“You’re not,” she says, lifting her head.
He studies his hands. “Well, I feel ancient.”
Greta stops what she’s doing. “This doesn’t only have to be an ending, you know. It could be a new beginning too.”
He shakes his head, his expression sober. “I don’t want a new beginning.”
“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice,” she says softly as she sweeps the cards from the floor. When she looks over again, his expression is vacant. He sets down the queen of hearts and stares at it for a while.
“We were in the middle of a puzzle,” he says, and Greta sits back on her heels to listen. “It’s been on the dining room table ever since. We hadn’t done very much. It’s a hard one. A thousand pieces. But now—now it’s like I can’t stand working on it without her, but I also can’t bear to put it away.”
Greta slides back into her chair. “Dad,” she says, and her voice breaks on the word; all at once, it feels like more than that is breaking too. She thinks of the ice cleaving off the glacier, pictures something inside her falling away. “I should’ve come home.”
“What?”
“When you called.”
Something snaps into place behind his eyes. “You didn’t know. No one did.”
“I wish I would’ve been there.” She rests her elbows on her knees, her forehead in her hands. “I’d give anything to go back and redo it. I’d give anything to rewind so I could get on the first plane out of there and make it home in time.”
She’s crying now, and Conrad—so unaccustomed to this, so out of practice—half-stands as if to comfort her. But then he sits down again, lowering his eyes. A waiter comes around with a bowl of peanuts, which he sets in the center of the card-strewn table, then leaves again in a hurry.
“I stayed,” Greta says quietly, “so I could play the fucking guitar. Like that even matters.”
Conrad shrugs. “It’s what you do.”
“What?” she says, bracing herself, waiting for him to say that what she does is choose her career over her family. What she does is choose her music over everything else.
But he doesn’t. Instead he says, “You play the fucking guitar,” and it’s so unexpected, so uncharacteristic, that they both laugh in spite of themselves. “How many people get to do that for real?”
“Thanks,” she says, which feels at once too small and too big. She wipes her eyes and lets out a long breath, then straightens the messy pile of cards and pushes the deck toward her dad.
“Here,” she says. “Try again.”
Later, they find Eleanor and Todd waiting outside the auditorium. He’s wearing a tux and she’s wearing a sparkly ball gown with a tiara-like hairpiece. It’s the kind of ensemble that makes you want to roll your eyes, but you can’t, because on Eleanor, it actually looks beautiful.
“Listen,” Eleanor says from inside a cloud of perfume. “I had a word with Bobby.”
Greta frowns. “Who’s Bobby?”
Eleanor laughs, then realizes Greta is serious. “The cruise director,” she says, clearly unable to fathom not being on a first-name basis with such an important figure by the final night. “He promised to save a slot for you. Just in case.”
It’s clear she’s bracing herself for another no. So she looks surprised when, instead, Greta folds her into a hug.
“Is that a yes?” Eleanor asks, confused.
“It’s still a no,” Greta says. “But thank you for asking.”
In the theater, they settle into seats near the front and listen to Bobby explain how things will go. Around her, everyone but Conrad is nervous; Davis plays an invisible piano with his fingers, Mary hums under her breath, and Eleanor and Todd keep tapping their feet.
“This was a terrible idea,” Mary whispers to Greta as the first act—an eight-year-old kid nervously clutching a set of juggling balls—steps onto the stage.
The poor kid drops the balls a total of twelve times in three minutes, two of which could be chalked up to the swaying of the ship, the rest of which he just fumbled. But when he’s done, the audience claps enthusiastically anyway, and beside her, Greta can feel Mary relax.
After that, there’s a family of Irish step dancers, a sixty-something guy who lip-syncs to “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and a magician, whom Conrad watches with a slightly judgmental frown.
“Amateur stuff,” he mutters, but he looks riveted anyway.