Ficlet: "Making the Connection"
Can be set in the M:FI world, doesn't have to be, but is set in an established relationship. I'm not actually 100% sure if this is canon-compliant, but I am sure one of you will let me know if I'm wrong. Daniel uses worse language than usual, but for a reason. Potentially, though not probably, triggery events narrated within. For the schmoop_bingo prompt "Memories: Scrapbook/Photo Album."
"Making The Connection"
“Wow, when you said you were into scrapbooking in high school, you weren’t kidding.” Daniel carefully picked up an overstuffed, blue-and-yellow, sequined volume labeled: JUNIOR YEAR: NOVEMBER!
“It was a creative outlet.” Betty smoothed the edge of the gingham ribbon she’d used for a border. “It let me get used to the idea of laying out text and graphics, too. And, as we’ve discussed, I wasn’t exactly busy with a social life.”
“Kind of cool that you’ve got a record of everything, though.” He smiled as he flipped through the first spread, “New Cafeteria Setup,” complete with a border of magic-markered forks and a slightly yellowed menu that now offered vegan options. “My junior year is kind of a blur. Probably because that was the year I got my first fake ID.”
“Go figure.”
They were sitting in the warm attic of the Suarez home, a space not tall enough to stand in. The air smelled comfortingly musty, and the only light came from a bare bulb that showed every dancing mote of dust. Now that she and Daniel were settled in their new London flat, she wanted to take a few of her old things out of storage and bring them to her new home. Summer sunshine meant sweltering heat in the poorly vented attic, but Daniel had nonetheless come up here with her and patiently gone through every box and carton. She found she was the one more willing to throw things away; he wanted to preserve every moment, to share them in reverse. Which was sweet, but the London flat only had so much storage.
Daniel turned the page for “Third Home Football Game!” to see a blank spread - two bare pages with one photo, black and white, clipped from a spare yearbook nobody had bought. Betty blushed as she recognized the photo and the memory came back to her. “Anthony De Rossi, huh?” Daniel held up the scrapbook and gave her a look. “Cute guy. Looks like he was important to you.”
“He was my first kiss,” she said. There was so much more to say, but the words didn’t come.
Grinning, Daniel said, “I would’ve expected heart-shaped stickers or at least some pink paint pen here.”
This was Daniel, her Daniel, and she wanted to tell him the truth about all of this, but it was so hard. Only Hilda knew any of it - besides the people there, of course - and Betty had never told anyone the full story.
“So where is Anthony De Rossi, these days? Do I need to watch my back?” he teased, but when he looked up from the scrapbook, his smile faded. “Hey, are you all right?”
“It’s hot up here.” Quickly she headed down the rickety ladder to the second floor; behind her, she could hear Daniel following.
They said nothing as they went down to the kitchen. Her father was at the grocery store, a small blessing Betty was deeply grateful for. Without being prompted, Daniel poured them both glasses of icewater and sat with her at the table. By the time their glasses were half-empty, Betty still didn’t know what to say.
So it was Daniel who broke the silence. “If you don’t want to get into this, we don’t have to. But anything you want to talk about, I’m ready to listen.”
“I know. Thank you.” She smiled at him, eyes already a little watery. “And - I want to tell you about what happened with Anthony.”
“Did he die?”
“What? No. The last I heard, he was managing a Hyundai dealership in Jersey City.”
“Then why were you so upset?” As soon as the words left his mouth, his eyes widened, and she recognized the rare-but-unmistakable signs of Daniel getting deeply, uncontrollably angry. “Oh, my God. Betty, he didn’t - did he hurt you?”
Betty put one hand on his forearm, trying to calm both him and herself. “He didn’t rape me, or attack me. It wasn’t anything like that. He hurt my feelings. My pride. But that’s all.”
“That’s bad enough,” Daniel said, but his breathing was steadier. There would be no assault and battery charges filed at any New Jersey car dealerships that afternoon, she thought with relief. “What happened?”
