I don’t want you to think I’m not.”
But what if she wanted him to be a little not-okay with it? Did that make her a bad person? Not that she wanted him to be hurt—she could never, ever want that—but it might be nice if he at least wished she could stay.
Not that she’d ever admit anything of the sort—to him or anyone else.
“Whew.” She passed her hand across her forehead in a jokey show of relief and let out a chirpy laugh.
His expression remained serious as he met her gaze again. “When that paper’s published, it’s going to be huge for you. You’ll be swimming in job offers.”
Mia made a scoffing sound. “I don’t know about that.”
She’d received an email from the editor informing her that the paper had been assigned for peer review, which meant she’d cleared the first hurdle in the lengthy submission process. But there were still a lot of hurdles to go. It was too soon to get her hopes up.
“I do.” Josh’s eyes shone with certainty. “I Googled that knot you were working on, you know. I don’t need to know anything about higher math to understand what a big deal it is that you solved something everyone else thought was unsolvable. You’re way too smart to hang around here. You deserve so much more than this.”
A lump formed in her throat. It was such an unexpected gift to have someone so completely in her corner. How did he always know exactly what kind of support she needed? He had more confidence in her than she had in herself, and he wasn’t shy about expressing it. It was exactly the validation her self-esteem craved.
If only she could take him with her when she left.
“You know—” She cut herself off before she blurted out the words you could always come with me.
Because he couldn’t, and she knew that. It wouldn’t be any more fair to ask him to leave his home than it would be for him to ask her to stay someplace she didn’t belong. He’d already said he wouldn’t try to hold her back. The least she could do was return the favor.
“What?” Josh asked.
“Nothing. I was just…” As her mind flailed to provide an excuse for her aborted utterance, her phone buzzed on the table, providing a convenient distraction. She swung around, setting her coffee and laptop aside as she reached for her phone. “Oh.” Her stomach dropped when she saw it was her dad calling.
He almost never called her. Not unless he wanted something. And since he’d had little use for Mia since she’d proven herself a largely unemployable disappointment in her ill-advised chosen field, she hadn’t heard from him in months. Since she’d told him she was moving here, in fact.
“Who is it?” Josh asked. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just my dad.” She set the phone down on the table again, where it continued to vibrate against the wood.
“Shouldn’t you answer it?”
“No.” Flicking her finger, she dismissed the call and the buzzing stopped. “It’s fine.”
“You don’t want to talk to your dad?”
“Not especially.”
Josh probably found that unrelatable. His parents called regularly, and he always seemed happy to talk to them. As far as Mia could tell, he had an ideal relationship with both of them.
He leaned forward to set his coffee on the table and scooted closer, letting his knee bump against hers. “You don’t talk about your parents much.”
“There’s not much to say.”
“Pretty sure that’s not true.” His hand stroked up her back.
She let her eyes fall closed, enjoying the sensation. “There’s no great hardship or tragedy in my past. We’re just not a very close family.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Neither of my parents were really into the whole parenting thing. My mom did the best she could while juggling her career, but my dad mostly lost interest in us after the divorce.”
Not right away, but certainly after he remarried. There’d been a brief, happy window between her parents’ divorce and her father’s second marriage. The fights and frigid silences had ended, replaced by alternate weekends at their father’s new apartment in Manhattan. He’d tried to make their limited time together fun, like he was trying to make up for his absence the rest of the time. Those weekends were some of Mia’s best memories from her childhood.
But then he’d started dating, and it had no longer been convenient to have two kids on his hands every other weekend. He’d started canceling. Putting them off more