Read Home Before Midnight for Free Online

his eyebrows. The question was payback, he knew, for his earlier crack about bribing him with breakfast. “What are you talking about?”
     
    “Yeah, what are you talking about?” Gabrielle asked from beside him.
     
    She was growing, he realized with a pang, pierced ears, ragged nails and all. Her head was level with his shoulder.
     
    He put an arm around her. “Nothing important. What are you up to today?”
     
    Her shoulders hunched, dislodging his arm. “I don’t know.”
     
    He watched her slide away along the counter. “You want to go to the movies, invite a friend?”
     
    “I don’t have any friends here,” she said. Not sulky, but with the exaggerated patience she’d adopted recently.
     
    Eugenia turned away, busying herself arranging the towel over the bar on the oven door. Letting him deal with it.
     
    Steve’s pulse banged behind his eyeballs. “Well,” he said cautiously. “It’s summer. You’ll make new friends when school starts.”
     
    Gabrielle looked down. “Yeah. Sure.”
     
    She didn’t say what he knew she was thinking, that she missed her old friends.
     
    Neither one of them was any good at talking about their feelings, a shared trait that hadn’t mattered much when Teresa had been alive to bridge their silences with her exclamations, explanations, and laughter. Now they managed as best they could without her. Going through the motions.
     
    Adjusting well, the grief counselor had told him, smiling. Lying.
     
    And he, God help them, had smiled and lied right back, desperate to be left alone to get on with it.
     
    For a while he’d even convinced himself they were doing okay. But then Rosa, the nanny who had been with them since Gabrielle’s birth, announced she was going home. To Brazil, a world away.
     
    She loved Gabrielle, Rosa had insisted, tears in her eyes. Like a daughter. But it had been two years since the senhora ’s death. Rosa missed her country, she missed her family, her own daughter was expecting another child. Teresa’s parents had offered to find her part-time work close to their home.
     
    Perhaps a menina pequena would like to make a visit to her grandparents? Rosa had suggested with a sidelong look.
     
    Steve had recognized and rejected his wealthy in-laws’ well-meant interference. Gabrielle had lost her mother. He’d be damned before he deprived her of her father, too.
     
    “We could still go to the movies,” he said.
     
    “Dad, I’m not, like, five. You don’t have to entertain me.”
     
    Maybe the full-time fathering gig was new, but he’d been married long enough not to agree with everything a woman said when she was in a Mood. He waited.
     
    Gabrielle drew patterns on the countertop with her finger. “I guess a movie would be okay,” she conceded finally.
     
    And long enough not to make too much of his victories.
     
    “You look at the paper, pick something out,” he said. “I’ve got to wrap up some work stuff today, but we could catch an afternoon show. Three, four o’clock?”
     
    She looked at him from under her lashes, her mother’s trick. “The new Orlando Bloom?”
     
    He almost said yes. “What’s it rated?”
     
    “R,” Eugenia said darkly from beside the stove.
     
    “But it’s Orlando Bloom, ” Gabrielle repeated.
     
    “Nice try, kid,” Steve said. “Pick something else.”
     
    She threw him a tragic look.
     
    Hell, they didn’t need the movies. Plenty of drama here at home.
     
    “Check the listings,” he said. “See what’s playing around four o’clock.”
     
    “If you go so late in the afternoon, you’ll ruin your appetites for dinner,” Eugenia objected.
     
    “I’ll take Gabby out for dinner.” Steve smiled at his mother. “You can have a night off, too.”
     
    “Well, if you’re sure . . .” she said doubtfully.
     
    “Just the two of us?” Gabrielle asked.
     
    The eagerness in her voice caught his heart and riveted his attention. He needed to spend more time with her,