My Best Friend's Dad Fills Me

Chapitre 1 : A Perfectly Ordinary Afternoon

The Vartelle house had a particular smell that Méry had come to associate with something she could not quite name.

It was warm and lived-in, the faint ghost of good coffee and whatever Nara had last cooked still lingering pleasantly in the hallway, the wooden floors slightly worn in the places where people actually walked, throw blankets left exactly where someone had last used them. It was the smell of a home that was genuinely inhabited, and every time Méry stepped through the front door, something quiet and unnameable loosened in her chest.

Her own house, *the manor*, the staff called it, though Méry had never been able to bring herself to use the word without feeling faintly absurd, was beautiful. Impeccably maintained. Enormous. It smelled of polished surfaces and fresh flowers replaced on a strict schedule, and it had seventeen rooms that Méry used perhaps four of on a regular basis. It was the sort of house that photographed wonderfully and echoed when you walked through it alone, which was most of the time.

The Vartelle house had two floors, a garden that looked slightly overgrown in the best possible way, and a patio where someone had left a half-empty mug of tea on the table from what appeared to be at least yesterday. It was modest by any comparison to what Méry was accustomed to. She loved it unreservedly.

"You can just put your bag anywhere," Lonie said, already halfway up the stairs and not looking back. She said this every time, and every time Méry set her overnight bag down in exactly the same spot beside the foot of the staircase, because it felt right there.

"Your father's car is in the drive," Méry observed, toeing off her boots and lining them up neatly beside the door.

Lonie paused on the fourth step. There was the briefest flicker of something across her face, a particular quality of awareness that she wore lightly, the way one wears a secret one is rather pleased about. Then she continued up the stairs with the easy nonchalance of someone who had absolutely nothing on her mind.

"He's working from home today," she said. "He does that sometimes, almost everytime these days."

"Oh." Méry picked up her bag and followed. "Should we be quiet?"

"God, no. He works with the television on anyway. He won't even notice us."

This was, Méry would later reflect, almost certainly not true.

---

Lonie's bedroom was comfortably chaotic in a way that Méry had always found secretly enviable. There were clothes draped over the back of the chair that had clearly not been worn today, a cork board above the desk so thoroughly covered in photographs and notes and miscellaneous small objects that the cork itself was no longer visible, and a bookshelf that had long since given up any pretence of organisation. The bed was large enough for two with room to spare, which suited them both perfectly.

Méry sat cross-legged in the centre of it whilst Lonie rummaged through her wardrobe for reasons that remained, for the moment, unclear.

"So," Lonie said, her voice slightly muffled by the wardrobe door, "did you eat before you came?"

"Juun made me lunch before I left."

"Of course she did." Lonie emerged with a lavender knit jumper that she immediately decided against and tossed onto the chair. "One day I'm going to come to your house and steal your chef."

"She'd probably prefer it," Méry said pleasantly. "She tells me I don't eat enough."

"You don't eat enough."

"I eat perfectly adequately."

Lonie gave her a look of profound scepticism and disappeared back into the wardrobe. Méry lay back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling, tracing the familiar geography of the small water stain near the light fitting that had been there for as long as she could remember. There was something profoundly restful about a room with a water stain on the ceiling. It meant no one had panicked about it. It meant it was just a room where people lived.

"Dad said he'd make dinner tonight," Lonie said, re-emerging with no jumper but a small, satisfied expression that she aimed at the middle distance rather than at Méry. "He always makes too much. You know how he is."

"He's very kind."

"Mm." Lonie sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled her knees up. Her green eyes were doing something that Méry, in her particular and rather beautiful obliviousness, did not notice. They were calculating, in the gentle and affectionate way of someone who has a plan and is quietly delighted by it. "He likes having you here. He says the house feels more alive."

Méry considered this. "That's a nice thing to say."

"He means it." A pause. Then, with the lightness of someone changing the subject: "Come on. Let's go downstairs and get something to drink. I'm dying."

---

Lowell Vartelle was in the kitchen when they came down.

