10:48 P.M.

WE ARE DEEP INTO DESSERT. Ice cream will only hold its shape for so long.

“I was never one for sweets,” Audrey says. “But this is delicious.”

She lifts a bite of praline ice cream onto her spoon and feeds it to Conrad, who opens his mouth willingly.

“Divine,” he says, licking his lips.

“Incredible soufflé,” Robert says. “I used to try and make them, but I never quite got the rise right.”

“The trick is not to overwhip the egg whites,” Audrey says.

I try to imagine Robert in his kitchen, an apron on, a doting wife chopping up vegetables and two little girls at his feet. If he were a friend, I think, I’d have been happy for him.

“So good,” Jessica says, her mouth full of a giant bite of soufflé.

Tobias sips his espresso. He turns to me. “I never regretted coming back,” he says. “Sometimes I was upset that the work stuff wasn’t turning out the way it had in L.A. But it wasn’t your fault, and I should never have made you feel like it was.”

“We were getting married,” I say.

“We were,” he says. It’s sad; he’s sad.

“I was never sure you really wanted to,” I say.

“I did,” he says. “When I asked you to marry me, I meant it.”

“And after?”

He runs a hand around the side of his neck. “I don’t know,” he says. “I wanted to be with you, but I wanted a lot of things. I wanted a lot for you, too, if you’ll believe that.”

“I do,” I tell him.

“So you never got married?” Robert asks. “I notice you’re not wearing a ring.”

He sits up a little straighter and does a flourish with his hands when he asks, like he’s fixing some sort of invisible tie.

“No,” Tobias says. “We didn’t.”

“You were close, though,” Robert says. His voice is sad. “It must have been so tragic. So much unfinished business.”

Tobias hangs his head. “We had set a date, yeah,” he says. “But the accident…”

“We weren’t together, exactly,” I say. “We got in a big fight, we hadn’t spoken in over a month.”

I hear Conrad’s fork clatter down on his plate. “You were broken up when he died?”

I feel the tears well up within me. I’m afraid if I speak I’ll never be able to stop crying.

“It’s okay,” Robert says. “It’s not even eleven yet.” He looks at me, and the hope on his face, the belief, splits me right down the middle. And all at once I know the thing I want to ask him, the question at the heart of the why.

“Would you want to change things if you could?” I ask Robert.

I see him weigh it in his mind. His wife, the children. The baking and bruised knees and school drop-offs. The years he filled with them.

“Yes,” he says. His voice is scratchy. It catches on the one word. “If I could make things right with you—yes.”

“Even if it would change everything?”

Robert clears his throat. “The one thing you can never rationalize is the loss of a child. Everything else. People become paraplegics and they find God. They lose all their money and they say it brought them a deeper level of peace, that they discovered what’s really important in life. I have heard people say the worst of things happened for the best. But no one ever says that about losing a child.”

Conrad makes a noise at the other end of the table. “Well,” he says, but that’s all.

I look at Robert. He’d want to go back, if he could. Undo all the life that was lived after. But that doesn’t sit well with me. It’s all I’ve wanted since I was a little girl—for him to prioritize me, for him to care, for him to return. But hearing him say it now, I know it wouldn’t be right. I’m not the only thing that mattered in his life. There was a family that needed him, too, that deserved to exist, and being my father, now, at this point, would undo all that.

Robert is looking at me with what I can only describe as love. Nervous love, timid love, love that does not know its place or where or how it will be received—but love all the same. And I think that maybe that’s enough. For now, at this table, that’s enough.