I looked back to her. “Okay, blossom. But you get done, come and join us if you feel like it.”

“Okay, Amy. If I feel like it.”

She wasn’t coming.

“Right. Hope to see you outside.”

She didn’t reply.

“Enjoy the book,” I bid her.

She nodded, touched her iPhone likely to restart her music playing and looked back down at her book.

Since I wasn’t blind, my eyes again took in her room before I closed the door. But when the door latched, a thought came to me.

My daughter, too, had a pretty little girl room (hers had been peaches and pinks). Starting at eleven, she’d begun begging for an update, and because I was me, but also because we were in the first throes of divorce, by the time she hit twelve, I’d given it to her.

This thought made me move down the hall. I saw Cillian’s door partially open, knocked, didn’t get an answer, so I stuck my head in.

Seeing it for the first time, I learned he’d had a bent toward careening down the highway to the danger zone even prior to seeing Top Gun. I knew this from the motif of airplanes that was in his room.

But it was little kid airplanes for a little boy. They weren’t cool. They were primary colors and cartoony.

His room was also untidy but nowhere near the mess of his sister’s.

I pulled my head out and moved swiftly down the hall to the back room where Mickey was standing alone behind the sectional, an MFD sweatshirt on to go out and play Frisbee, but eyes aimed to the college football game on TV.

“Hey, where’s Cill?” I asked.

He looked to me. “Bathroom. Ash coming?”

I shook my head.

His handsome face turned worried and his eyes drifted to the hall.

I got close. “Before Cill comes back, can I ask something?”

He looked back to me and invited, “Shoot.”

I got closer. “It’ll be asking a lot, honey. And you can say no.”

“Is it about Ash?”

I nodded.

“Then shoot.”

Yes, worried.

But such a good dad.

I nodded again and spoke. “When I went in to talk to her, I noticed she still had her Aisling-as-a-little-girl decoration in her room under all that mess. And I remembered when Olympia hit eleven she started wanting something more grown up. So I just wondered if you might have a teeny-tiny budget,” I lifted my hand to do a thumb and forefinger inch, “that we could use to update her room. Go to Target. Get a new comforter. Maybe a lamp or two. Buy some paint and she and I can paint her walls. Nothing extravagant, just a new look.”

“You think she hates her room?” he asked.