“What a waste! What you should do is—”

“Don’t should on me, buddy. I don’t normally throw it away. I make bread with it, that’s the point. And you’re this close to never getting any of that bread again.”

He smiled that charming smile. “I’m just kidding. This will be fun. Nice to have someone to keep me company while you’ll be gone. Does Brian prefer quiet nights at home or long walks on the beach?”

“Ha-ha. Smart-ass.”

After leaving Brian, a bag of flour, a bottle of spring water, and her kitchen scale with Nadim, she changed and packed for the weekend. Her phone rang just as she zippered the bag. She glanced at the call display.

Her father. Her father never called her.

“Hi, Dad. What’s going on?” She sat on her bed, body tensed in preparation for bad news.

“Your mother tells me you are going north for the weekend.”

“Yes, I took the day off work so I could head to Amira’s early.”

“Can we speak before you leave? I’m at the project site all day.”

“Today?” she asked. Also, alone?

“Yes. We can go for coffee. Nadim is at an off-site meeting with a restaurant developer this morning.”

Hmm. Why did Dad bring up Nadim?

Reena took a deep breath. She should be good at keeping secrets by now but was actually terrible at it. It seemed a wonder her parents didn’t thrust her into speech therapy as a kid with how often she hesitated and said um …

She really had no choice here. “Um … okay. I can be there in about an hour.”

After Reena finished packing her hair products and makeup, she downed a quick cup of coffee before taking her bags to her car. It was a twenty-minute drive to Dad’s worksite. When she got there, she parked in the gravel lot and went looking for him.

Reena hadn’t been to the Diamond project in a while, and she couldn’t help but be impressed at the progress since then. A medium-size low-rise building, it was loosely modeled after European mixed-use structures, with space at the bottom for stores and restaurants and four levels of condos and rental units facing into a large center courtyard. The building stood on the edge of a big residential subdivision in the city of Markham, filled with cookie-cutter single-family homes. It had been a major challenge to get zoning approval, but Reena had never been prouder of her father than when he won it, and seeing the project now, in the last stages of construction, the pride swelled in her heart even more.

And to think, he’d almost lost all this thanks to that architect guy. Reena tensed a bit as she peeked into the building. She didn’t want to think about how, in a way, the success of this project was resting on her and Nadim’s shoulders.

She found her father outside the building, talking to a man who looked like a construction foreman. “Reena,” he said. “This is Igor. I’m sorry I don’t have time to show you around—I have a meeting in an hour—but after we have coffee, Igor can show you our progress. We’ll have to drive. There is nothing around here.”