After a few minutes, she reluctantly lifted her hand away from my chest, and sat back. She drank from the glass of sparkling water while I continued to eat, exclaiming from time to time.

“So … do you bowl?” I asked after a few minutes of silence, and smirked at her. She chortled, and held her hand to her mouth to keep some of the water she was about to swallow from spurting out. “That part of your smooth date-night patter, Aerin?” she asked with a chuckle, after wiping her mouth daintily with the edge of the starched linen napkin.

I laughed lightly, “No! I really want to know!”

“Long, long ago. I remember my parents taking us bowling, occasionally,” she started.

“Us?” I asked. It occurred to me that she’d hinted that there’d been more than one child in their family, but she’d never talked about her siblings. Maybe this was a good time to nudge her?

She nodded, and answered, “I have an older brother, a step-brother, really. He was my dad’s son with his first wife. Taylor’s ten years older than I am, and he moved to Washington, DC in the aftermath of … um … everything.”

She leaned her elbows on the table and formed a bridge with her hands, laying her chin on it and looked at me. The stress and internal turmoil she’d endured during that part of her life were clear in her eyes. She continued, “He was about to turn 33 at that time, and had just gotten married. He just couldn’t deal with what happened, and for a long stretch he just didn’t keep in touch. So by default, it fell to me to scramble and scrape up, trace my dad’s assets, to sell them, to pay off everything.”

I rubbed her forearm sympathetically. “That’s ok, we can talk about all of that some other time.”

She nodded and blew a breath out. “I guess that’s part of the reason why it was difficult for me to form attachments or forge bonds and friendships with people. Mostly, I didn’t have time to. I just had to hunker down and work through all of dad’s stuff, while working at jobs that would keep me afloat.”

“So you found a way to head west, slowly,” I said quietly, after she fell quiet.