It was easier to tell him about Todd than she had expected, and he admitted that he wasn’t surprised, and told her that he had always thought they were too different. Francesca had never thought so. She thought they had everything in common. And in the beginning they had, but no more.

“He was just a tourist in the art world,” her father commented as their lunch arrived. He had ordered onion soup and a dish of haricots verts, which was how he kept his long, lean, slim figure, not unlike her own. And he thrived on Avery’s good healthy cooking. Francesca was always more haphazard about what she ate, especially lately with Todd gone. Most nights she was too lazy to cook herself dinner and had been losing weight since the breakup. “I always figured he’d go back to Wall Street eventually,” her father said as he started in on the onion soup. Francesca had ordered the crab salad.

“That’s funny,” Francesca said pensively, “I never thought that. I guess you were right. He says he’s tired of being poor.”

Her father laughed at that. “Yeah, so was I, until Avery saved me.”

She told her father then about trying to buy Todd out of the house, and with a guilty look, she told him that she might sell his paintings, and he was very nice about it. It was easy to see why women had always loved him. He was easygoing and charming, rarely critical, and all-forgiving. He made her feel better about it immediately, and assured her he wasn’t upset about it at all. By the time their coffee arrived, she had gotten up the courage to ask him about the gallery, and he smiled at her across the table. Avery had warned him about it cryptically, and said she needed his help, and told him to be nice. But he would have been anyway. She was his only child, and however unreliable he had been as a father, he was essentially a kind man.