She had her reasons for not talking about it - and her reasons for not telling Daniel in particular. But they weren’t as great as the reasons to tell him. “Well. Like you said, Anthony was cute. I had the biggest crush on him, all of tenth grade and that whole summer. He worked a pizzeria that delivered to our house, and I used to make Papi order pizzas about twice a week. Mom - Mom was sick then, so it was easy to get him to do it. And she enjoyed the pizza, being able to have us sit on the bed with her and eat it, so there really was more to it than seeing Anthony in his delivery uniform. But I liked that part too.”
Daniel turned his hand over beneath hers, capturing her thumb between his fingers in a loose embrace.
“It was just a crush, though. I knew there was no way that Anthony would ever ask me out. He was one of the most popular kids in my class, and I was … not. But then there was a dance after the third home game. I went mostly to talk with my friends in the bleachers. I never thought anybody would ask me to dance, but Anthony did. And that was like - Daniel, that was like the most amazing four minutes of my life. Stupid glitter ball on the ceiling and crepe paper streamers, and I was wearing baggy jeans and white tennis shoes, and I thought I was a princess.”
“You were. You are.”
Betty squeezed Daniel’s hand; as much as she appreciated the compliment, and knew he meant it, she had to get this out. “Anyway, after that one dance, Anthony started talking with me, and asking after my mom, and walking with me around the school. We ended in Mrs. McKibben’s room - she taught world history. It was so dark in there. And we sat on her desk while I just poured my heart out to him, and then he kissed me. I thought he really cared.”
She bit at her lip, struggling to keep her composure. Over the years, she’d gotten better at not thinking about this too often - but that only made it more powerful now. Daniel waited in silence for her to continue.
“So. We kept on kissing. At first I loved it. But then he was getting a little more aggressive - putting his hands beneath my shirt, and when I would ask him not to, he’d do it again. I should’ve punched him, but finally I let him. I liked him so much, and it did feel good even if I wasn’t really ready. Nobody had ever touched me before, you know? I thought, this is what guys and girls do together. If he’s going to be my boyfriend, it’s okay. Then he unbuttoned my shirt, and I let him do that too. And then …” Betty swallowed hard. “Then the lights came on. There were about five or six of his friends in the back of the room, and they all started laughing. Anthony too. They’d dared him that he couldn’t get my clothes off. He did it all on a dare.”
“Shit.” That anger worked behind Daniel’s features for a moment before raw hurt replaced it; he felt it the way she’d felt it so long ago. “That’s the … worst thing I ever heard.”
“There are worse things.”
“That doesn’t make it any less - awful, God, awful isn’t even the word.” Daniel grimaced, and she could see him struggling against the frustration of being unable to help her. It was weirdly comforting to think about today’s Daniel somehow running into her high school classroom to beat up all those jerks.
He didn’t seem to be making the connection, which Betty decided was a relief.
She said, “I got my shirt buttoned again and ran out of there. Everyone heard some version of it in school by that Monday, and there were all these rumors about other things he’d gotten me to do, but I didn’t care about the rumors. The truth was bad enough. And I put him in the scrapbook because - it was important, you know? I knew it was part of my history. But no paint pen. No hearts.”
Daniel gathered her into his arms, and Betty embraced him gratefully. She felt the vibration of his voice in his chest as he said, “I don’t know what to say, or do, besides never buying a fucking Hyundai.”
She laughed despite herself. “You’re here. That’s enough.”
For a while they simply sat in the kitchen together in silence, Daniel stroking her hair. Betty’s tears were dry by the time they heard noise on the back stoop: Papi coming home with bags of tamale ingredients. They all hung out downstairs for a while after that, and she was grateful to live once again wholly in the present, where her life was so much better - so fully what she wanted and needed. She noticed that Daniel was oddly silent through most of the following hour; he talked and joked along, but rarely, and his mind seemed to be somewhere else. Hopefully he wasn’t plotting an attack raid on Jersey City.
