Then the elevator doors closed, and he was gone.
In the elevator, descending, Emily stood beside her father and watched the numbers count down on the panel above the doors. They did not speak. It was not the hollow silence of the guest bedroom, or the stale silence of the conference room. It was a real silence—inhabited, warm, the silence of two people who have known each other long enough to rest in the same quiet without it meaning anything other than rest.
They were in the lobby before she said anything.
“Were you there the whole time?”
“I arrived before you did,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you’d go through with asking me to stay back.”
“I almost didn’t.”
“I know.”
She looked at him. He was a man in his mid-sixties now, the same age she associated with the particular combination of silver at his temples and the vertical lines around his eyes that had appeared when she was a teenager and had deepened in the years since, and he looked exactly as he always had, which was like someone who had decided a long time ago what he was and had not wavered from it since.
“Thank you,” she said. “For not saying anything until I was done.”