“One day, just, you know, on a roll, watching documentaries on Netflix, I watched the Amy Winehouse doc. Did you see that?”

“No.”

“Well, we can just say it didn’t depict her dad in the greatest light.”

There it was.

“Okay,” he said.

“Then, I don’t know, it was a bummer, obviously, since she’s lost to us now, and she was so amazingly talented. And Lady Gaga is so badass. So, in order to cleanse my palette, I watched Gaga’s documentary. And her dad is in it. And he’s awesome. Very supportive.”

No.

There it was.

“Yeah,” he said quietly.

“Did you see that one?” she asked.

“No, but I get you,” he told her.

“I never really…” She paused. “It’s just my life. I never really stopped to think about it.”

“And now you are.”

“Yes. And what you said about loyalty. I don’t know if that’s true.”

“Baby, you go there every—”

She cut him off.

“I go there to win his approval. I’m realizing now that I’m still trying to win his approval, Axl.”

Well.

Shit.

He hadn’t thought of that.

“I can’t say I don’t love him,” she carried on. “He’s my dad. And like I told you, he can be charming. Funny. Not just to others, also to me. It isn’t just ugliness and yuck.”

Yuck.

So damned adorable.

He fought smiling.

“So, it’s not all bad times,” she continued. “But it isn’t even that. It’s just…” Another pause. “I want what I can’t have because he’s not going to give it to me because if he did, he’d lose his ability to control me.”

Shit.

She was onto something deeper and more sinister than what he was seeing as an outsider who hadn’t even met the villain yet.

“Yeah, it’s why he tells you you’re less when you’re more,” he concurred.

She didn’t reply.

He reached out and touched her thigh then kept his hand there, the back of it on her jeans.

She slid her fingers around his.

He brought their hands to his leg.

“The sky is not green, it’s blue,” he said. “You just need to find the place where you see the color of the sky through your own eyes. You with me?”

“I’m with you.”

“And it fucks me to say this, but if you got that, if you’re firm in that, in understanding who you are, you can take care of him and it won’t be a threat every time you go over there because he can say what he wants and it won’t affect you because you’ll know it’s bullshit.”

“If I go over there,” she mumbled.

He felt a weird thump in his chest.

“Sorry?” he asked.