When Papi got to work on the evening’s dinner, the two of them returned to the attic to finish up. The scrapbook lay on the floor, Anthony’s face staring upward. He looked like a child to her now; when he’d played that cruel prank, he had been younger than Justin. That didn’t make it okay, not by a long shot, but Betty wondered how much he might have changed in the years since. Maybe he was sorry. She liked to think he was.
“Betty?” Daniel had crawled in beside her, but hadn’t made a move to start bringing down the chosen boxes. “Can I ask you something?”
His voice sounded strange. Had he put it together after all? Betty cocked her head. “Okay, what?”
“When you were first at MODE.” The words seemed to choke in his throat. “When I - when I made you put on that ridiculous outfit and model for the Fabia shoot. And people laughed and you were so upset … that was partly because it reminded you of what Anthony did to you, right? I’d done the exact same thing.”
And there it was - the connection she’d never thought Daniel would make. She needed to stop underestimating him.
“Not the exact same thing.” The truth, Betty thought. It’s important. “And that wasn’t the only reason it was upsetting. But yeah. All those people laughing at me brought that night with Anthony back in a big way. It wasn’t good.”
Daniel groaned and slumped over, forehead to the ground. “Oh, God.”
“Daniel - ”
“I want a time machine. I want a fucking time machine so I can go back and kick myself in the head, and get you out of there.”
Betty didn’t like thinking about it either; sometimes it was hard to remember that the gentle man she loved had been capable of that kind of callousness. But she had dealt with this - they had dealt with this - a long time ago. “You apologized to me. You made things right.”
“Don’t let me off the hook! I didn’t bring this up so you would have to make me feel better about it, okay?”
Her temper - rubbed raw by the memory of the photo shoot - flared. “Did you bring it up so you could make two of my worst memories all about you? How I felt doesn’t matter as long as we know that you feel really, really bad?”
Daniel looked sick. He opened his mouth, shut it without saying a word, grabbed one of the boxes to be shipped to London and headed downstairs. Betty finished up alone. It went quicker that way.
When she came downstairs, Daniel was watching Papi’s latest favorite telenovela with him, probably as penance. It was no coincidence that her father insisted the perfect baking time for tamales was exactly the length of one of his “stories.” Daniel’s forehead furrowed as he tried to figure the story out. “Is the maid secretly her sister?”
“Secretly her daughter.” Ignacio shook his head. “You won’t believe who the father is.”
Betty had to smile despite herself, but Daniel remained mostly silent and glum throughout dinner. She wasn’t in the brightest mood herself. Both of them talked to Ignacio more than to each other.
After dinner, Daniel volunteered to take out the trash. Once they were alone, Papi said, “You two have a fight?”
“Was it obvious?”
“Neither of you took second helpings of the tamales. Always a bad sign.” He folded his arms. “Who messed up?”
“Daniel.” But it wasn’t cut and dried like that, was it? She tried to explain. “Well, yes, Daniel messed up, but I was okay with him having messed up, or I was trying to be, and he wouldn’t let me be, so he actually messed up worse with his reaction to messing up than he did messing up in the first place. Wait, no. Messing up in the first place was worse, but it was a while ago.”
“Madre de Dios.” Her father shook his head as he took two beers from the fridge and handed them to her. “Any argument that tough to explain isn’t worth it. Make it up, would you?”
Betty had been planning on this anyway, but she still smiled and gave Papi a kiss on the cheek. “Okay.”
When she stepped out on the back stoop, Daniel was sitting there, forearms on his knees, staring at the back fence of their miniscule, concrete-slab “back yard.” She sat next to him, and while he accepted the beer gratefully, neither of them spoke at first. They just sipped from their bottles, side by side.
Finally, Daniel said, “I didn’t mean to take something that’s really about you and make it about me. I honestly didn’t want to do that.”
“I know.”
