“Come in,” I said, stepping back. “Fair warning — it’s small.”
They filed into my six-hundred-square-foot apartment, and I watched them take it all in — the IKEA furniture, the modest television, the tiny kitchenette that barely fit a stove and a refrigerator side by side.
“It’s cozy,” Patricia said, and for the first time all day, she actually sounded like she meant it.
Michael and Jessica arrived a few minutes later, arms full with a bottle of wine and a small bouquet of flowers.
“Mom, Dad — what are you doing here?” Jessica asked, genuinely startled to see her parents standing in the middle of my living room.
“Your future father-in-law invited us to dinner,” Richard said. “And we’re grateful he did.”
We crowded around my small kitchen table, plates balanced on knees where there wasn’t quite enough room for six people to sit properly. We talked about architecture, about hospital volunteering, about the small herb garden Sarah had once kept on my fire escape that I still, somehow, couldn’t bring myself to let die. Christopher asked genuinely thoughtful questions about investment strategy, questions that showed he’d actually paid attention over the years, whatever his father’s example had taught him about status. Patricia shared stories about Jessica as a little girl — a memory of her crying at her first piano recital, another of her rescuing a wounded bird off their back porch and nursing it for two weeks. Richard, somewhere around his second glass of wine, admitted quietly that his own father had worked as a janitor for thirty years and put himself through night school one class at a time.
