“Okay,” I said, excited for something that was going to be just the two of us.

“Great,” he said, and I remember being a little surprised at how happy he looked. For a moment, we just stared at each other with goofy grins. “What are you waiting for? Go pack.”

“It’s this weekend?” I asked, shocked.

“Yeah, we fly out in the afternoon. I’ll call my assistant, get you a ticket,” he said like it was no big deal, fingers tapping the door frame.

“But—” I didn’t finish. But what about Mom? She’d say no, she always did.

“Don’t worry, it’ll be our secret,” he said with a wink after seeing my expression. “You know my motto.” Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

“Yeah,” I said, laughing. “Okay.”

It was an accounting conference, and on the first day, when Dad was downstairs making a speech or running some workshop, I ordered movies and room service upstairs in our room, went up to the roof for a swim, and got a massage at the spa.

“Whatever you want,” he’d told me. “Just charge it to the room.”

He called me after and I met him in the lobby for dinner. “Remy,” he said, smiling when he saw me. “This is Brenda.”

I looked at the woman beside him and smiled politely.

“She works with me,” he continued. “She’s brilliant.”

She waved him off. “You’re brilliant.”

I looked between the two of them in confusion.

“Brenda and I are the only ones from the team here, so I invited her out to dinner,” he said casually, but his smile was tentative.

“Hope that’s okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure.” I shrugged. In the car on the way to dinner, Dad sat up front while I sat with Brenda in the back. White, middle-aged, and petite with pale skin and soft brown eyes, she was unassuming and unthreatening, always full of smiles and compliments for me. “I love your hair,” she told me that night. “You have such great skin,” she said later.

She went to dinner with us again the next day, and came to Wicked. And on the last morning, she skipped her meetings and took me out for mani-pedis, which was surprisingly fun.

“Do you like Brenda?” Dad asked on the flight back.

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s cool.”

He had the biggest smile on his face and let me have a sip of his champagne when the flight attendants weren’t looking.

“Remy, I have to tell you something,” he said near the end of our flight, suddenly serious. “Can you keep a secret? I mean it, Remy. You can’t tell anyone, okay? Not even Christian. Not yet.”

I nodded, thrilled he’d trust me with something that sounded so important.

He took a deep breath as the captain announced the beginning of our descent. “Things between your mother and I have always been, well, you know,” he said. “And well, things will probably never get better.” Behind him, outside of the window, I could see highways coming into view, the cars like lines of ants. “So,” he continued, his voice straining a bit, “how would you feel if we got a divorce?”