“I brought it up because I just had to know. I deserve to understand what a complete ass I was to you.” Daniel’s voice sounded rough, like he had a lump in his throat. “It makes me sick to think about hurting you that way. Reminding you of what happened with Anthony.”
“Listen to me.” Betty spoke firmly. “You didn’t hear what I said upstairs.”
“What in particular?”
“I said - you apologized to me. A lot of guys had been cruel to me, you know? A lot. Anthony was the worst, but he wasn’t the only one. Sometimes all my memories between ages 13 and 23 feel like this big blur of being the world’s punching bag.” She took a deep breath. “And when I ran out of the MODE office that day, I thought my dreams of working at a magazine were going to go just like everything else. That nothing would ever, ever change for me.”
God, how she’d cried. She’d made it back to the main offices, where she’d found a coat in the Closet to wear home. Then she’d settled back into the only life she’d known, doing her family’s laundry, putting together a resume for temp agencies, fighting with her father’s health insurance. Walter had come by, begging to be taken back, and she distinctly recalled thinking, I’m not that low yet.
“And then you came here,” she said, looking at Daniel with a smile on her face. “You apologized. You said you were totally wrong. I was angry with you, and you let me be angry with you. And then you said you’d seen there was really something special about me. I still kind of wanted to smack you, but part of me - Daniel, do you know how long I’d waited for someone who’d hurt me to say they were sorry, and admit they were wrong? It felt like I’d been waiting for that more years than I’d been alive.”
“It’s the least you deserved.”
“I know, right?” Her mood was lifting again, the way it had that long night when she’d decided Daniel Meade was worth one more chance. “You offered me another shot at my dream. More than that - for the first time in forever, you made me really believe that change was possible. For me. For my life. For you too, I guess.” She folded her arms across her knees. “Get it?”
Daniel said only, “You’re better than I am.”
Betty shook her head. “You’ve grown into the best man I know.” She ran one hand over his hair, partly to console him, but also reminding herself that he was now hers to touch and to love. “Who knows? Maybe Anthony De Rossi turned out okay too.”
“Doubt it.” He smiled at her in a kind of tired wonder. “He didn’t have as good a teacher.”
**
"Making The Connection"
“Wow, when you said you were into scrapbooking in high school, you weren’t kidding.” Daniel carefully picked up an overstuffed, blue-and-yellow, sequined volume labeled: JUNIOR YEAR: NOVEMBER!
“It was a creative outlet.” Betty smoothed the edge of the gingham ribbon she’d used for a border. “It let me get used to the idea of laying out text and graphics, too. And, as we’ve discussed, I wasn’t exactly busy with a social life.”
“Kind of cool that you’ve got a record of everything, though.” He smiled as he flipped through the first spread, “New Cafeteria Setup,” complete with a border of magic-markered forks and a slightly yellowed menu that now offered vegan options. “My junior year is kind of a blur. Probably because that was the year I got my first fake ID.”
“Go figure.”
They were sitting in the warm attic of the Suarez home, a space not tall enough to stand in. The air smelled comfortingly musty, and the only light came from a bare bulb that showed every dancing mote of dust. Now that she and Daniel were settled in their new London flat, she wanted to take a few of her old things out of storage and bring them to her new home. Summer sunshine meant sweltering heat in the poorly vented attic, but Daniel had nonetheless come up here with her and patiently gone through every box and carton. She found she was the one more willing to throw things away; he wanted to preserve every moment, to share them in reverse. Which was sweet, but the London flat only had so much storage.
Daniel turned the page for “Third Home Football Game!” to see a blank spread - two bare pages with one photo, black and white, clipped from a spare yearbook nobody had bought. Betty blushed as she recognized the photo and the memory came back to her. “Anthony De Rossi, huh?” Daniel held up the scrapbook and gave her a look. “Cute guy. Looks like he was important to you.”
“He was my first kiss,” she said. There was so much more to say, but the words didn’t come.
