Gemma considered this with enormous seriousness.

“No,” she admitted.

“She never tells on me.

But she says it.”

Lorelai came down more slowly.

She was nine, and nine was the age at which his older daughter had begun to watch a room before entering it — a habit Chadworth had noticed some months ago and filed away as a phase, the way he had filed away several other things that season.

She was already dressed.

Her hair was already brushed.

She stopped three steps from the bottom and put her hand on the rail.

“You’re leaving again,” she said.

It was not a question, and there was no whine in it.

That was what made it land.

A whine he could have absorbed.

This was flat, and it was accurate, and it came out of her like a fact she had already made peace with.