Layla
“Thank you for this morning,” Gray said as we took our seats on the plane—next to each other, in first class.
I assumed that was another detail on my itinerary Gray had chosen to fix, because the seat assignment my assistant had provided was in row twenty-three. I didn’t complain about this change at least.
“Anytime. Etta’s great. She cares about you a great deal.”
“She’s more like a parent to me than the one I had. Most of my teachers in grade school thought she was my mother after my mom died. Etta was the only one who showed up for parent-teacher conferences and chorus concerts. My father never did.”
I felt myself going soft, slipping back to the type of heart-to-heart conversations we’d spent more than a year having. I didn’t want to be mean when he spoke so nicely of a woma
