As always, thank you all, reviewers and non-reviewers, for your continued interest in the story. I'm still committed to this neverending saga, and I promise to see it through to the end, which was supposed to be the end of December and is now I have no idea when.

Chapter 46

I can't explain it.

With anyone else at this tenuous point in the affair, there would have been a playful How'd-it-go? or Are-u-busted? text before bed, and some flirty reassurances that we'll pick up right where we left of ASAP. But this is Walt we're talking about.

I wasn't worried.

I'm used to the old school pace of our communications. In fact, in some ways the involuntary delayed gratification breathes more life into the magic of this phase we're in. I've begun to appreciate the benefits of patience.

Still, when I hadn't heard from him by mid-morning, I probably should have been concerned, but that would have required me to recklessly throw open the gate on all that insecurity and paranoia I'd spent the past four months taming and corralling. It would have required me to question my faith in him and in us, and that faith hadn't been so easy to come by.

That's why, I guess, even when it did occur to me that by now maybe I should have heard something, I filled in the blanks with a reasonable explanation: He hadn't had privacy to call from home. There had been a new case before he even made it into the station. He'd been at it all morning. He'd wanted to call, but without a cell, how could he?

So when the doorbell rang at what I hoped was the end of the fourth phone call with my mom in three hours, this time about my cousin Vince picking me up at PHL on Thursday afternoon following his shift at U.S. Airways, there was no suspense, no question.

I just knew.

The doorbell rang again in the middle of her account of the issues festering between the mechanics union and the airline, and this time she heard it, and I knew as we said goodbye that he was here now to wrap those long arms around me, to laugh with me about how it went when he got home last night, to make love to me for three hours before heading back to work.

And that's why what would have been a surprise any day actually shatters something in me, sends most of my blood rushing, sirens blaring, to my heart.

It's not Walt.

Walt always knocks.

Instead, it's her, standing there in all her visual perfection, not a hair out of place, make-up flawless, long flowy sweater and pressed jeans, and that smile that says she's packing.

Her eyes are wide and fixed.

She doesn't give a rat's ass what I think of her.

"Cady."

"Can I talk to you?" she says.

A flare of anger lights through me. I remind myself this is the daughter of the man I love.

"Sure," I say, not particularly encouraging, but not hostile either. "You want to come in?"

She pauses next to the suitcase in the foyer. "Going somewhere?" she asks.

Apparently it's her business.

"Philly for Thanksgiving."

Her smile is closed-lipped and loaded.

I offer her a seat on the couch where Walt and I had sex for the first time, and it's possible I do that on purpose. I sit in the chair across from her.

"What's up?" I ask, again not pretending I think this is appropriate, but at the same time, keeping myself in check.

"Vic," she says, eyes unfocused but locked on me. "My dad . . . ."

She sighs.

I wait.

They have this in common, but with him, the wait is worth it, regardless of what comes out of his mouth on the other side. It's his mouth.

"Your dad?" I say, nudging her.

She shakes her head, then nods. "Yeah," she says. "My dad. He's been through a lot."

She doesn't blink while she formulates the rest of the thought.

I want to ask her if she convinced herself that this was rational behavior before or after she flatironed her hair in Walt's unfinished bathroom.

Sitting up agonizingly straight, she seems to be waiting for me to respond, so I say, "I know."

She clasps her hands together, like she's trying to convince me this is hard for her, and like she thinks I should care about that.

"He's vulnerable," she says.

"Aren't we all?"

"He's been through more, though."

"Has he? Or did his just all come at once?"

The twitch in her smile, the slight tick of her head says she hears this as blasphemy.

"How does singling him out as more broken than the general population help him? How does that encourage him to move forward?"

She shifts her gaze to the opposite side of the room, like she's removing the question from her desktop, dropping it in a file over there somewhere.

That's not the point, she's saying.

"This . . . thing."

"Thing?" I ask.

"Relationship." It's an amendment, a one word apology of the sort that isn't an apology at all. "Maybe he'll feel good for now, but . . . ."

"But what?" My face is heating up, and it's virtually impossible to keep the attitude out of my voice.

"But is it really what's best for him?"

"He seems fully capable of deciding for himself what's best for him."

It dawns on me that she can't see it. She's not acting in opposition to an understanding that this oversteps the bounds. She actually believes that it doesn't, that the fences aren't intended to keep her out.

She actually believes in the rightness of all that she is.

"He needs support," she says.

"Is that what he said?"

"You know him," she says. "He didn't say much."

He didn't say much.

A sharp pain rips through my metal plate, and it's becoming harder to breathe.

"Really," I say. "He didn't say much."

"Well, you know."

"No. I don't think I do."

"He said you two were seeing each other."

"Okay."

"He said he was happy."

"Okay."

"I'm just not sure he's thinking straight."

I actually want to hurt her, maybe not physically, but emotionally, socially.

I want to kick her out of my house.

I want to remind her about Branch and how stupid all this was when it happened the other way around, too.

But suddenly, uncomfortably, I get it. This is how they operate as a family unit.

They measure the world against their self-centered standards, their insular beliefs, their lines in their sand. I wonder if Martha was like this, too, or if it was Walt that started it, or if maybe it was something they created together, some big fish, small pond coping mechanism.

"So having . . . ," I start, then pause to smooth the shake out of my voice. "Having a thing with me indicates faulty thinking."

"I didn't mean that."

"Didn't you?"

She's affronted that I'm anything but totally receptive to her involvement.

"If you care about him, I'm just asking you to consider what you really have to offer him."

"Maybe this is something you need to discuss with him."

"We talked," she says. "I shared my concerns."

I refuse to ask her what else he said. I just want her to go.

It's past noon the day before I leave for Philly for three weeks.

I don't know who I think I'm kidding.