Grinning, Daniel said, “I would’ve expected heart-shaped stickers or at least some pink paint pen here.”
This was Daniel, her Daniel, and she wanted to tell him the truth about all of this, but it was so hard. Only Hilda knew any of it - besides the people there, of course - and Betty had never told anyone the full story.
“So where is Anthony De Rossi, these days? Do I need to watch my back?” he teased, but when he looked up from the scrapbook, his smile faded. “Hey, are you all right?”
“It’s hot up here.” Quickly she headed down the rickety ladder to the second floor; behind her, she could hear Daniel following.
They said nothing as they went down to the kitchen. Her father was at the grocery store, a small blessing Betty was deeply grateful for. Without being prompted, Daniel poured them both glasses of icewater and sat with her at the table. By the time their glasses were half-empty, Betty still didn’t know what to say.
So it was Daniel who broke the silence. “If you don’t want to get into this, we don’t have to. But anything you want to talk about, I’m ready to listen.”
“I know. Thank you.” She smiled at him, eyes already a little watery. “And - I want to tell you about what happened with Anthony.”
“Did he die?”
“What? No. The last I heard, he was managing a Hyundai dealership in Jersey City.”
“Then why were you so upset?” As soon as the words left his mouth, his eyes widened, and she recognized the rare-but-unmistakable signs of Daniel getting deeply, uncontrollably angry. “Oh, my God. Betty, he didn’t - did he hurt you?”
Betty put one hand on his forearm, trying to calm both him and herself. “He didn’t rape me, or attack me. It wasn’t anything like that. He hurt my feelings. My pride. But that’s all.”
“That’s bad enough,” Daniel said, but his breathing was steadier. There would be no assault and battery charges filed at any New Jersey car dealerships that afternoon, she thought with relief. “What happened?”
She had her reasons for not talking about it - and her reasons for not telling Daniel in particular. But they weren’t as great as the reasons to tell him. “Well. Like you said, Anthony was cute. I had the biggest crush on him, all of tenth grade and that whole summer. He worked a pizzeria that delivered to our house, and I used to make Papi order pizzas about twice a week. Mom - Mom was sick then, so it was easy to get him to do it. And she enjoyed the pizza, being able to have us sit on the bed with her and eat it, so there really was more to it than seeing Anthony in his delivery uniform. But I liked that part too.”
Daniel turned his hand over beneath hers, capturing her thumb between his fingers in a loose embrace.
“It was just a crush, though. I knew there was no way that Anthony would ever ask me out. He was one of the most popular kids in my class, and I was … not. But then there was a dance after the third home game. I went mostly to talk with my friends in the bleachers. I never thought anybody would ask me to dance, but Anthony did. And that was like - Daniel, that was like the most amazing four minutes of my life. Stupid glitter ball on the ceiling and crepe paper streamers, and I was wearing baggy jeans and white tennis shoes, and I thought I was a princess.”
“You were. You are.”
Betty squeezed Daniel’s hand; as much as she appreciated the compliment, and knew he meant it, she had to get this out. “Anyway, after that one dance, Anthony started talking with me, and asking after my mom, and walking with me around the school. We ended in Mrs. McKibben’s room - she taught world history. It was so dark in there. And we sat on her desk while I just poured my heart out to him, and then he kissed me. I thought he really cared.”
She bit at her lip, struggling to keep her composure. Over the years, she’d gotten better at not thinking about this too often - but that only made it more powerful now. Daniel waited in silence for her to continue.
“So. We kept on kissing. At first I loved it. But then he was getting a little more aggressive - putting his hands beneath my shirt, and when I would ask him not to, he’d do it again. I should’ve punched him, but finally I let him. I liked him so much, and it did feel good even if I wasn’t really ready. Nobody had ever touched me before, you know? I thought, this is what guys and girls do together. If he’s going to be my boyfriend, it’s okay. Then he unbuttoned my shirt, and I let him do that too. And then …” Betty swallowed hard. “Then the lights came on. There were about five or six of his friends in the back of the room, and they all started laughing. Anthony too. They’d dared him that he couldn’t get my clothes off. He did it all on a dare.”
