“Yeah,” I said vaguely, and then dropped my pen. “You… Bette introduced you to her father?”

Sunny nodded, looking suddenly as if she thought herself to be very important. “Of course it couldn’t be helped, you know. She’d said, ‘Sunny, my father is coming to visit and so I won’t be able to see you tonight.’ Well! You can imagine how well I took that.”

“I can imagine,” I murmured. Despite myself, I was interested.

“I stopped by her place just as she and her father were coming back from dinner and I said, ‘Bette! Honey, I think I left my briefcase here!’” She allowed this to sink in for me and then said in a stage whisper, “I hadn’t, of course, but the damage was already done. She just had to introduce us.”

“Ah.” I sipped my espresso. “Nice how you put her on the spot there,” I commented, but Sunny missed my sarcasm and only smiled.

“I thought so. Oh, that was the beginning of our problems, you know. She introduces us and she says, ‘Daddy’ (this is what she says) ‘Daddy, this is my good friend, Sunny.’”

“Mmm,” I hummed sympathetically.

Then Sunny repeated herself: “She says ‘Daddy, this is my good friend, Sunny,’” and I knew that my reaction had not been dramatic enough.

“Uh, wow,” I said. “I mean… you must have been…”

“I was upset!”

“Upset, yeah.”

Sunny ordered coffee and a muffin and then kept looking at me and shaking her head. “I told her I was hurt, I said, ‘Listen, if your dad knows about you being *****, then what’s the big deal about introducing me as your girlfriend which is what I am, thank you very much?’”

“You said that, huh?”

“Yeah!” She rolled her eyes. “She says, ‘You don’t understand Daddy’. Like that. ‘You don’t understand Daddy’.”

“Wow, that’s… something,” I said, nodding my head sympathetically but finding it difficult to get quite as upset as Sunny apparently was.

Sunny sighed heavily as though the burden of dating Bette Porter still weighed heavily upon her shoulders. We sat in silence for awhile. I returned to my list, now deciding that just a list of the best coffee in L.A. was too little; maybe the best and cheapest would be good… Amusingly, Marina kept shooting me strange looks and then gesturing to Sunny as if to say ‘What on earth is that?’