"Mock Me Again, I Dare You!" The Single Dad Waiter Said — The Billionaire Went Silent
Chapter 8
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Damon said the rope was attached to something, and he needed to know what was on the other end before he grabbed it.The reporter showed up at Mila's school on a Wednesday morning. Damon got the call from the front office while handling something at the apartment: a woman with a press credential had been waiting near the side entrance and had approached Mila directly, asking about her father, and what she knew about Crestline Systems, and whether Damon had ever discussed Grant Mercer at home.Mila had not answered: she had turned and walked the other way toward the street, and a car making a right turn had to brake hard to avoid her as she stepped off the curb.She was unharmed; the school had her inside; she was sitting in the counselor's office eating a granola bar and not talking very much.Damon picked her up within the hour. She sat in the back seat with her backpack on her lap and looked out the window, and he did not fill the silence. When they got home, she went to her room.He sat at the kitchen table, put his hands flat on the surface, and understood with a clarity that left no room for argument that this had moved somewhere he had not anticipated and could not accept.That evening, he pulled the restaurant plans from the top shelf of the closet: the floor layout, the draft menu, the sketches he and Mila had drawn together on a Saturday last spring. He put them in a box on the table, intending to move them somewhere out of sight—somewhere that wasn't a daily reminder of something that no longer felt like a plan.Mila came out of her room and stood in the doorway. She looked at the box, then at him, and said she thought he always told her that what other people said about you didn't get to decide who you were; she said she was pretty sure he had said that more than once; she asked why he was letting strangers who were lying decide what he was allowed to want.Damon had no answer. He sat there with his hands on top of the box, and the kitchen light on, and his daughter watching him from the doorway, and he had nothing at all to say.He left the box on the kitchen table that night and sat across from it in the dark. And he thought about what Mila had said: not the words themselves—he had heard versions of that logic before, had said versions of it to her—but the quality of being confronted with your own belief by the person you most wanted to protect from disappointment.There is a specific weight to that; it does not let you reason your way around it. He sat with it until the apartment was fully quiet and the city outside had settled into its late-night register. And by the time he went to bed, he had already made the decision, though he would not have been able to name the exact moment it happened.