“Like all of a sudden?” she snapped back at me.
“Well, yes … and no … It happened gradually … The feelings … But the kiss thing … just happened. All of a sudden, yes.”
I was babbling, my insides twisting, as I waited for the inquisition to continue. But instead of another question, Lucy said, “You know what? I’m going to bed. I can’t do this. I don’t want to know. Just … do what you’re going to do … and please leave me out of it.”
She rose as Coach tried to stop her, standing and reaching for her arm. He caught it, but she shook it off and said, “I’m tired, Daddy. Good night.”
“Good night, Lucy … I’m … really sorry if this hurts you …”
“If?” she said, her eyes finally filling with tears.
“I’m sorry that it upsets you,” he said.
Lucy stared at her father, her eyes cold, remote. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say anything else. I just hope it’s worth it to you both …”
“Lucy,” he said, his voice stronger, more urgent, with just a hint of authority. “Wait.”
She shook her head, then walked out of the room, without so much as a glance my way.
Thirty-nine
“That was brutal,” Coach said when he called me from his cell just a few minutes after we had seen ourselves out of Lucy’s house. In a mild state of shock, I gripped my steering wheel, trailing Coach in my car.
“She hates me,” I said, more to myself than to him. Without thinking, I passed the turnoff for my apartment, still following Coach in the direction of his house.
“She hates both of us,” he said, as if this were some kind of solace.
“You’re her father. She can’t hate you,” I said, realizing that that hadn’t stopped me from hating my own dad for the longest time. In some ways, it was easier to hate someone in your family, the smallest betrayals magnified. But it was also far easier to write off a friend, without a bloodline holding you together.
“She has to forgive us,” he said. “Eventually.”
I wondered what he meant by eventually—a couple of days, weeks, or years—and the thought that it could be the last, that it could be never, made me pull over to the side of the road.
Coach must have glanced in his rearview mirror, because he said, “Where’d you go?”
“I stopped for a second,” I said, my hands shaking. I watched his taillights illuminate ahead of me as he pulled over, too.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“What if she never forgives us?” I said, thinking of all the grudges Lucy had held over the years. All the people she had written off for far smaller offenses.
“She will. Of course she will.”
“How do you know?”
“Because … we’re the two most important people in her life after Caroline and Neil.”
“No,” I said, staring at his car. “Her mother’s far more important than we are. That’s the point.”
“But … she’s not here. This never would have happened if Connie were still with us.”
“Of course not,” I said, appalled at the mere idea that anything, even the most minor of flirtations, would have ever begun if Mrs. Carr had been alive. I thought back to that dreadful time when she was really sick, and how I couldn’t even look him in the eye. “Do you think Lucy knows that?”
“Yes. She knows that. She knows us … Nobody cheated here. Nobody lied.”
“We sort of lied.”
“No. We just didn’t tell her right away … This thing just happened … Nobody planned it … Lucy’s just upset … She needs time to process it.”
“She’ll never accept it,” I said.
“She has to.”
“She won’t,” I said, wondering what in the world I’d been thinking. How did I ever think this could work?
“Yes. She will. Now c’mon. Follow me.”
I hesitated, then decided that where I went at this moment really wouldn’t change anything. So I put my car back in drive and said okay.
A few minutes later, we were together in his kitchen, both of us checking our phones.
“Did she call you?” I asked.
“Nope. Did she call you?”
I shook my head.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have kissed you like that. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I let you,” I said. “I forgot where we were. You make me forget everything …”
He gave me a thoughtful look and said, “Maybe it’s for the best that it came out now. There was never going to be a good time for that announcement.”