Chapter 24: The Glass Door

In February, on a Monday morning, Alessia took her seat on the junior advisory board of the Founders Foundation.

The brace was gone by then, and the stitches had left a thin white line on her lip that she liked to call her signature.

I waited in the lobby with Dario, because she had asked us to.

"You can come to the second meeting," she had said. "The first one, I want to be bad at by myself."

Dario sat on a leather bench in his charcoal coat with his hands on his knees.

He had worn it every day since the pizza place, and he had never once complained about the heat.

"She's going to be better than all of them," he said.

"She's going to ask about page fourteen."

"She's going to ask about page fourteen in front of the chairman."

I laughed, and he turned his head to watch me do it.

He still did that.

At ten past eleven the elevator opened, and Alessia came out with a folder under her arm and a pen behind her ear.

She stopped when she saw the front door.

It was a tall pane of glass, with the street on the other side, and a man stood outside it in a worn grey coat.

He had not come in.

He had not been told he could not, and I did not think it had occurred to him to try.

It was Jared.

He had lost weight, and his hair was long over his collar, and I would not have known him from the back.

His hands hung at his sides, and he was looking through the glass at my daughter.

Alessia stood in the middle of the lobby, with the marble floor between them.

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