He had his back to them, standing at the counter with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and he appeared to be reading something on his laptop whilst simultaneously assembling what looked like the beginning of a rather ambitious dinner preparation. There was music playing from somewhere, something low and unhurried, and the afternoon light came through the kitchen window at an angle that made the whole scene look rather like an advertisement for something expensive and aspirational.

Méry noticed all of this in the quiet, observant way she noticed most things, absorbing the details without particularly meaning to, cataloguing them without quite knowing why.

Lowell turned as they entered. His expression did what it always did when he saw Méry, which was a great deal more than it did for most people, though he managed it with considerable composure. There was a warmth in it. There was also something else, cooler and more deliberate, that lived just beneath the warmth, something that a more worldly girl might have identified immediately and with alarm.

Méry simply thought he had very nice eyes.

"There you are," he said. His voice was easy, unhurried, carrying naturally across the kitchen without effort. "I thought I heard the door an hour ago."

"We were upstairs," Lonie said, already opening the fridge. "What are you making?"

"Pasta. Possibly risotto. I haven't decided." His gaze moved to Méry, and he smiled, the particular smile he seemed to reserve specifically for her, which was warmer and more personal than his ordinary one. "Good to see you, Méry. How was the drive over?"

"Fine, thank you." She settled herself onto one of the stools at the kitchen island with the natural ease of someone who had sat there many times before. "The radio presenter was talking about the election again. I had to turn it off."

Lowell laughed. It was a real laugh, not a polite one. "Which presenter?"

"The one with the very loud opinions about everything."

"That narrows it down to approximately all of them." He turned back to his counter but cast a look back at her over his shoulder that lingered a beat longer than was strictly conversational. "You should have change the station, you know."

"I did. To one where a different man had very loud opinions about different things." She paused. "I put on music in the end."

Lonie, who had poured herself a glass of juice and was leaning against the fridge watching this exchange with the quiet, undisguised pleasure of someone at the cinema, said nothing. She sipped her juice. She was, by any measure, thoroughly enjoying herself.

---

The afternoon arranged itself calmly at the Vartelle house tended to. Lonie and Méry migrated to the sofa in the living room, which sat adjacent to the open kitchen in a way that made the two spaces feel like a single continuous environment. They put something on the television, a programme neither of them was fully watching, and talked in the half-distracted, deeply comfortable way of two people who have no need to perform for each other.

Lowell worked at the kitchen island. Or appeared to work. His laptop was open. Whether anything was being accomplished on it was a separate question.

From where he sat, the living room was entirely visible. This was, one suspected, not entirely inconvenient.

Méry had tucked her feet up beneath her on the sofa and was absently scrolling through her phone whilst Lonie told her something involved and enthusiastic about a girl in her seminar group who had apparently committed some deeply unremarkable social infraction that Lonie had nonetheless been saving up to recount for two days.

"And then she said, she actually said this, out loud, to the whole group,"

"What did she say?" Méry asked, looking up.

"That she hadn't read the text because she didn't think it was *that* important." Lonie delivered this with the gravity of someone reporting a genuine atrocity. "The text we had to read. The main text. For the seminar."

"Perhaps she was busy."

"Méry."

"I'm not defending her. I'm offering an alternative interpretation."

"There is no alternative interpretation. She was chaotic and she knew exactly what she was doing." Lonie pointed at her. "You always do this. You always find the charitable reading."

"Someone has to."

"It's exhausting."

Méry smiled at her phone. "I know."

Lonie threw a small cushion at her. Méry caught it without looking up, which made Lonie make a noise of profound indignation and throw another one.

From the kitchen, there was the sound of something being set down on the counter with perhaps slightly more attention to quietness than was natural. As though someone had paused to watch and only remembered themselves afterwards.

---

It was shortly after five when Nara called.

Lonie took the call in the hallway, and Méry heard fragments of it from the sofa, the particular cadence of a conversation that was delivering news of plans changing, of timelines shifting. She heard Lonie say *When?* and then *no, it's fine, really* in a tone that suggested it was at least partially fine.

She came back into the living room and sat down with the expression of someone reorganising their expectations in real time.

"Maman's not coming back tonight," she said. "She's got a meeting first thing tomorrow. She's just going to stay over."

