“Nothing,” he said, holding both hands up. “You just impressed me with your acting tonight. With the Raptor,” he added, “not when you were trying to pretend your feet didn’t hurt. That was just awful.”

I laughed. “Shut up,” I said, then immediately wondered if I shouldn’t have. Had I just crossed some line?

But Matty just smiled. “You shut up,” he said. “It was bad.”

“What are you studying?” I asked, realizing belatedly—and ashamedly—that I didn’t know, because I had never asked. “At Columbia?”

“I’m not sure,” he said with a shrug. “I mean,” he added, when he must have seen my expression, “I know what classes I’m taking. But I’m not sure to what end yet.” He rocked back on his heels. “I want to cast as wide a net as possible—to see what I like. So I’m doing marketing and art history and medieval literature and psychology.”

“Wow. That makes—no logical sense at all.”

Matty grinned. “Exactly.”

“Okay,” the guard said, hanging up the phone and facing us again. “Go on up. Seventeenth floor.”

“Cheers,” Matty said. The guard buzzed open the automatic turnstile security entrance thing and we walked up to the elevator, which was waiting in the lobby. Matty pressed the button for floor seventeen, and then just as the doors started to close, I pressed the button for thirty-eight.

“I’m going go and say hi to my dad,” I said. “He’s working late, so he’ll still be in the office.” In the back of my mind, I was secretly hoping that once I was there, he’d realize that he could, in fact, take the hour or so off and come have dinner with me. It wouldn’t need to be something fancy like Josephine’s. Or I could even pick something up and bring it back to the office, and we could eat together. After what a stressful night it had been, the thought of getting to still have a win—getting to have dinner with my father after all—was too appealing to ignore. I was hoping that he wouldn’t be too mad about me coming in without permission. I could catch him up on my night—or an edited version of it. Somehow, I knew that he’d like that I’d spent time with Matty and Margaux.

The doors slid open on floor seventeen. “Meet you down in the lobby in ten?” Matty asked as he stepped out.

I nodded as the doors started to slide closed. “See you soon.” I figured that if my dad was free to take some time to hang out, I could just run down and get the key from Matty.