Marrying Her Older Billionaire

Chapter 2

Angie was out of the airport and looking everywhere for her father. She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see him right in front of her.

“Dad!” said Angie, throwing her arms around her dad.

Matthew laughed and said, “Angie, my baby girl,” holding her tight and hugging her back.

It was a lovely reunion. Angie couldn’t believe how happy she was to see her father again. “Thank you so much for coming to pick me up,” she said. “I know how busy you get at work, it couldn’t have been easy for you to get away for so long.”

“It’s alright,” said Matthew. “I own the law firm, I should be able to take some time out to pick my only daughter up from the airport, don’t you think?”

“I agree,” said Angie. She kissed her father on the forehead. “You look so good! It’s so nice to see you dad. I’ve really missed you, you know!”

“I’ve missed you too, honey,” said Matthew. “I think it was a good idea for you to go to Africa, however. If both of us had just tried to force it and get over your mother’s death, I don’t think it would have ended up very well. I don’t think we would have been able to rationalize the grief that we were going through at that time and as a result might have ended up hurting each other with our inability to deal with our sadness.”

“I agree,” said Angie. “I was just thinking of this on the way here. On the flight I mean. Thank you, by the way, for booking a first class flight. I don’t think I would have been able to deal with coach in the emotional state I was in, it would have been rather difficult for me to bear all of that heat and body odor. And the lack of leg room!”

Matthew laughed and hugged his daughter again, saying, “Of course I was going to book you a first class ticket. I only want the best for my little girl. Shall we go? I can drop you home and then head back to work. I have your room all set up. It’s not exactly the way you left it but it’s clean and comfy and you can get settled immediately. I think you’ve probably changed quite a bit over the last ten years, I mean a decade is a long time and people tend to change quite a bit, especially during this stage of life. I think you’d appreciate not having the bedroom that nineteen year old you left behind.”

“I will definitely appreciate that,” said Angie. “I think that I need to bring my own feel to the bedroom now. Me ten years ago was a very different person from the me that I am right now, and I’m sure that if I walked into nineteen year old me’s room, I would do nothing but cringe and vomit violently.”

Matthew chuckled and put a protective arm around his daughter’s shoulders. He had driven himself to the airport, Angie discovered after getting to the car.

“Why’d you drive yourself, dad?” she asked him. “Where’s your chauffeur?”

“Oh I just thought that I wouldn’t like having someone looking in while we were having such a tender moment,” said Matthew. “Besides, you’re my daughter. I should come to pick you up myself. Just because I’m rich now doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten where I’ve come from.”

He kissed Angie on the forehead and the two of them got into the car. Angie sighed as she got in. It was the same car. Her dad had bought a few new cars in the past ten years, but today he had chosen to drive the vehicle that Angie had been used to all her life. It was a lovely gesture and she really appreciated it. It allowed her to remember what life had been like back then. It allowed her to rationalize, to a great extent, the time that had passed between then and now, time that had allowed her to heal. She was back home, and this car was a sign that it was okay to be okay.

They began to drive, and as they drove they spoke of a lot of things. They spoke of important things and inconsequential things and many, many other things but, at the end of the day, what they spoke about most of all were the sort of things that a daughter and her father might miss about each other if they had not seen each other in ten years. The conversation they had as they drove home was the conversation of two people that were trying to get to know each other again.

It was working. They found themselves getting comfortable with one another. Angie was really glad that this was the case. She didn’t know how she would be able to deal with not knowing her father anymore. She had been quite afraid of this possibility, but at the end of the day it simply was not true and this was all that mattered.

What she had truly been afraid of had been the possibility that she might not know how to talk to her father anymore. After all, they had kept in touch but the internet simplifies interaction to an almost ridiculous degree. It makes it so that you do not have to put any real effort in at all, the only effort that you truly have to put in is the effort to type or say anything in response to what the other person is saying. Reading cues becomes a lot less important, and trying to understand what the other person is saying becomes less essential to maintaining a good conversation. At the end of the day, it becomes all about knowing how to make the other person think you are listening rather than actually listening to what that person has to say. It’s so easy to communicate via the internet that you can actually watch videos and check your social media accounts and the other person will be none the wiser about what you are doing.

Hence, she was afraid of the fact that they were out of practice. She was afraid that when they met each other, the ten years that they had spent apart would end up acting like a canyon between them, and communicating with each other would be like shouting from opposite ends of the canyon. They would not have been completely lost to one another, rather they would have had to start building a bridge. Angie did not like this idea of creating a communicative bridge of sorts because it would mean that they would have to spend yet more time apart, if not physically then at the very least emotionally. It would have become very difficult for them to simply get started knowing each other if they had to recover the intimacy that they had lost while Angie had spent a decade in Kenya helping children in need.