"Oh." Méry looked at her. "Is she all right?"

"She's fine. She does this all the time." Lonie waved a hand. "It's just us tonight."

Just us. Meaning herself, and Méry, and Lowell. The house. The dinner he was already making.

Lonie reached for her juice and did not look in the direction of the kitchen. She did not need to. She had, Méry did not know, spent approximately eleven minutes that morning considering the possibility of exactly this outcome and deciding she was comfortable with it.

She was very comfortable with it indeed.

---

Dinner was good. It had turned out to be risotto after all, and Lowell made it the way he made most things, without apparent effort and with excellent results. They sat at the dining table off the kitchen, the three of them, with the back door open to the garden and the evening air coming in mild and easy.

The conversation was natural, winding, pleasantly inconsequential in the way that good dinner conversation often is, touching on Lonie's seminar girl again, on a documentary Lowell had been working on, on the peculiarities of the summer forecast. Méry was quieter than the other two, as she usually was, but she was present in the way that quiet people often are more fully than louder ones, attentive, warm, responding with precision rather than volume.

Lowell spoke to her often. More often, perhaps, than the distribution of the conversation strictly required.

He asked about her reading, she had mentioned a novel she'd been working through, something dense and nineteenth century that she'd found in the manor's library, and listened to her answer with the full, unhurried attention of someone who was genuinely interested, or wanted very much to appear so, or both.

"You have an extraordinary way of talking about books," he said, at one point.

Méry looked up from her plate. "Do I?"

"You make them sound like places." He held her gaze for just a moment longer than was strictly conversational. "Like somewhere you've actually been."

She considered this. "I suppose they are," she said. "For me, at any rate. I've been to rather more books than places."

Something moved through his expression, something quiet and not entirely appropriate for a dining table with his daughter present. He reached across for the wine and refilled her glass, and his hand, in passing, rested briefly on the table very close to hers. Not touching. Close.

Lonie, who had been watching all of this with the sustained and focused attention of someone who had paid for a front-row seat, took a long sip of her water and said absolutely nothing.

---

They cleared up together after dinner, or rather Lowell cleared up whilst Lonie made a series of largely unsuccessful contributions and Méry dried things and put them away in the places she knew they went, which were all the correct places, because she had been coming here long enough to know.

At some point, Lonie announced that she had forgotten to reply to something important and disappeared briefly in the direction of the living room, leaving Méry alone at the counter with a tea towel and the last of the glasses.

Lowell was at the sink. The kitchen was quiet.

"Thank you for dinner," Méry said. She said it simply, without artifice, because she meant it.

"It's nothing." He turned off the tap and reached past her for the tea towel, reached past her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, the presence of him, in the way one feels a fire without needing to touch it. His hand closed around the towel, and in doing so, closed briefly, not accidentally, around her fingers beneath it.

Not roughly. Not urgently. Just firmly, deliberately, for a moment that lasted precisely long enough to mean something and not quite long enough to demand a response.

Méry did not move.

She was aware of her own heartbeat in a way she was not usually aware of it. She was aware of the warmth of his hand and the stillness of the kitchen and the low sound of the television from the other room where Lonie had conveniently gone. She was aware that this was, that this felt like, something she did not entirely have the vocabulary for, but which her body, with an instinct she had not known she possessed, seemed to understand perfectly.

She looked up at him.

Lowell looked back at her. His expression was composed, unhurried, wearing that faint knowing quality it always wore, except that now, up close, in the quiet of the kitchen, it was not faint at all. It was entirely legible. It said, with the calm confidence of a man who has decided something: *I know exactly what I'm doing. And I think, Méry, so do you. *

He released the towel. Released her hand beneath it. Stepped back to his natural distance as though nothing had happened at all.

"You dry. I'll put away," he said pleasantly.

And from the living room doorway, where she had absolutely not gone to reply to anything and had instead positioned herself at an angle that afforded a perfect view of the kitchen counter, Lonie pressed her lips together very tightly against a smile and slipped silently back to the sofa.

She picked up her phone. She was, one might reasonably observe, in an extraordinarily good mood.