I snorted, laughing. “Aye-aye, boss.”
“Delegation is one of my strengths,” she said. I loved the way she was looking at me, like she actually was my boss, but she also wanted to get in my pants. “I’m very good at it.”
“I bet.”
We stared at each other while I wished we were anywhere but here—in my room at home, at our place in Chicago, in the rental car—I didn’t care where.
My eyes dropped to that first button and I wondered what she’d do if I reached over and unfastened it, maybe the next few as well. Or what would she say if I asked her to stand so I could hike her skirt up and touch the soft skin of her thighs?
“I wish . . .” she said, which brought my eyes back to hers.
“What?” Tell me.
“I wish I didn’t have to withdraw from the University of Chicago.”
“Oh yeah. Can you transfer your credits to some place out here? Isn’t that how it works?”
“Yes. Eventually. I’ll call tomorrow, or maybe Friday, and explain the situation. Once things settle down, I’ll apply to schools out here.” She looked resigned, regretful. “And then there’s work.”
“You mean Foster?” Foster was the architecture firm where she worked.
“I’ll have to turn in my notice. I’ll do that on Friday, too. There’s no getting around it. I just wish . . .”
When she didn’t finish, I prompted, “That you could keep working there?”
“More like, I wish this weren’t so sudden. I wish I could phase out over a month, so they would have time to find someone and I could train them.”
“Didn’t they fire Janie suddenly? Because her ex-boyfriend’s father, who was giving Foster business, wanted her gone?”
Kat seemed to consider this. “Yes, they did. But that doesn’t mean I feel great about leaving abruptly.”
He shrugged. “It’s business. They did what they had to do with Janie. You do what you gotta do. Life, work, business goes on, even when great people leave.”
“I guess it does. When Janie left, it took months to find a replacement, and then they ended up hiring four people to do her job. But, eventually, she was replaced.”
“In business, no one is irreplaceable.”
Her eyes came back to mine, sharpened. “The opposite of a family.”
“What?”
“In a family, no one is replaceable.”
I studied her, not knowing where she was going with this. Was she talking about her father? Or . . . ?
Chewing on her lip, her stare grew increasingly intense until she blurted, “Why is your mother alone? What happened with your father? I see pictures of him all over the house, but aren’t they divorced?”
The air was driven from my lungs. I blinked at her, startled. She’d blindsided me.
“I’m sorry.” She winced, a concerned frown settling between her eyebrows. “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business. I just—”
“My dad, Denis, was in love with this lady. Let’s call this lady Linda.” I leaned forward, placing my elbows on my knees and glared at the back of my hands. There was never going to be a right time to tell this story, so it might as well be now. “Linda had a baby, let’s call the baby Seamus. Linda didn’t want Seamus, and she didn’t want my pop, so she left Seamus at a fire station when he was something like three months old, and my dad—he’s a navy guy—was deployed overseas.”
I lifted my eyes to hers, found them thoughtful and interested. “My mom, well, she’d known my dad since forever. He’s ten years older than her, but they grew up next door to each other, and she’d been full stop crazy about the guy for years and years. The firefighters where Linda had left Seamus knew my dad, they all went to school together, so they take Seamus to my dad’s parents while they try to track down Linda. They can’t find her, she’s gone, skipped town.”
“Seamus is your half-brother.”
I nodded, rubbed my face, and then leaned back in my seat, placing my arm along the table, so fucking tired of this story already. “My mom helped my grandparents out from time to time. She starts babysitting Seamus for free, who of course falls in love with her, grows attached, you know? When my dad gets back, his parents don’t like the idea of raising their son’s illegitimate child, they want him to sign his rights away to the state, put Seamus up for adoption. So my dad, he asks my mom to marry him, to raise his son. She’s in love with the guy, in love with his son, and she’s only seventeen—a dumb, love-sick kid—so she says yes, and he is so grateful.”