She thought about it honestly before she answered.
“Better,” she said. “Not all the way yet, but genuinely better.”
He nodded.
“Do you think about it?” he asked, and she knew what he meant.
“Less than I expected to,” she said. “In the beginning I thought I’d be angrier. Or sadder. For longer.” She looked at her coffee. “But I think the grieving happened while I was still in it, so by the time it was over there wasn’t as much left to process.” She looked up. “What I think about is the two years before things went wrong. When I was trying hard and believing hard and it didn’t—” she stopped. “I think about what I didn’t see. Whether I should have seen it sooner.”
“Should you have?”
She considered this with the same care she considered everything.
“Probably,” she said. “Some of it. But I also think there’s a version of loving someone where you choose, for a while, to see what they could be rather than what they are. And I don’t think that’s entirely wrong. I think it’s only wrong when you stop being honest with yourself about which one you’re looking at.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“That’s a very precise way of understanding something that tends to be not very precise.”
“I’ve had time to think about it.”
“Yes,” he said, and looked at her with the expression she knew by now—the one that contained the particular pride of a man watching his child be, unmistakably and completely, herself. “You have.”
The city outside the restaurant window was loud and various and ongoing, the way cities are—a hundred thousand stories moving simultaneously, most of them ordinary, some of them not, none of them stopping for any of the others. Emily Reed sat across from her father in a restaurant she had chosen herself and looked at the life she was building and felt its weight in her hands—real weight, the weight of something solid, something hers—and she thought: this is what it feels like to be beginning.
She picked up her cup.
Alexander raised his.
“To new chapters,” he said.
She touched her cup to his.
“And to not looking back,” she said. “Except to understand.”
He smiled.
“Except to understand,” he agreed.