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He was expecting Peyton--not many people knocked on his door and most of them were louder than she was about it--and a strange succession of emotions flitted through him when he realized who it was: relief first, and then confusion; apprehension and then, as he took in what she was holding, raw nerves edged with irritation. It was only the latter that actually manifested on his face.

He opened the door for her and hesitated over pursuing his usual ritual of depositing himself into his chair, unsure of exactly how this ought to be approached, and in stark contrast to her he looked, as he always did, like he might be called away at any minute: coat, even scarf (tucked up neatly to hide as much of his scrawny neck as he could), right down to his boots.

He took in her face. The strange conversation on Twitter was still at the forefront of his thoughts. Without sitting, he occupied his hands in squaring the edges on a stack of notes on his overloaded but rigidly organized desk.

"No RSVP," he pointed out lamely.

He wanted to tell her: the other corner's more comfortable. He wanted to do what he'd done for himself and pull the blankets off the bed, make a nest half under the desk, but this would entail admitting both to her and to himself that he'd spent time sleeping there. On the floor, hiding from what wasn't there any more.

He sighed instead at her news, folding up onto the ground and maintaining a careful, terrified few inches of space between them.

"His name isn't Jan," he informed her flatly. "It's Lawrence and I'm pretty sure he's British."

He turned the can over and around in his hands, distractedly examining the label like he didn't know it by heart by now, and finally cracked it open (his hands steady, unfumbling), letting a long silence answer her observation. He wasn't looking at the laptop. He wasn't looking at her, either: he wasn't really looking at anything, eyes roaming back and forth through the middle distance.

"He doesn't know s**t about my family," he repeated finally, quietly. "So whatever."

The silence was much longer this time: the same restless, blind eyes this time accompanied by a distracted chewing of his lip. He'd pulled his leg out of the way of hers as soon as she'd touched him.

He took a drink mechanically.

"I did--" he started, and his voice broke violently into a sharp, strangled inhale and he paused and steadied it again, tamed it back to unruffled quiet that was even more obviously fake than it normally was. "I did what was best by her. That's all I ever wanted to do for her, anyway."

His voice went pleading and he still wasn't looking at her, or at the screen. "Please don't tell anyone."

A few breaths passed in silence (looking at her now, at the reflection in her eyes), and maybe he was going to let it go. Instead he put the can aside and abruptly, in a show of naked vulnerability that he didn't see the point in hiding any more, he didn't even bother to keep the strain of tears out of his voice.

"Please," he begged, and he reached to touch the tips of his fingers to hers the same way he had in the rain, only to draw them back the same way too, pulling his hand to his chest and cradling it like he was afraid she'd try to hurt him. "Not you too. Please."

Sure enough he cringed at the touch: not his usual stiff, half-concealed jerk away but an actual cringe, pained and afraid, his entire body curling in on itself, making the smallest target possible.

"It was--this was better. For her," he insisted tearfully, arguing points that weren't being made, rebutting statements that no one was offering. "It was now or later and I didn't--I didn't want--Jesus Christ," he finished in a whisper, sucking in a hard breath, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes and visibly willing himself to stop.

"I miss her," he choked, but he'd half-mastered himself already, and the act of fumbling shaky-handed through his pockets for his cigarettes served to finish the job. "I'm sorry. Christ." The shield was coming back up, broken through it was and always had been. "Just--just a hell of a thing to get sprung on you, I guess. I'm sorry." His desperate attempts to sound normal were patently ineffective, and ludicrous besides after his obvious breakdown. He abandoned his clumsy attempts with the lighter to shamelessly and childishly scrub his hands across his eyes. "Please don't leave," he added desperately.

And again, again, the constant mantra: "I'm sorry." For ruining it. For failing to uphold the facade. For making her see someone else in a moment of weakness.

He allowed himself a drag before a convulsive, hiccuping swallow, and it was hard to say whether it was her words or the cigarette that had him relatively calm again--as calm as he got, still wire-tense, still obviously humiliated. He made no response to her statement that she was glad: he understood, fully and completely, and had never stopped finding his own grief over his daughter a source of odd relief--an affirmation that he could do and feel something right. That he'd done something hard, for once, because it was just, instead of doing something wrong because it was easy.

"Give me a minute," he said as he made a move to get to his feet, jabbing a hand at the laptop in an imperious, wordless order that she keep watching, a petty little snatch at control. Something to make her stop looking at him, stop crowding into his personal space. "I'm not going anywhere either," he added, "just--just give me a minute."