“You’re getting there,” she said. “I’d say you’re currently around a size sixteen basketball shoe.”
He grinned at her, looking rather pleased with himself. “I’m that good, am I?”
“Well, considering my daddy wore clown shoes . . .”
He laughed and squeezed her hand again. “I’ve got a way to go then.” He speared his asparagus with his fork and shoved it into his mouth, not bothering to chew and swallow before he continued asking questions. “And your mother? Does she always keep close tabs on you?”
“She’s not used to me being gone.” Toni stared down at her food. She’d known she’d eventually have to find a life for herself—and she was excited to be exploring the world outside her tiny sphere of comfort—but she couldn’t stop the guilt from clawing at her belly. What if something happened while she was gone and she wasn’t there to protect those she loved? Like she hadn’t been there when her father collapsed. He’d been lying on the porch for almost an hour when she’d found him after school. He might have been saved if she’d been there with him when his heart had betrayed him. How would she ever live with herself if something happened to her mother while she was gone? Or to Birdie? Birdie had been born with a congenital heart defect, so it was probably only a matter of time—
Logan interrupted her upsetting thoughts. “So you live with her?”
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
“Yeah.” Why was he so interested in her mundane life? She should be the one doing the interview here.
“This would be a lot easier if you volunteered information,” he said.
She glanced up from her plate and found him grinning at her. “Sorry. I’m just kind of confused as to why you’d want to know about my life.”
“Because I like you.”
“But I’m not interesting at all.”
“I think I’m capable of judging that for myself.”
She took a deep breath. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” he said. “But focus on you instead of your family.”
“On me?” She hadn’t focused on herself much since her father had died. With the exception of trying to find her way through college. “I had a very normal childhood growing up in a suburb of Seattle. The only real difference was that my mom was CEO of a publishing company and my dad stayed at home with the kids. Well, kid. I was an only child until I was fifteen.”
“So you have siblings?”
“A little sister. She wasn’t planned. My mom thought she’d finished going through menopause and then whoops. I guess there was still one viable egg in there after all.”
Logan’s forehead wrinkled in concentration. Doing math, she presumed. Everyone did math when they found out her sister had been born after her father had died. “So your sister was born . . .”
“A few months after my father passed away. He never got to meet her.”
“That must have been hard on you and your mother.”
“Mom isn’t really the maternal sort, and that was okay when I was growing up, because I had Dad, but Birdie—”
Logan’s eyebrows shot up. “Birdie?”
Toni laughed. “We both have formal, rather elegant names. My full first name is Antonia and she’s Bernadette, but Toni and Birdie fit better.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. You had Dad, but Birdie . . .”
She couldn’t believe he seemed so interested in her family. “Mom didn’t know what to do with Birdie. Actually, I don’t think she even wanted Birdie at first. Birdie was born with Down syndrome, and Mom seemed to think she was being punished. First losing her husband and then her baby being imperfect in her eyes.”
“That’s really sad,” he said. “For your sister.”
Toni’s lips trembled as she forced a smile. “Birdie never knew how Mom felt about her in the beginning.” And she never would. But Toni knew and it still broke her heart. “So I switched from public school to home school in tenth grade and stayed home to take care of the baby.”
His eyes widened. “You did? That’s a pretty selfless thing for a teenager to do.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t miss high school at all. I was my little sister’s universe for the first five years of her life, and I didn’t have to put up with mean boys anymore.”
She pressed her lips together. She hadn’t meant to let that last part slip out. Logan was just so easy to talk to. He listened. He seemed to care. She said things to him