“I asked her right then,” he says with a laugh. “We were hungover and stuck in traffic, coming back into the city from the Hamptons. She pulled over to the side of the road and made me at least get out of the car and onto one knee.”
“And she said yes?”
“She said yes,” he tells her. “But the kid thing—that felt different to me. Bigger. Scarier. We weren’t even really trying, so it caught me completely off guard. The day we found out, I made a list of things I wanted to be as a dad. Honest. Supportive. Kind. And then Avery came along and it was all crying and dirty diapers and middle-of-the-night feedings, and there’s not really any time to think about a bunch of adjectives when you’re covered in spit-up.” He glances over at her. “The truth is, being a parent is mostly just reacting. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t. You give what you can. And at the end of the day, most of it is just being there.”
Greta opens her mouth to speak, but before she can, Ben hurries on: “Look, I realize we just met, and I don’t know much about your dad. It’s entirely possible he’s the world’s biggest jerk. But he could also be a guy who’s mostly just been reacting his whole life, trying his best and maybe not always getting it right. The important thing is that it seems like he wants to be there right now. And he clearly wants you to be here too.”
“Except,” Greta says, “it was my brother who suggested I come.”
Ben smiles like a lawyer about to rest his case. “But if your dad really didn’t want you on this ship, I doubt you’d actually be here.”
This hadn’t ever occurred to Greta. When she’d finally called Conrad to suggest joining him—a few days after she’d promised Asher she would—he’d been quick to dismiss the offer. “I don’t need a babysitter,” he’d said, much to her relief, and her halfhearted insistence had done little to change his mind.
But the next day, she woke up feeling guilty. It was something about the way he’d answered the phone, his voice less gruff than usual, more plaintive. She pulled up the website for the cruise line to see if they still had any available cabins, and when she saw that they did, she sighed. The second time her dad picked up, she didn’t ask him. “I’m all booked,” she said, and a few beats passed before he replied: “Okay.”
She and Ben continue to walk in silence, Greta deep in thought as they trudge up a slope leading back to the visitors’ center. After a while, the rain starts up again, falling in fat drops now, and Ben glances over at her apologetically.
“We should’ve turned back sooner,” he says, squinting at the sky. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “I don’t mind walking.”
“Me neither. That’s my favorite thing about being back in the city, actually. I can wander for hours.”
“Me too. Especially when I’m writing. It helps me think.”
“Same. Where do you live?”
“East Village.”
He nods, as if he expected as much. “I bet you’re one of those people who never goes above Fourteenth Street.”
“Depends on what’s above Fourteenth Street,” she says, and he smiles. “Remember that huge storm in February? The one where they shut down the subway? I walked all the way up to Central Park in that. Took me ages. There was a foot and a half of snow by the time I got there, and I had to take a cab back home because I couldn’t feel my toes. But I worked out a whole song that day.”
Ben is looking at her with a strange expression. “So did I.”
She frowns at him. “You wrote a song?”
“No,” he says. “I trekked down to Central Park in that storm.”
“You did?”
He nods. “I love walking in the snow.”
“Me too,” she says. “The streets get so quiet.”
“And it feels like the city is all yours.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t believe you were there too.”
“It was pretty surreal,” he says with a faraway look, and she knows exactly what he’s talking about: the way the swirling snow had started to quiet just as it got dark, how—after hours of wind and noise—the world felt suddenly like the volume had been turned down. The lampposts were capped in white and gave off an otherworldly glow, and everyone she passed moved slowly through the heavy drifts, as if in a dream. It’s so strange to think now that one of them could’ve been Ben.