“But you didn’t want any of them.”

“And I don’t want you. You are not why I came back, Jack. My family is. So call me crippled or damaged or spineless, if calling me names gives you a rush, but I’d wager I’m a lot happier than you are right now.”

My phone dings. His phone dings. We both reach, raise, read.

Where r u? Joy texts.

Almost there, I text back and slide off the table at the same time as Jack. “My daughter calls,” I say. “Gotta run.”

“Me, too. My cat calls.”

I might mock the fact of daughter versus cat, or say, See, it’s always about you, if it weren’t for the concern in his voice, which I do hear precisely because I loved him once. But no more.

Without another word, we walk off in opposite directions, which is a metaphor if ever there was one.

Chapter 10

The interior of Sunny Side Up is as yellow as its name implies—yellow walls, yellow tables, yellow art. Still annoyed at Jack, I would have preferred a calmer blue or green, even my New York black. I’m not feeling terribly sunny.

Then I see Joy, and my mood lifts. She is a rainbow of color, with a short bar apron tied around her waist, and moves from table to table with carafes of coffee in each hand, one regular, one decaf, all the while chatting and smiling and topping off cups with aplomb. She is underage. She is inexperienced. But she is adorably happy.

My father sits alone in the front right corner of the shop. A newspaper lies open before him, and he does look to be reading, to judge from his glasses and the movement of the eyes behind them. I know that once I sit with him, all hope of anonymity is gone. But if I’d wanted to be anonymous, I wouldn’t be here now, would I?

Besides, connecting with my father is preferable to dwelling on Jack.

Setting my sunglasses and camera on an empty patch of the table, I slide into what must have been Joy’s chair, given the remains of a green smoothie and the uneaten half of a piece of avocado toast. “Hey, Dad.”

He looks up in surprise and just stares at first, hitting me with the awful possibility that he won’t recognize me here. I’m about to take off the ball cap to help him out, when he removes his reading glasses, breaks into a smile, and says, “Hello, middle one.”

I’m stunned. “Middle one,” which he had always thought a clever takeoff on “little one,” was his nickname for me in those fond moments that were so few and far between.

I had forgotten.

But this was a nice memory.