“Shit.” That anger worked behind Daniel’s features for a moment before raw hurt replaced it; he felt it the way she’d felt it so long ago. “That’s the … worst thing I ever heard.”
“There are worse things.”
“That doesn’t make it any less - awful, God, awful isn’t even the word.” Daniel grimaced, and she could see him struggling against the frustration of being unable to help her. It was weirdly comforting to think about today’s Daniel somehow running into her high school classroom to beat up all those jerks.
He didn’t seem to be making the connection, which Betty decided was a relief.
She said, “I got my shirt buttoned again and ran out of there. Everyone heard some version of it in school by that Monday, and there were all these rumors about other things he’d gotten me to do, but I didn’t care about the rumors. The truth was bad enough. And I put him in the scrapbook because - it was important, you know? I knew it was part of my history. But no paint pen. No hearts.”
Daniel gathered her into his arms, and Betty embraced him gratefully. She felt the vibration of his voice in his chest as he said, “I don’t know what to say, or do, besides never buying a fucking Hyundai.”
She laughed despite herself. “You’re here. That’s enough.”
For a while they simply sat in the kitchen together in silence, Daniel stroking her hair. Betty’s tears were dry by the time they heard noise on the back stoop: Papi coming home with bags of tamale ingredients. They all hung out downstairs for a while after that, and she was grateful to live once again wholly in the present, where her life was so much better - so fully what she wanted and needed. She noticed that Daniel was oddly silent through most of the following hour; he talked and joked along, but rarely, and his mind seemed to be somewhere else. Hopefully he wasn’t plotting an attack raid on Jersey City.
When Papi got to work on the evening’s dinner, the two of them returned to the attic to finish up. The scrapbook lay on the floor, Anthony’s face staring upward. He looked like a child to her now; when he’d played that cruel prank, he had been younger than Justin. That didn’t make it okay, not by a long shot, but Betty wondered how much he might have changed in the years since. Maybe he was sorry. She liked to think he was.
“Betty?” Daniel had crawled in beside her, but hadn’t made a move to start bringing down the chosen boxes. “Can I ask you something?”
His voice sounded strange. Had he put it together after all? Betty cocked her head. “Okay, what?”
“When you were first at MODE.” The words seemed to choke in his throat. “When I - when I made you put on that ridiculous outfit and model for the Fabia shoot. And people laughed and you were so upset … that was partly because it reminded you of what Anthony did to you, right? I’d done the exact same thing.”
And there it was - the connection she’d never thought Daniel would make. She needed to stop underestimating him.
“Not the exact same thing.” The truth, Betty thought. It’s important. “And that wasn’t the only reason it was upsetting. But yeah. All those people laughing at me brought that night with Anthony back in a big way. It wasn’t good.”
Daniel groaned and slumped over, forehead to the ground. “Oh, God.”
“Daniel - ”
“I want a time machine. I want a fucking time machine so I can go back and kick myself in the head, and get you out of there.”
Betty didn’t like thinking about it either; sometimes it was hard to remember that the gentle man she loved had been capable of that kind of callousness. But she had dealt with this - they had dealt with this - a long time ago. “You apologized to me. You made things right.”
“Don’t let me off the hook! I didn’t bring this up so you would have to make me feel better about it, okay?”
Her temper - rubbed raw by the memory of the photo shoot - flared. “Did you bring it up so you could make two of my worst memories all about you? How I felt doesn’t matter as long as we know that you feel really, really bad?”
Daniel looked sick. He opened his mouth, shut it without saying a word, grabbed one of the boxes to be shipped to London and headed downstairs. Betty finished up alone. It went quicker that way.
