“I do,” Steven said. “As a matter of fact, Victoria and I had spoken a little about your plans to expand this place.”
Victoria’s brow furrowed. “Dad?”
“I hadn’t told either of you yet,” Steven said. “I’d been considering helping. After the wedding. An investment, to get the second location off the ground.”
The whole room seemed to hold its breath.
Christopher stared at him. “You were going to invest?”
“I was thinking about it,” Steven said. “That’s the real reason I stopped in today. I wanted to see the place with my own eyes before I made up my mind. Wanted to see how it was run.”
And I watched Christopher’s eyes dart, quick, over to the sandwich on the table. To the bowl of water on the floor by my feet. To all the sudden kindness he’d scrambled to produce the moment he learned who Steven was.
He hadn’t known about the money. That much was plain on his face. He hadn’t known there was an investment on the line. Steven’s name alone, Steven being Victoria’s father, that had been enough to flip him inside out. The money he was only learning about now.
I looked at him.
“You didn’t know about the investment, did you,” I said. “Just now. That’s the first you’ve heard of it.”
“No,” he admitted.
“But you knew who Steven was. The second he said the name.”
Christopher’s jaw worked. “I’d seen photos. We’d talked on the phone a couple of times.”
I nodded slowly, and I looked down at the sandwich he’d set in front of me.
“And that,” I said, “is exactly when I turned into someone worth apologizing to. Not when you made an old woman dizzy and ashamed. When a man you wanted something from walked in the door.”
The whole café was silent.
Ten minutes earlier, I’d been nothing but an old woman with a four-dollar coffee and a homely dog. And then Steven had walked in, and all at once Christopher cared very much who was watching him.
Victoria was quiet for a long moment. A very long moment.
And then she reached up and slid the engagement ring off her finger.
Christopher’s eyes went wide. “You’re, what, you’re ending this? Over a stranger? Over some old woman’s dog?”
“No,” Victoria said. Her voice was steady, though her eyes were wet. “I’m ending it because I warned you. Because I told you, months ago, that I could not build a whole life with a man who decides what people are worth by their clothes, or their money, or by what they can do for him. I told you that, and you promised me you understood, and today I watched you do it to a woman who could barely stand up.”
She set the ring down on the counter. It made a small, final sound against the wood.
Christopher turned to Steven, almost frantic now. “And you? So now you’re telling me you won’t invest? Just like that?”
Steven’s voice never rose. It stayed calm and even the whole way through.
“No,” he said. “I won’t.”
Christopher wheeled back around to me, and his face twisted up, and he pointed his finger at me across the room.
“You,” he said. “You’ve cost me everything. Do you understand that? Everything!”
I stood up, slow and careful, and I gathered Benny up against my side where he belonged.
“No,” I said. “I only ordered a coffee.”
He said nothing.
“You,” I told him, “chose every single thing that came after.”
And that was the first moment all afternoon that I saw Christopher look smaller than the café he owned.
A few minutes later, while Victoria and her father spoke quietly by the window, Christopher came over to my table one more time.
He wasn’t looking at Steven this time. He wasn’t looking at Victoria, checking to see who was watching. He was looking at me.
“I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did,” he said. “Whatever else. That part was wrong, and I knew it was wrong while I was doing it.”
I looked up at him for a long moment.
“Thank you,” I said. And I meant it, because I believe that one was real. Maybe the only real thing he’d said to me all day. It had come too late to save anything for him, but it had come, and that counts for something. Not everything. But something.
Steven pulled out the chair across from me and sat down.
“Will you let me buy you lunch, Carol?” he asked. “A proper one. I’d be glad of the company.”
And my old answer rose up in my throat, quick as ever. I’m fine. Don’t trouble yourself. I don’t want to be a bother.
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