruit on the counter.
“If Callum asked you to the dance, he’d pick you up and—”
“No, Samantha and I are going together. You said you’d drive us. You don’t remember?” She splayed her hands in front of her as if I was possibly the stupidest man ever to have lived.
“Yeah, I remember,” I lied. “But I thought you and Samantha were no longer friends?”
“Last week, Dad. Keep up.”
“Okay, explain it to me because I don’t know how these things work. So you’ll see Callum there?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
The thudding of my pulse slowed. Maybe labelling this whole thing dating was over-dramatic. I poured the batter onto the griddle as I tried to cover my relief. “So do you have your costume yet for this dance?” I asked.