When she came downstairs, Daniel was watching Papi’s latest favorite telenovela with him, probably as penance. It was no coincidence that her father insisted the perfect baking time for tamales was exactly the length of one of his “stories.” Daniel’s forehead furrowed as he tried to figure the story out. “Is the maid secretly her sister?”
“Secretly her daughter.” Ignacio shook his head. “You won’t believe who the father is.”
Betty had to smile despite herself, but Daniel remained mostly silent and glum throughout dinner. She wasn’t in the brightest mood herself. Both of them talked to Ignacio more than to each other.
After dinner, Daniel volunteered to take out the trash. Once they were alone, Papi said, “You two have a fight?”
“Was it obvious?”
“Neither of you took second helpings of the tamales. Always a bad sign.” He folded his arms. “Who messed up?”
“Daniel.” But it wasn’t cut and dried like that, was it? She tried to explain. “Well, yes, Daniel messed up, but I was okay with him having messed up, or I was trying to be, and he wouldn’t let me be, so he actually messed up worse with his reaction to messing up than he did messing up in the first place. Wait, no. Messing up in the first place was worse, but it was a while ago.”
“Madre de Dios.” Her father shook his head as he took two beers from the fridge and handed them to her. “Any argument that tough to explain isn’t worth it. Make it up, would you?”
Betty had been planning on this anyway, but she still smiled and gave Papi a kiss on the cheek. “Okay.”
When she stepped out on the back stoop, Daniel was sitting there, forearms on his knees, staring at the back fence of their miniscule, concrete-slab “back yard.” She sat next to him, and while he accepted the beer gratefully, neither of them spoke at first. They just sipped from their bottles, side by side.
Finally, Daniel said, “I didn’t mean to take something that’s really about you and make it about me. I honestly didn’t want to do that.”
“I know.”
“I brought it up because I just had to know. I deserve to understand what a complete ass I was to you.” Daniel’s voice sounded rough, like he had a lump in his throat. “It makes me sick to think about hurting you that way. Reminding you of what happened with Anthony.”
“Listen to me.” Betty spoke firmly. “You didn’t hear what I said upstairs.”
“What in particular?”
“I said - you apologized to me. A lot of guys had been cruel to me, you know? A lot. Anthony was the worst, but he wasn’t the only one. Sometimes all my memories between ages 13 and 23 feel like this big blur of being the world’s punching bag.” She took a deep breath. “And when I ran out of the MODE office that day, I thought my dreams of working at a magazine were going to go just like everything else. That nothing would ever, ever change for me.”
God, how she’d cried. She’d made it back to the main offices, where she’d found a coat in the Closet to wear home. Then she’d settled back into the only life she’d known, doing her family’s laundry, putting together a resume for temp agencies, fighting with her father’s health insurance. Walter had come by, begging to be taken back, and she distinctly recalled thinking, I’m not that low yet.
“And then you came here,” she said, looking at Daniel with a smile on her face. “You apologized. You said you were totally wrong. I was angry with you, and you let me be angry with you. And then you said you’d seen there was really something special about me. I still kind of wanted to smack you, but part of me - Daniel, do you know how long I’d waited for someone who’d hurt me to say they were sorry, and admit they were wrong? It felt like I’d been waiting for that more years than I’d been alive.”
“It’s the least you deserved.”
“I know, right?” Her mood was lifting again, the way it had that long night when she’d decided Daniel Meade was worth one more chance. “You offered me another shot at my dream. More than that - for the first time in forever, you made me really believe that change was possible. For me. For my life. For you too, I guess.” She folded her arms across her knees. “Get it?”
Daniel said only, “You’re better than I am.”
Betty shook her head. “You’ve grown into the best man I know.” She ran one hand over his hair, partly to console him, but also reminding herself that he was now hers to touch and to love. “Who knows? Maybe Anthony De Rossi turned out okay too.”
“Doubt it.” He smiled at her in a kind of tired wonder. “He didn’t have as good a teacher.”
**