I swallow hard. Maybe the only thing keeping me separated from her is my acute awareness of Mia and Annie one floor below. “But . . . ?”

“But I feel like I’m acting out some weird Jungian script. You know?”

“Yes.”

Tee laughs again. “Why aren’t we welders and not writers?”

“I’m not sure that would make much difference.”

“You know what?” she says, her tone that of a professor analyzing an obscure Greek play. “We’re not like your father or my mother. And I’m not like Viola, either.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re free agents. They weren’t. If you and I want to hook up, there’s nothing stopping us. If we want to go down to the courthouse tomorrow and get fucking married, there’s nothing stopping us.”

“You might be rushing things a little.”

Serenity flips me off. “What I’m saying is, when you’re like our parents were—when you’re tasting the forbidden—at some level you know there’s no real future. You’re like married people having an affair. Unless you’re caught, you pretty much know the relationship is stillborn.”

She’s right. “Even if you kid yourself about it,” I think aloud, “and fantasize about a future together, you know there really isn’t one.”

“Exactly. But for you and me, the future is out there. It’s real. If we make love right now, then tomorrow we’ll be forced to confront the reality of it. Your daughter, my job in Atlanta. This act would have consequences. Whereas if this were 1964—”

“We’d do it in a bubble of secrecy, and it would stay in the bubble.”

Serenity smiles. “Exactly. We’d have no choice.”

She walks to my dresser and lays her hands on it, breathing with conscious rhythm. There is a woman in the throes of sexual heat and emotional confusion. Despite her thin frame, Tee’s taut haunches fill out her jeans in a profoundly erotic way. The powerful curve of her thighs below the buttocks sends my blood pumping southward.

“So, now that we’ve analyzed ourselves,” I say. “What do we do?”

Tee straightens up and looks back at me, clearly undecided. “You tell me.”

“Dad, are you finished yet?”

My daughter’s voice, right on cue . . . “I guess I am,” I say softly. “Right?”

Serenity puckers her lips in thought, but after a few seconds, she nods. “We have some thinking to do. And thinking usually stops this kind of foolishness.”

I take a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I’m sure you have somebody in Atlanta. Right?”

She sighs. “I’m not a nun, Mr. Mayor.”

“Okay. I haven’t been with anyone since my fiancée was killed.”

Tee looks back at me in silence for several seconds. “Not even the cheerleader?”

“No joke. It’s only been three months.”

“I’m sorry.”