He left the room, and I could suddenly breathe deeply again.
Ireland hurried over.
"What happened to Cary?" "I'll tell you about it while we set the table."
* * *
I was surprised I could eat.
I think I was too fascinated by the silent showdown between my dad and Gideon to notice that I was stuffing food into my mouth.
At one end of the table, Cary was charming Ireland into peals of laughter that kept making me smile.
At the other end, my dad sat at the head of the table, with Gideon on his left and me on his right.
They were talking.
The conversation had opened with baseball, as I'd expected, then migrated into golf.
On the surface, both men seemed relaxed, but the air around them was highly charged.
I noticed that Gideon wasn't wearing his expensive watch.
He'd planned carefully to appear as "normal" as possible.
But nothing Gideon did on the outside could change who he was on the inside.
It was impossible to hide what he was - a dominant male, a captain of industry, a man of privilege.
It was in every gesture he made, every word he spoke, every look he gave.
So he and my father were in the position of struggling to find who would be the alpha, and I suspected I hung in the balance.
As if anyone were in control of my life but me.
Still, I understood that my father had only really been allowed to be a dad in the last four years, and he wasn't ready to give it up.
Gideon, however, was jockeying for a position I was no longer prepared to give him.
But he was wearing the ring I'd given him.
I tried not to read anything into it, but I wanted to hope.
I wanted to believe.
We'd all finished the main course and I was pushing to my feet to clear the table for dessert when the intercom buzzed.
I answered.
"Eva? NYPD detectives Graves and Michna are here," the gal at the front desk said.
I glanced at Cary, wondering if the detectives had found out who'd attacked him.
I gave the go-ahead for them to come up and hurried back to the dining table.
Cary looked at me with raised brows, curious.
"It's the detectives," I explained.